Of all Greek coinages, it is perhaps the Athenian New Style which offers the greatest opportunities and the greatest potential rewards. A hundred–odd issues, mostly, if not all, annual, are lavish in information which should assist their arrangement and dating; once firmly dated, they will fertilise many various fields, mint–organisation, the Athenian calendar, prosopography, economic history. The attempt to arrange them has been frequently made since Beule. His work and Head's have been most influential; Svoronos and Kambanis rendered great services, but never reached the end of their task; finally Bellinger in 1949 broke away from the conventional starting–date of 229 BC and laid down the lines on which future study should proceed.

It is to Bellinger that Miss Thompson's enormously useful work is dedicated. Conceived in the belief that a new corpus of the coinage was needed if any firm chronological order was ever to be established, it has been carried through with a devotion and care for detail beyond praise. 6,888 coins are listed and ordered, numerous false readings have been removed, for the first time the essential evidence has been made fully available. Completeness is obviously a mirage in the pursuit of any coinage, and I found an unlisted reverse in the second dealer's stock I looked at with the catalogue, but I think that we can be confident that everything of importance is there for the time being.