The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s1.349

c10.s1.349

One thing is certain about the Euthydemids: to do what they did, they not only had a large population behind them, but they had the support, perhaps the hearty support, of the native Bactrians, without which Euthydemus might have met the fate of Molon; for purposes of external policy that would mean the landowners, who with their retainers supplied the famous Bactrian cavalry. Euthydemus’ 10,000 Bactrian horse sufficiently witnesses to the increase in the population during the Seleucid peace; for the trustworthy figures supplied by Hieronymus of Cardia as to the amount of native cavalry in the Farther East after Alexander’s death show that in the time of the Successors the Bactrian satrapy could not have raised anything approaching that figure.¹ And the fact that Euthydemus sought to hold the line of the Arius against Antiochus III with the Bactrian horse alone, though that was not the way to hold a river line, if it shows (as it probably does) that he had learnt from Molon’s fall and was afraid of trying to use the Greek settlers against their lawful king (though some may have been guarding the Massagetae front), also shows that he knew that he could count on the loyalty of the Bactrians. Iran had always been the Seleucids’ failure (pp. 32, 55), and they had never secured any real hold on the country, which had fallen away to the Parthians at the first opportunity; but though Parthia, when her time came, might lop off outlying parts of the Bactrian empire, she never permanently got one foot’s breadth of the soil of Bactria itself. It must mean that in some way Euthydemus had really secured for his house the loyalty and co-operation of the Bactrian aristocracy, the thing which Alexander had tried to do by his marriage with Roxane, and that he went nearer than anyone else to solving the problem of how to combine in one polity the Greek city and the Iranian baron, the problem which, as Alexander had seen, lay at the root of governing Iran. The one name of a satrap of Euthydemus which has survived, Aspiones, is Bactrian;¹ Menander later had a Bactrian on his Council (Excursus, p. 422); and it was apparently during the Greek occupation that the Sogdian language of the Bactrians, a north Iranian speech akin to Pahlavi, was reduced to writing (p. 304).