The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s2.291

c10.s2.291

There is no doubt that the policy followed by the Greek leaders was the policy of Demetrius; his lieutenants, especially Menander, may have entered wholeheartedly into his scheme, but his was the brain which conceived it and his the will which so nearly carried it through. For there is one unmistakable piece of evidence. Whether we believe or disbelieve the stories of Asoka’s conversions of Greeks to Buddhism,² he had at any rate converted Gandhāra and preached to the Greeks of the Paropamisadae;³ and this means that Demetrius was well informed about the position by the time he reached Taxila, even if he had not been so when he crossed the Hindu Kush. And his first step, as has been noticed, was to cause his son Demetrius II, his governor west of the Indus, to issue in his name a bilingual coinage with a Greek legend on the obverse and a Prakrit legend written in Kharoshthi on the reverse. As every succeeding Greek king in India copied him, the bilingual coinage has become such a commonplace that the tremendous significance of its first introduction has been obscured. It was *not*, as is sometimes said, issued for the benefit of Indian subjects who knew no Greek. Many Hellenistic kings, both before and after Demetrius, ruled over subjects who knew no Greek; but no Seleucid ever put Iranian or Babylonian legends on his coinage, no Ptolemy ever put Egyptian; the Arsacids of Parthia did not enquire if their subjects could read their Greek legends, any more than any British Government has ever troubled itself about its Latin ones. What Demetrius was doing was expressing the very basis of the conquest he meditated, the policy which made some Indians see in him the traditional King of Justice, the policy which had led him to rebuild his destined capital as an Indian rather than a Greek city (p. 179), and had led him, contrary to what appears to have been the Seleucid practice with regard to Greek cities with dynastic names, to admit Indians as citizens of Demetrias in Sind (p. 257). His realm was to be a partnership of Greek and Indian; he was not to be a Greek king of Indian subjects, but an Indian king no less than a Greek one, head of both races. There will be more to be said about this when we come to Menander’s kingdom; it may be the most important thing about the Greek empire in India. It has already been shown that Demetrius was consciously copying Alexander; but in this matter his inspiration was not the Alexander who had cut his blood-stained way to the Beas but the Alexander who had imagined something better, the man who had prayed at Opis for a joint rule of the Macedonian and the Persian, the man whom Eratosthenes had called ‘reconciler of the world’¹ and who had dreamt of a union of peoples in a human brotherhood.² It is to the lasting credit of the Euthydemids that they made an attempt to put this into practice; an attempt imperfect enough, no doubt, and one whose motive force may have been largely ambition; but still an attempt. And that was more than was done by any other Hellenistic dynasty.