The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s2.252

c10.s2.252

It seems then that, speaking generally, these semi-foreign peoples were probably a help rather than a hindrance to the Greek advance. The Euthydemids had behind them, as Alexander had not, much experience of successful conciliation of the native Bactrians; doubtless they applied the same methods to the Bāhlīkas, and, it would seem, just as satisfactorily. But we require to find a much wider and deeper reason for the sweeping successes of the Greeks than anything so far indicated, and fortunately there can be little doubt what it was. It lies in the position of Buddhism with regard to the circumstances of the moment when the Greeks came; and it needs putting with some care, if it is to be rightly understood. Under Asoka Buddhism had become the official religion of the empire; the religion itself had been spreading along the two great roads north-westward and westward,² and a great deal of the North and West had genuinely become Buddhist. But in the second century B.C. Buddhism was not quite the victorious faith which it had been under Asoka. More than one of his successors, in the tradition, had fallen away; Brahmanism had remained strong, though it was ceasing to be Vedic Brahmanism, for it had known how to assimilate the new forces which had been at work since *c.* 300 B.C. or earlier and which were making of Vishnu and Siva personal and all-embracing deities. The new Vishnuism and its effects will be noticed later.³ But Siva, though he appears in the Vedas under the name Rudra, was pre-Vedic and pre-Aryan and immensely old, and his worship had been widely spread throughout the Indo-Iranian borderlands long before history began.⁴ It is possible therefore that he appealed with special force to the half-foreign peoples of the North-West, one of the Buddhist strongholds; certainly in the Greek period he was firmly established in Pushkalāvatī, the capital of the Holy Land of Gandhāra, and had apparently a footing in Taxila also.¹ What was going on may in one aspect be called a counter-reformation; that the Brahmans should have enlisted the aid of a non-Aryan deity like Siva is a fact of considerable interest.