This tetradrachm belongs to the classic period of Syracusan die-engraving, struck at the height of the city's wealth and civic confidence in the decades following the defeat of the Carthaginians at Himera and the consolidation of Deinomenid and, later, democratic Syracuse as the dominant power in Sicily. The obverse captures a moment of triumphant motion: a fast quadriga driven left, the charioteer standing in sleeveless chiton, reins gathered in both hands and kentron poised in his right, while above him Nike descends in flight to crown the victor - a composition that transforms the coin into a miniature monument to athletic and civic victory, likely commemorating success in the great Panhellenic games. Below, in the exergue, a ketos, or sea-monster, coils beneath the horses' hooves, a device closely associated with the Syracusan mint and one that situates the scene within the city's maritime identity even as the chariot race itself speaks to landed aristocratic sport.

The reverse presents one of the most beloved images in all of Greek coinage: the girlish head of Arethusa, the nymph of the sacred spring on Ortygia around which Syracuse itself was founded, her hair swept up into a krobylos at the crown of her head, adorned with earring and necklace. Four dolphins circle her in clockwise motion, evoking both the fountain of Arethusa's mythical submarine passage from the Peloponnese to Sicily and the city's intimate relationship with the sea. The die-engraver responsible for this coin remains anonymous - the great masters Kimon and Euainetos, whose signed dies would later come to define the pinnacle of Syracusan numismatic art, were not active until roughly 415–390 BC, a full generation after this piece was struck. This tetradrachm therefore belongs to the unsigned, formative phase of the classical Syracusan style, when the dynamic "fast quadriga" and the increasingly refined, almost lyrical treatment of Arethusa's features were still being developed by nameless hands working within the mint's evolving artistic tradition - the very soil, in effect, from which the later signed masterpieces would grow. The fluency of the hair and the softness of the girlish features already anticipate the achievement that Kimon and Euainetos would bring to full flower a generation later.