The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c26.294

v1.c26.294

None of the coins of Eucratides bear dates. Notwithstanding this, there are indirect means of utilising them so as to secure a partial confirmation of what Justin says (XLI, 6) as to the usurper's rise to power being more or less contemporaneous with the accession of Mithradates I of Parthia. Mithradates, it will be remembered, succeeded to the crown about 171 B.C., and the emergence of Eucratides has been tentatively assigned to 175. He must certainly have been firmly seated on the throne a very few years later. A unique silver tetradrachm, now in the British Museum, has on the obverse a helmeted bust evidently copied from the best-known coin-portrait of Eucratides, and on the reverse the Sun-god, driving in a four-horse chariot. The legend is ΒΑΣΙΛΕΩΣ ΕΠΙΦΑΝΟΥΣ ΠΛΑΤΩΝΟΣ, while in the exergue are letters which, though not altogether clear, are generally read as PMI and interpreted as referring to the year 147 of the Seleucid Era (Pl. IV, 7). If the date has been correctly deciphered—the first of the three numerals is very obscure—the tetradrachms with the helmeted bust of Eucratides must, therefore, have been in circulation for some time previous to 165 B.C., and these were by no means the earliest that he issued. Who Plato was, we have no means of knowing. The one genuine specimen of his money that we possess—modern forgeries are far from uncommon—is said¹ to have been 'originally procured from an itinerant goldsmith of Sháh-ke-Dheri, who had himself procured it somewhere in Central Asia, perhaps in the Hazāra country or beyond the Hindu-Kúsh.’ Its comparatively debased style betrays affinities with the coins of kings whose domains were purely Indian. But whether Plato was a vassal or a short-lived rival of Eucratides, we cannot say. His title ΕΠΙΦΑΝΟΥΣ, which reads like an offset to ΜΕΓΑΛΟΥ, is borrowed from the coinage of Antiochus IV (175–164); it does not appear in Parthia till nearly half a century later.