Tetradrachm In the name of Lysimachus

Byzantion struck posthumous tetradrachms in the name of Lysimachus well over a century after his death at Corupedium in 281 BC — a calculated political move by a city that understood the commercial weight his image carried across the Aegean trading world. By the mid-second century, these coins functioned less as royal propaganda than as trusted trade currency, their types so widely recognized that Byzantion's own civic magistrates added control marks to distinguish local issues from the broader flood of Lysimachean coinage circulating from dozens of mints. Marinescu's classification of this piece as #463 places it within a tightly sequenced group attributable to Byzantion's own dies.