Intercourse between India and the Western World from the Earliest Times to the Fall of Rome c9.34

c9.34

Only one of these monarchs achieved any real greatness. This was king Menander, or Milinda as he is called by the Buddhist writers, of whose career some details have been preserved in a Buddhist treatise, the *Milinda Pañha*, and in passages of Strabo and Plutarch. To him, too, we should very probably attribute the remarkable Greek invasion of the Ganges Valley which penetrated almost to the walls of Pāṭaliputra itself, and which is mentioned by more than one Indian writer¹. According to the *Milinda Pañha*², Menander was born, probably soon after the conquest of the Panjāb by Demetrius, perhaps about 180 B.C., in a village called Kalasi, on the island of Alasanda. This was no doubt an island at the confluence of the Indus and Akesines, which took its name from the adjacent town of Alexandria-on-Indus, the modern Ucch. His father may have been a viceroy, probably a relation, of Demetrius, left in charge of this important post. Strabo, who couples together, on the authority of Apollodorus of Artemita³, the names of Demetrius and Menander, says that both monarchs made themselves masters of the Panjāb, Sind, and the Kathiāwār coast. Menander ascended the throne of Sāgala, which probably retained the position of the premier state or capital of the Greek principalities, about 155 B.C. It was about this time, no doubt, that his conversion to Buddhism took place⁴. Buddhism, which had been made, thanks to the efforts of Aśoka, the official religion of northern India, appealed especially to the casteless foreigners of the Indus valley. In the Middle Land, with the collapse of the Maurya dynasty, Brahminism was gradually beginning to reassert itself, though it encountered set-backs when foreign kings like Kanishka or Menander wielded a temporary supremacy over India.