The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s2.138

c10.s2.138

There are two other matters which bear out Demetrius’ plan. The author of the original document or chronicle which must stand behind the Yavana sections of the Yuga-purāṇa (App. 4), in recording the Greeks at Pāṭaliputra, was thinking all the time about the Mauryan empire; ‘all provinces will be in confusion’, he says, meaning the provinces of that empire, and when the Yavanas command ‘the kings will disappear’; as his story centres throughout on Pāṭaliputra, he means that there will be no more Indian kings in the Mauryan capital as aforetime. But more important is the meaning at this time of the words ‘India’ and ‘Indians’ to Greeks of the East like Apollodorus and ‘Trogus’ source’. There is no direct evidence, but the evidence from analogy is too strong to be set aside. In Alexander’s day the word ‘Asia’ was habitually used in the sense of the Persian empire,¹ that is, it was used as a political term and not merely as a geographical one. Some indeed knew that there were bits of the Asiatic continent, like the spice-land of Arabia, which were not within the Persian bounds; but such lands were shadowy things, outside the range of the politics of the day. When the Seleucid empire replaced the Persian, the word ‘Asia’ was transferred to signify that empire, though it was now well known that considerable sections of the continent were outside the Seleucid bounds: Seleucus was ‘King of Asia’,² and the term ‘Stations of Asia’³ applied to the Seleucid survey of their empire, and the title ‘Saviour of Asia’ given to Antiochus IV,¹ are sufficient proof. To Alexander, when he crossed the Hindu Kush, ‘India’ meant only the Indus country which Darius had ruled;² but since then Greek knowledge of India had been enormously enlarged by Megasthenes. But Megasthenes, though he knew of the existence of peninsular India, had only described the Mauryan empire of Chandragupta, and the only part of India with which Greeks had been in contact since Alexander’s death was the Mauryan empire, just as the only part of Asia with which they had been in contact before Alexander’s birth was the Persian empire; Southern India was as shadowy a land as Southern Arabia had been. It is therefore inconceivable that ‘India’ should not also have had a political meaning, just as ‘Asia’ had always had; as ‘Asia’ was used in the sense first of the Persian and then of the Seleucid empires, so ‘India’ must have been used in the sense of the Mauryan empire. Consequently when Trogus’ well-informed source called Demetrius (the Greek equivalent of) *Rex Indorum*,³ ‘King of the Indians’, he meant exactly what Alexander meant when in 330 he called himself ‘Lord of Asia’: ⁴ Demetrius was monarch of the Mauryan empire. Alexander in 330 had not completed the conquest of the Persian empire, but he held the great centres, and after Gaugamela what was to come seemed a foregone conclusion. Similarly, Demetrius had not yet completed the conquest of the Mauryan empire, but with the three great centres in his hand what was to come might well seem a foregone conclusion also; the one statement was as true as the other. Where Chaucer’s ‘grete Emetrëus, the kyng of Inde’ came from is unknown;⁵ but for a moment it had seemed true, and legend remembered where history has forgotten.