Tetrobol - Molpagores

Abdera's coinage followed an unusual civic convention: each issue was struck under a named magistrate, and the magistrate's name appeared on the coin itself. Molpagores held this position during the mid-fourth century, when the city was recovering from a Tribute crisis and increasingly caught between Macedonian expansion and the remnants of Athenian league influence. The practice of naming magistrates on coinage is well-documented at Abdera and makes die-linking studies unusually tractable — May's 1966 corpus remains the definitive reference precisely because the named series provides a chronological skeleton unavailable for most Greek civic issues.