The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s2.211

c10.s2.211

Apollodotus, like Demetrius, appears in the Mahābhārata as a king of the Yavanas under the name Bhagadatta,² and the wide extent of his rule is attested in general terms by the wide diffusion of his abundant coinage; the range of find-spots is said far to exceed that of any other Greek king except Menander, and the number of monograms on his money suggests that he coined in other places beside Pushkalāvatī and Taxila. It is unfortunate that Cunningham, with his unrivalled knowledge of find-spots, a knowledge which no one now can ever acquire again, never drew up a complete list of the places in India where within his knowledge Apollodotus’ coins had been found; putting together the indications he left³ and omitting Seistan-Arachosia and the Paropamisadae, he refers to finds in the Lower Punjab, Sind, Gujerat, Karnal near Delhi, Roh, and Pushkar near Ajmer; add to these Amarkot near Dera Ghazi Khan,⁴ Bajaur,⁵ Mathurā,⁶ Bundelkhund south of the Jumna,⁷ Dudial in Hazara,⁸ and of course Taxila; apparently too they circulated among the Kunindas (p. 325), and certainly in Barygaza. Probably this list is nowhere near complete, but it covers most of Greek India. The presence of his coins in Menander’s sphere attests a lively trade; it can hardly be taken to mean that at the end of his life he was Menander’s suzerain. Why, unlike every other Greek king except Antimachus II and Telephus, he never put his portrait on his coins is a mystery; that, and the great amount of power delegated to him by Demetrius, which implies complete confidence, may support the view that he really was Demetrius’ youngest brother (p. 76) and that the relations between them were those between Antigonus Gonatas and his half-brother Craterus. But indeed one obvious feature of the whole story is the manner in which the early Euthydemids trusted one another; there is no hint anywhere, such as one overstriking another’s coins, that that trust was ever misplaced, and we shall see the way in which they acted as a family against Eucratides. The phenomenon is a well-known feature of two other Hellenistic dynasties, the Antigonids and the Attalids; but clearly those two houses had no monopoly of family loyalty.