The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s2.131

c10.s2.131

At Madhyamikā he was only some 80 miles north of Ujjain, the capital of Avanti (West Malva), and at Barygaza he had been on the great road running eastward to Ujjain. He could no doubt have reached Madhyamikā across country, leaving Ujjain on his flank; but Alexander had always followed the main routes where they existed, as no doubt any army in Asia normally did, and the common-sense of the matter is that Apollodotus would follow the main highway and occupy Ujjain; indeed one can go further and say that it is inconceivable that his principal objective can have been anything but that city.⁴ For Ujjain was in the west very much what Taxila was in the north, an important seat of learning and one of the chief commercial centres of India: situated at the junction of two main routes, the Barygaza-Kosambī road to the capital and the road that came north from the Deccan, it gathered up and forwarded the trade between the Ganges valley, Southern India, and the western sea. In one way it was more than Taxila, for it was one of the seven sacred cities of India, whose meridian was to be taken as the base for India by the astronomers of a later day;⁵ and like Taxila it had been the seat of a Mauryan viceroy. That Apollodotus could have passed it by is impossible; but it must be emphasised that this is only a deduction. There is no direct evidence of his occupation, for though Ujjain appears in Ptolemy (VII, 62) with a Greek name, ’Οζηνή, this is only a rendering in Greek letters of the sound of the Indian name Ujjahini and might have been made at any time. But there is the indirect evidence of the rule there later of the Saca Western Satraps (pp. 243, 335); for the Sacas merely followed where the Greeks had led.