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, exploiting the enduring commercial authority of his coinage type across the Black Sea trade network. By the mid-second century, these issues functioned essentially as a trusted currency brand rather than any political statement about the long-dead king. The city controlled the Bosphorus strait and extracted toll revenues from grain ships moving between the Pontic region and the Aegean — maintaining a recognizable, widely-accepted silver coinage was a practical commercial necessity.

The Marinescu corpus identifies this specific emission within a tightly sequenced die study, placing it among the later Byzantion issues distinguished by increasingly stylized engraving.