The coinage of the Sicilian city of Syracuse was one of the most abundant and artistically distinguished of any age. And although the city began relatively late to strike its own coins – presumably in the last decade of the 6th century BC – it eventually came to exercise a dominant influence over the coinage of the rest of Sicily.
Like this tetradrachm from the first half of the 5th century BC, Syracuse coins mostly bore a horse chariot on the one face and the nymph Arethusa on the other.