Tetradrachm New style

The New Style tetradrachm series replaced Athens' archaic "owl" coinage around 165 BC, adopting a magistrate-name system that allows individual issues to be dated with unusual precision. Thompson 376a falls within the earliest phase of this transition, when the new administrative apparatus for recording mint officials was still being established. The series was almost certainly driven by the need to compete commercially with the flood of Attalid and other Hellenistic silver circulating across the Aegean following Rome's reorganization of the eastern Mediterranean after Pydna in 168 BC.