Tetradrachm - Mithridates VI Eupator Pergamon; ΓIΣ IA

This tetradrachm belongs to Mithridates VI's Pergamene civic coinage, struck after his seizure of the Roman province of Asia in 88 BC — a campaign that opened with the massacre of an estimated 80,000 Roman and Italian residents across Asia Minor in a single coordinated day. The Pergamon mint was pressed into service producing Mithridatic coinage at scale during the subsequent occupation, replacing Roman financial infrastructure with Pontic.

The regnal year ΓIΣ (213) corresponds to 84 BC, the year of the Peace of Dardanos, by which Sulla forced Mithridates out of Asia on terms Rome considered humiliatingly lenient. Coins of this late Pergamene phase are among the more precisely dateable issues in the entire Mithridatic series, thanks largely to de Callataÿ's chronological reconstruction.