Athens, Greece, Pi-Style III Tetradrachm, 353 - c. 340 B.C

Silver tetradrachm, 17.1g, Athens mint, oval flan, typical of the type.
O: Head of Athena right with eye seen in true profile, wearing crested helmet ornamented with three olive leaves and pi-style floral scroll, pellet in ear.
R: Owl standing right, head facing, to right AΘE in large lettering, to left olive sprig and crescent, pellet over eyes.
- Kroll Pi-Style p. 244, fig. 8; Flament p. 126, 3; SNG Cop 63; SNG Munchen 96; SNG Delepierre 1479; Svoronos Athens pl. 20: 2

Unlike the customary flans of 5th and earlier 4th century Athenian tetradrachms that have solid, rounded edges from having been cast in a mold, these were struck on thick planchets made of flattened, folded-over, older tetradrachms. The flattened coins were not just folded in two but were folded over a second time to produce a planchet of three or four layers

There are three distinct features of this type of Athens Owl coinage. 1st, they have flans that are commonly misshapen. A number of them are so distorted that numismatists and collectors in Greece have long referred to them as “logs” (koutsoura); these are the tetradrachms in the form of long, stretched ovals with one or two nearly straight sides. 2nd, since the flans, of whatever shape, were ordinarily too small for the full relief designs of the dies, relatively few pi-style coins were minted with their entire obverse and/or reverse type showing. 3rd, just as the diameters and surface areas of the pi flans are generally smaller than those of Athenian tetradrachms of the 5th century and of the first half of the 4th century, they tend also to be exceptionally thick.

The name Pi-style refers to the floral helmet ornament on the obverse which resembles the Greek letter pi (P) bisected by a long central tendril.