Erythrai, a coastal Ionian city on the Çeşme peninsula, continued striking Alexander-type tetradrachms well into the second century BC — decades after Alexander's death in 323 — because the type had become an international trade currency trusted across the eastern Mediterranean. These posthumous issues were not forgeries or imitations; they were legitimate civic productions authorized under the monetary conventions that followed the collapse of the unified Macedonian empire. Price 1907 places this issue in the later phase of Erythrai's output, when the city was navigating the political turbulence between Seleucid and Pergamene influence in the region.
Erythrai, a coastal Ionian city on the Çeşme peninsula, continued striking Alexander-type tetradrachms well into the second century BC — decades after Alexander's death in 323 — because the type had become an international trade currency trusted across the eastern Mediterranean. These posthumous issues were not forgeries or imitations; they were legitimate civic productions authorized under the monetary conventions that followed the collapse of the unified Macedonian empire. Price 1907 places this issue in the later phase of Erythrai's output, when the city was navigating the political turbulence between Seleucid and Pergamene influence in the region.