The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c25.47

v1.c25.47

One curious incident relieves the story of blood-shed. Somewhere among these hills⁶—probably on the lower spurs of the three-peaked Koh-i-Mor—dwelt a people who told the Yavanas, or so the invaders understood them, that they were descendants of the western people who had come into those parts with their god Dionysus; for Dionysus, the Greeks believed, had gone conquering across Asia, at the head of his revellers, in the old heroic days. The Greeks always experienced a keen joy of recognition, when they could connect foreign things with the figures of their own legends, and they were delighted with the suggestion. The assonance of names lent itself immediately to confirm the theory as usefully as it does to confirm the adventurous speculations of modern archaeologists. In the legend the name Nysa was specially connected with Dionysus—it was the name of his nurse or of the place where he was born or of his holy hill—and the name of this little town in the Hindu Kush, as it was pronounced to Alexander, had a similar sound. Again the legend said that Dionysus had been born from the thigh (*mēros*) of Zeus, and a neighbouring summit, the Greeks discovered, was called *Meru*. What could be clearer? And when they saw the sacred plants of the god, the vine and ivy, running wild over the mountain, as they knew them at home¹, no doubt could be left. Modern travellers have come upon certain fair Kāfir tribes in this region, whose religious processions with music and dancing have a Bacchanalian look, and the Nysaeans discovered by Alexander, they suggest, may have been the ancestors of these Kāfirs; their processions may have led the Greeks to connect them with Dionysus. This is possible, but in the Greek books we hear nothing of the Nysaeans going in procession. It is the Macedonian soldiers themselves, who wreathe their heads with ivy and range the hills in ecstasy, calling on the god by his sacred names, as their people had done from old time on the woody spurs of the Balkans. Hostilities, at any rate, with these interesting kinsmen could not be thought of, and the ‘Nysaeans’ were themselves prepared to act in character; three hundred of them on their mountain horses joined the army of the Yavana king and followed him to battle in the plains of the Punjab.