The Beginnings of Buddhist Art and Other Essays in Indian and Central-Asian Archaeology c8.23

c8.23

Of all these Indo-Greek kings I will name only Menander (pl. XIV, 2), since he is known to us not merely from the narrative of Plutarch, but also from Indian texts. A curious apologetic treatise, entitled « The Questions of Milinda » and composed as a dialogue in the Platonic manner, brings before us in the town of Sâgala on the one hand Hellenism, represented by Menander, the king of the Yavanas (Ionians), and on the other hand Buddhism, in the person of Nâgasena, one of the patriarchs of the church. According to native tradition the monk even converted the king. However, on the reverse of his coins, Pallas Athene continues still to brandish the paternal lightning of Zeus. She does not seem in any way to care how little her image squares with the exotic surroundings of the language and the writing in which Menander, generalizing a usage inaugurated by his predecessors, is always careful to have the Greek legend of the face translated for the use of his Indian subjects. Never, in truth, were the circumstances more favourable than during his reign (between 150 and 100 B. C.) for planting the germ of the whole subsequent development of Greco-Buddhist art by the creation of the Indo-Greek type of Buddha. What, in fact, is that beautiful statue which I showed you just now (pl. XI, 2), but an Asiatic coin struck in European style? And what more simple for artists initiated into all the secrets of Hellenic art, as were the authors of those magnificent medals, than to adopt for the representation of the Indian Saviour the most intellectual type of their beardless Olympians? Thus we arrive quite naturally at the strange and quaint mixture which we were analysing a short time ago, at this statue, which is a Hellenized Buddha, unless you prefer to describe it as an Indianized figure of Apollo.