The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s2.289

c10.s2.289

We can now, I think, see what the Greek ‘conquest’ meant¹ and how the Greeks were able to traverse such extraordinary distances. To parts of India, perhaps to large parts, they came, not as conquerors, but as friends and ‘saviours’; to the Buddhist world in particular they appeared to be its champions; some provinces must have welcomed them precisely as Egypt and Babylon, and in India Taxila, had welcomed Alexander. They may have had comparatively little fighting till their achievement was half finished; they may even have had none at all except with the actual troops of Pushyamitra and in districts in the South where he was strong; the places where fighting is recorded—Mathurā, Sāketa, Pātaliputra, Madhyamikā—are all places which he would be bound to try to hold. Whatever allowance be made for adventurers and mercenaries from the West (p. 251), the Greeks and Westerners actually engaged in the enterprise cannot have been too numerous, and in each province when occupied the Greeks must largely have retained whatever native organisation existed (Chap. VI), merely seeing that power was in the hands of their friends and probably leaving a handful of Greeks to help in administration. The instance of the Sibi at Madhyamikā may show that points which had to be held for military reasons were settled with native troops from a distance, whose isolation might guarantee their loyalty. Questions of towns and settlements will be considered later; but it may be said here that the only districts in which Greeks really settled to any extent were Gandhāra and the northern Punjab, and perhaps the western seaports and parts of Surāshtra. Over large parts of Greek India we need not think of Seleucid analogies.