The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s2.272

c10.s2.272

I want to be clear as to the meaning of this, lest any one should suppose that I am talking of an alliance of the Greeks with Buddhism,¹ the Buddhist religion. Such a thing is, to my mind, impossible. It would presuppose a state of war between Brahmanism and Buddhism which did not exist, though there may have been a good deal of tension;² and it would run counter to the deepest feelings of Hellenism. No Hellenistic king would ever have supported one religion against another, for one of the cardinal tenets of Greeks in the Hellenistic centuries was that no man’s religion was any one’s business but his own, and except by Antiochus IV the rule never seems to have been broken; it seems certain enough now that we never find Buddhist symbolism on the coins of the Greek kings³ (that was left to Sacas and Kushans), or indeed any Indian religious symbolism except that relating to the god or gods of some particular city on the coins minted in that city. Naturally Hellenistic kings were clear enough as to the distinction between a religion and the temporal power of its priesthood: the early Ptolemies did not touch the Egyptian religion but they circumscribed the power of its priests; the early Seleucids did not touch the strange matriarchal religions of Asia Minor but they sometimes curtailed the territory ruled by the priest-kings. But in purely religious matters these kings never interfered; all the religions of India were safe enough in Greek hands, and indeed we shall meet Greeks later who were devotees of Brahmanism (p. 391). It must be remembered that reconstructing history from coins is like restoring a dinosaur from a fossil bone; the coin also was once clothed in flesh and blood—proclamations, speeches, acts of state. The word *Soter* on the coins of Apollodotus and Menander may really imply a manifesto issued by Demetrius to the peoples of India on the lines, though not in the sense, of the famous proclamation of Antigonus I that all Greeks should be free, a proclamation which for years was a main motive power of Hellenistic history. And if the Mauryas really had Seleucid blood (p. 152), he must also have proclaimed that he came as kinsman and heir of the extinct dynasty.