The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s1.334

c10.s1.334

But this does not end, or even explain, the matter, for the number of military colonies can only have been a limited one. Their chief use was to form a military frontier, a *limes*, against the Massagetae and to guard the natural frontier of the Jaxartes. The Seleucids in Asia Minor had formed just such a military frontier to guard the Ionian cities against raids by the Galatae, and seven colonies had sufficed (p. 8); granted that the Massagetae were stronger and far more numerous than the Galatae, still the analogy shows the kind of thing the frontier must have been, supported of course by a squadron on the Oxus (p. 91). And the Greeks in Bactria, even though *relatively* numerous and even if the term included Europeans generally, can only have been a strictly limited body in actual fact. But we have to account for the thing already noticed which, in the latter part of, or at the end of, the second century B.C., is attested both from the Greek and the Chinese side: our two well-informed Greek sources call Bactria the land of a thousand cities, and Chang-k’ien, an eye-witness and a shrewd observer, says that the people dwelt in walled towns. To talk in an easy fashion of mixed communities and a Eurasian population is worse than useless. A military colony in the East was no doubt apt to be mixed in a sense; it might for example, beside Greeks and Europeans, contain Anatolians (p. 9) or possibly men from local hill-tribes, as at Avroman, and possibly some of the original settlers might marry native women; but how far that takes us has already been discussed (p. 35), and the number of military colonies was totally inadequate to afford an explanation of the thousand cities. And there seems little question of a number of mixed cities, that is cities whose citizens were partly native Bactrians.⁴ For what was a native Bactrian? The country possessed the ordinary Iranian feudal system (p. 32); the land, other than King's land with its serfs, was in the hands of those Iranian barons or landowners who play such a part in the Alexander-history, men who lived in their own strongholds, kept a body of mounted retainers of their own race, and had their lands cultivated by a serf peasantry living in villages, who were probably in part at least pre-Iranian in blood.¹ To settle Bactrians in cities on any scale would have implied either the existence of a free Iranian peasantry, which we have no grounds for postulating anywhere except in Persis (though some think it did exist in Bactria), or of a middle class of some sort, for there could be no question of settling the serfs. And the only germs of a middle class were the merchants who conducted the caravan trade—they might be and probably were settled—and the barons' retainers; it is not so long since there was no middle class in large parts of the Highlands of Scotland, apart from the small and scanty towns. As the Greek kings were to make Indians full citizens of the Greek cities in India (p. 257)—in India they had large town populations to draw upon—it must be supposed that they gave the franchise to what Bactrians they could; but these can, relatively, only have been few.