Amphipolis served as Macedonia's primary mint for posthumous Alexander tetradrachms through much of the late 4th and early 3rd centuries BC, operating under successive regimes as the city changed hands between Cassander, and later the Antigonids. Price 459 falls within a period when Cassander controlled the mint, continuing Alexander's types not out of reverence but because the coinage had become the dominant trade currency across the eastern Mediterranean and disrupting the standard would have been commercially suicidal.
The Amphipolis mint is distinguished within the posthumous series by its use of specific control marks and magistrate symbols that allow reasonably precise die studies — Martin Price's 1991 corpus remains the definitive reference for sorting them.
Amphipolis served as Macedonia's primary mint for posthumous Alexander tetradrachms through much of the late 4th and early 3rd centuries BC, operating under successive regimes as the city changed hands between Cassander, and later the Antigonids. Price 459 falls within a period when Cassander controlled the mint, continuing Alexander's types not out of reverence but because the coinage had become the dominant trade currency across the eastern Mediterranean and disrupting the standard would have been commercially suicidal.
The Amphipolis mint is distinguished within the posthumous series by its use of specific control marks and magistrate symbols that allow reasonably precise die studies — Martin Price's 1991 corpus remains the definitive reference for sorting them.