The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s2.270

c10.s2.270

Something of this sort was the position when a Brahman, the Sunga Pushyamitra,¹ murdered the last Maurya and seized the crown, as already related. But he was more than a Brahman; he was a convinced, perhaps even a fanatical, devotee of the Brahman religion, which he therefore naturally desired to see restored as the religion of his realm. The matter at once became of concern to every Buddhist in India; they had no desire to be under the rule of a very earnest Brahman. Probably too there were people who did not desire to be under his rule for more mundane reasons; there was no national feeling in India, and to many men Pushyamitra, the Sunga from the south, would seem hardly less a foreigner than Demetrius, the Yavana from the north. The Greek leaders saw that they could use these feelings. Of course they fought Pushyamitra, not because he was a Brahman, but because he wanted what they wanted and was in their way; both sought control of the huge derelict empire, and war between them was inevitable. Obviously therefore anyone who, for whatever cause, was an enemy of Pushyamitra might become a friend to the Greeks. Both Apollodotus and Menander on their coins, the former exclusively, the latter down to his latest issue, called themselves *Soter*, ‘the saviour’. The title still had its full value in the Greek world. It had only been used twice before in history: Ptolemy I had been *Soter* because he had helped to save Rhodes from Demetrius the Besieger, and Antiochus I because he had saved Asia Minor from the Gauls; in the same way, Apollodotus and Menander were *Soteres* because they professed to come to Indians as saviours, to ‘save’ them from Pushyamitra. It was entirely a political matter; but it happened that the people to be ‘saved’ were in fact usually Buddhists, and the common enmity of Greek and Buddhist to the Sunga king threw them into each other’s arms.