Tetradrachm - Heliokles II

Heliokles II ruled a Baktrian kingdom already in terminal contraction, his territory reduced to a rump state in the Paropamisadae as Indo-Scythian pressure from the north and Parthian encroachment from the west squeezed the last Greek dynasts out of Central Asia. He is sometimes confused with Heliokles I — the son of Eucratides who struck the first posthumous portrait coins of his assassinated father — but the two are separated by roughly half a century and considerable dynastic turbulence. The attribution of this type was itself contested for decades before the SNG ANS ninth volume helped stabilize the sequence.