The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s2.231

c10.s2.231

Alexander had found a country divided between local kings and ‘free peoples’ (Āratta) under their own oligarchic rule. With the kings accommodation was possible to him, for he understood kings, but it was not common: Taxiles joined him and Porus became reconciled to him, but three others—Sambos, Musicanus, and the second Paurava king, the ‘bad Porus’—were irreconcilable, and one, Abisares, held aloof. But the free peoples—the Asvaka of Gandhāra, the Cathaei between the Ravi and the Beas, the Mālavas (Malli) of the lower Ravi—all fought him desperately; he did not understand them and they did not understand him. Subsequently this whole complex of states became part of the Mauryan empire, but that empire was nothing organic, merely a covering framework; it functioned while the central power was strong, but easily fell back into its component parts when it became weak, though the component parts might have altered meanwhile. The Greeks met with local kings in Cutch and Surastrene, as has been seen, and at Mathurā (p. 259); but though in the case of many of the Indian peoples to be mentioned it cannot be said whether there was a king or not, there are two districts, Taxila¹ and the Madras (p. 171), where the kingship which had existed in Alexander’s day had certainly been lost, and it seems as if the relative importance of the free peoples may have increased. However that may be, it seems probable that the attitude of the free peoples to the Greeks and the Greek attitude to them was something quite other than it had been in Alexander’s day.