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Termessos, a Pisidian city in the Taurus Mountains of southern Anatolia, was one of the few cities Alexander the Great declined to besiege — judging the approach too costly for the prize. That independence persisted for centuries. Rome granted Termessos formal autonomy in 71 BC under a lex de Termessensibus, making it a free city with the right to mint its own bronze coinage without Roman oversight, an unusually explicit legal guarantee that directly explains why this series exists at all.