The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s2.162

c10.s2.162

Hecate may perhaps give some help in elucidating the types on the nickel and bronze issues of Pantaleon and Agathocles. The nickel¹ and round bronze coins show a bust of the young Dionysus and on the reverse a panther; as they are not bilingual, they were intended for Greeks, and Dionysus is simply Dionysus and has nothing to do with Siva. The square bronze coins,² which are bilingual and intended for Indians, show a ‘dancing girl’ in Indian dress holding a flower (?lotus) with a panther on the reverse. The panther of Dionysus, then, is common to the two series and both therefore ought to refer to the same thing; it is difficult to suppose that the same reverse type was used with two different significations, and that seems to exclude any idea that the panther on the square bronze coins might be the lion which is so common on coins of Taxila. The ‘dancing girl’ has been a problem. It has been suggested that the flower is a lotus and that she is the goddess of the ‘city of lotuses’, Pushkalāvatī;¹ but one cannot imagine the Fortune of a city without her mural crown and dancing, and on the solitary autonomous coin of Pushkalāvatī she wears her mural crown,² which seems decisive, apart from the panther. The same reason seems fatal to the suggestion that she might be the city goddess of Taxila, comparing her with a female figure on coins of Taxila which indeed holds a flower but stands stiff and upright;³ moreover there is no reason to suppose that Taxila was ever a *polis*—it is tolerably certain that it was not—or that Agathocles ever ruled there (p. 160 sq.). The figure in fact cannot be interpreted apart from the panther. Now the Zeus-Hecate silver coins refer to the gods of a particular city, Alexandria-Kapisa, and the explanation of the types on the nickel and bronze issues should therefore be that they also refer to some particular town; this, from the Dionysiac types, can only be Nagarahāra near Jalalabad, the frontier town towards India, which appears in Ptolemy as ‘Nagara, also called Dionysopolis’.⁴ Very few places east of the Hindu Kush have a Greek name, so the town must have been important; the form of the name Dionysopolis shows that a Greek military colony had been planted there (p. 11), one of the usual methods of hellenising an existing Oriental town (p. 22); whether, like Susa, the place had become, or ever did become, a Greek *polis* cannot be said. The settlers were devoted in some especial way to the worship of Dionysus; hence the panther, probably the city type. The ‘dancing girl’ on the bilingual coins should then stand in the same sort of relation to the Indian community of Nagara as the head of Dionysus does to the Greek community, and she is presumably a Yakshī or something of the sort with a special connection with the city; there would be no objection, from the point of view of a Buddhist community, to representing her as dancing, for the Yakshīs at Mathurā, with their voluptuous coquetry, come from a Buddhist monument.⁵ We shall meet a similar case later (p. 400) of two coins of Maues, linked by a common obverse type, which refer to the two religions of a particular town. If Nagarahāra, whose site has been identified, be ever excavated it may be possible to be more precise; but what is both interesting and important is that these two Euthydemid princes on their money treat the Greek and Indian communities in the town as on a level.