During the last decades of the 5th century BC, the southern Italian city of Rhegion introduced new coins. As in earlier times they showed a lion's scalp on the obverse. On the reverse, the head of the Greek light and sun god Apollo was depicted.
This would have been nothing special. Extraordinary, however, was the new stile in which the coins of Rhegion were made. For the lion's scalp and Apollo's head appeared in the highest relief ever minted on Greek coins until that time. The face of the lion was deeply engraved in the die, and his mane blazed like flames of fire. Apollo, on the other hand, was depicted in a fine, ethereal stile – as befits a god.