The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s2.121

c10.s2.121

This is the known limit of Apollodotus’ advance southward—Kathiawar and part of Gujerat, *i.e.* Barygaza and presumably Surat. There are indeed the cave inscriptions from the country behind Bombay, which will be considered in their place, but they do not go to proving Greek rule. More important is the manner in which his advance is confirmed by the fragments of a list of the provinces (satrapies) of the Greek empire in India preserved by Ptolemy; but I want to deal with Ptolemy’s invaluable evidence as a whole, and these fragments will be considered in Chapter VI. But one remark may be made here about Apollodorus’ phrase, the ‘kingdom called of Saraostos’. Greeks adopted from Indians the habit of calling a king by the name of his country or his capital: Saraostos is ‘King Surāṣṭra’, the king of Kathiawar; Taxiles of the Alexander-historians is ‘King Taxila’, his personal name being Ambhi; the ‘King Palibothros’ of Strabo (xv, 702) is the Mauryan emperor for the time being, whose capital was Palibothra (Pāṭaliputra); two fresh Indian instances, on coins of the Andhra dynasty, have recently been recorded.¹ The usage is notorious. But Patañjali’s ‘The Yavana’ (p. 146) is not in this category, for Yavana is not a territorial designation; the phrase does not mean ‘King Yavana’, but merely ‘the Yavana chief’. There is a similar use in English.²