The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s1.119

c10.s1.119

Apavartikene and perhaps part of Parthyene, which became (with a different division) the Bactrian satrapies of Tapuria (or Tapuruaia) and Traxiane,¹ Tapuria being the country of the Tapuri about the upper Atrek and Traxiane the Kasaf-rud valley with its capital at Susia-Tōs and probably extending northward. The conquest is reflected in Apollodorus’ statement that the Arius flows *through* Bactria,² and it implies a war with Parthia, though the occasion is unknown. The two new satrapies, with the outlying Bactrian satrapy of Margiane (Merv) and the country between the Margus and the lower Arius (which may have been part of the Merv satrapy) to connect them,³ were formed into a sub-kingdom for Euthydemus’ second son Antimachus;⁴ his seat was probably Antioch-Merv, as his kingdom appears to have been generally known as Margiane. Cunningham, who knew more about the find-spots of coins than anybody, has recorded that he would have put Antimachus’ kingdom in Margiane⁵ but for his own theory of the Bactrian mints, which has never been accepted by anybody and may now be left out of the question (App. 1); and this kingdom of Margiane appears in Ptolemy, who, as will be seen later (Chap. VI), has preserved a good deal of information about the second century from ‘Trogus’ source’ (p. 45). Ptolemy’s divisions of Asia, speaking generally, are the old Achaemenid-Alexander satrapies, but he makes Margiane (VI, 10) a separate division of Asia as though it had been a satrapy. This it never was; under Darius I the Merv district (Margus in Old Persian) was part of the Bactrian satrapy and when it revolted it was the satrap of Bactria who was entrusted with its reduction;⁶ Alexander continued this arrangement (all his satrapies are known and Margiane is not among them), and there is nothing to show that the Seleucids ever did otherwise. The name Margiane, from its form, must be that of a Seleucid eparchy (App. 2), the eparchy of Merv proper (not Ptolemy’s Greater Margiane); like the other Seleucid eparchies of Bactria, it became under Euthydemus a satrapy of the Bactrian kingdom (p. 113) and at a later time a satrapy of the Parthian kingdom.¹