The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s1.37

c10.s1.37

It will be well to consider here the Euthydemid relationships of the earlier period, and the portraits on coins struck in Bactria are such fine work that it ought to be possible to use them as evidence.³ Three of these Bactrian heads, in their stark truth and realism, stand out from the rest—that of Euthydemus in old age and those of his son Demetrius wearing the elephant-scalp and of a certain Antimachus wearing a flat kausia, both men in the prime of life;⁴ Greek art has bequeathed to us no finer portraits. These three are certainly the work of one man, whom I may call *X*, and cannot be very far apart in time. Antimachus then belongs to the same generation as Demetrius, and his portrait shows a feature which I believe to be all but unique in Hellenistic art, a peculiar half-mocking smile, as of one who did not take himself very seriously; those who wish may trace a resemblance to the smile of Monna Lisa. It has nothing to do with the vacuous smile, resembling the archaic smile, common in late Seleucid portraits; it is an essential part of the man. Now that smile occurs once again in Greek art; it occurs in the portrait of Euthydemus⁵ on one of Agathocles’ pedigree coins (App. 3). This coin is the work of a later artist—let us say school of *X*—who was portraying Euthydemus some twenty years after his death; but he remembered the smile, though he could not render it with the same subtlety with which *X* had rendered that of Antimachus. So far as I know, that peculiar smile never occurs again anywhere—certainly not in the East. Antimachus therefore was a son of Euthydemus and a younger brother of Demetrius.