Excerpt from The Electrum Coinage of Lampsakos

Aamfraxnvoc' referred to in the Accounts of the Epistatai of ca. 434 B. C. These Accounts begin with the phrases vrapc'z 76w p're'pmv e'mamfe'w and wepuyevo'pevov uev e'lc 7017 7rpo7'e'pov that is to say, they were 30001111138 rendered of funds accumulated, and we are therefore bound to allow a margin of ten years or more previous to the archonship of Krates B. C., in which the second stone is dated, for the commence ment of the issue.1 Now it can scarcely be the staters of Per. I to which the Accounts refer, for, as we have said, there was a decided break between the two issues, and the staters of Per. I. Do not, in my opinion, extend down very much later than 500 B. C. As the first issue of elec trum was a rather limited one, these earlier staters were probably out of circulation entirely by the middle of the Fifth Century. That a con siderable number of years elapsed between the coins of Per. I and those of Per. II will become convincing after a study of Plate I. The size of the horse's head in proportion to the body, the position of the fore-legs, treatment of the wing, etc., on the coins of these two groups, and, more over, the developed character of the decorative, stylized wreath of the I staters, point to a rather wide gap between the two. Even between the later coins of Per. I, nos. 9-13 (pl. I. 8-11 and fig. 2) and the coins of Per. II (pl. I. L2a - 12k), although the horse's head is not so dispropor tionally large and the Vine wreath gradually becomes more definite, still the break between the really archaic style of Per. I and the ad vanced transitional style of Per. II is most sensibly felt. In fact the affinity of style between the half-horses of the I staters and those of the earliest coins in' the gold stater series is greater than that existing between those of the I staters and the archaic coins.

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