The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s2.104

c10.s2.104

We may now leave Menander at Pāṭaliputra and return to Sind and Apollodotus. The evidence for what he did is not so clear as that for Menander, the Yuga-purāṇa being only concerned with Pāṭaliputra, but rather more is known about the ultimate consequences. Doubtless he first conquered the coastal provinces where a fleet could help him, and the notice of him in southern Rajputana comes later; we may suppose that he went round the Rann of Cutch, then possibly a sea-gulf, and so southward. Ptolemy (VII, 60) knows of a Greek city Theophila in those parts (p. 234), and his co-ordinates, for what they are worth, place it eastward of the Indus delta; he seems to have figured it as on the route from Patala to Ujjain,¹ and its foundation—it must have been an Indian town refounded—would belong to Apollodotus' activity. A woman's name means a dynastic name, which implies a Greek *polis*; Theophila might have been Demetrius' queen, but the likeliest guess would be that Apollodotus *was* Demetrius' youngest brother (p. 76) and that Theophila was their mother, the half-Seleucid consort of Euthydemus. Apollodorus says of this advance that not only did the Greeks occupy Patalene (the Indus delta country) but also, of the rest of the coast land, the kingdom called of Saraostos and the kingdom of Sigerdis.² The former has long been certain; it was Surāṣṭra, Kathiawar.³ There seems to have been a foreign element in the province, at any rate in the seaports, a thing in favour of the Greeks; Asoka's governor in Surāṣṭra had had an Iranian name, Tushaspa, and had been called a Yavana,¹ and Ceylonese tradition knows of a missionary, Dhammarakkita, sent by Asoka to Aparānta (Gujerat), who is called a Yona.² The other kingdom, that of Sigerdis, is unknown, but can only mean the country between Patalene and Surastrene, including Cutch;³ the provinces however will be discussed later (pp. 233 sqq.) and I only want here to get the outline of the conquest.