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Messene's civic bronze output under the early Principate reflects a city still navigating the consequences of its complicated relationship with Rome. Favored by Augustus after Actium partly due to its strategic position in the southwestern Peloponnese, Messene retained a degree of civic autonomy that kept local minting alive well into the first century AD — a privilege many Achaean cities lost or never held.

The city had been refounded as a political counterweight to Sparta by Epaminondas in 369 BC, and that rivalry never fully dissolved under Roman administration.