The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s1.343

c10.s1.343

And those germs did grow, till by the time that Greek rule ended the villages of Bactria had sufficient organisation to be capable of a considerable degree of self-government. Chang-k’ien, who saw the country when it was derelict, just after the overthrow of the Greek government and before the victorious Yueh-chi had established their own government (see generally Chap. VII), said that the people ‘have no great king or chief but everywhere the cities and towns have (or “set up”) their own petty chiefs’;³ and by towns he meant, as we have seen, the walled villages. Of course any native village in any country might have some sort of a head man, like the komarch of the Armenian village who plays a part in Xenophon’s story;¹ but Chang-k’ien would know this well enough, and it is not this that he troubled to record. What he means—and it is a great tribute to his powers of observation that he should have detected it—is that the villages of Bactria had some system, each under a single head, which was enabling each one to carry on for itself (at the time) without a central government, and even to continue trading (p. 298); the country had reached a point in which the absence of a central government did not (for a time) spell anarchy. It is known that at a later time, in one part of Syria under the Roman Empire—Batanea, Auranitis, Trachonitis—the native villages had acquired an organisation which in many ways imitated that of a Greek or Graeco-Roman city;² they had Assemblies and perhaps occasionally Councils, communal income and expenditure, boards of officials to superintend finance and public works, and in some cases they had at their head a single official who was known by different names—komarchos, protokometes, strategos;³ the strategos might even give his name to the year, like the eponymous magistrate of some old Greek city. In the late Hellenistic period strategos had often been the title of the chief magistrate of a Greek city, and undoubtedly this village organisation goes back in origin, though probably in less elaborate form, to Hellenistic times;⁴ it was the outcome of the Seleucid policy of raising the status of the serf population and so of their villages. It is on these lines that one must seek to understand the Bactrian villages which Chang-k’ien called walled towns: the serf village had become a fortified and quasi-organised township. How far the organisation had progressed naturally cannot be said, but it was far enough to enable the villages to carry on for themselves under their own officials after the central government had perished. The numbers already considered show that by the end of the second century B.C. Bactria was in this respect far ahead of any country east of the Euphrates, possibly of any country in Greek Asia; and if the Seleucids started the process, the credit for the thoroughness with which it had been carried out must be given to Euthydemus and his son. I make no apology for having dealt with this subject at length, for the evolution of the serf village into the organised and quasi-autonomous township was the most important work done by the Greeks in Asia; this it was which really affected the mass of the native population, for it must have meant a considerable improvement in their conditions of life. And this, as I understand it, and not mixed cities or anything else, was the real gift of the Greek world to Bactria.