The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s2.6

c10.s2.6

Demetrius, when he crossed the Hindu Kush, was the third foreign conqueror whom north-west India had seen in historical times, not counting the unrecorded tribes, proto-Bactrian and other, who prior to the Achaemenid period had made their way over the passes and settled in the country. Darius I had conquered Gandhāra, Sind, and part of the Punjab; whether he had any plan beyond the enlargement of his empire is not known, but there seems to have been a good deal of Iranian blood in the North-West, which may have had some bearing on his actions. These Indian provinces were finally lost in the reign of Artaxerxes II; Artaxerxes III (Ochus) was very hazy about the geography of the Indus,⁴ and Alexander met no Persian officials east of the Hindu Kush. Alexander himself had a double plan: to conquer what Darius I had held, which he achieved, and to reach the Eastern Ocean which he thought quite close, a thing now known to have been impossible. His success was far more evanescent than that of Darius; a few years after his death the only traces left of his rule, not counting the Paropamisadae, were two or three of the cities he had founded, islands now in an Indian sea. Demetrius’ invasion was a different matter. It followed a plan which neither Darius nor Alexander had known enough about India even to dream of, and employed methods which Alexander had indeed dreamt of but had only begun, very tentatively indeed, to practise when he died, and which might have provided possibilities of permanence in advance of previous attempts; in distances traversed, in territory acquired, the Bactrian Greeks far surpassed both the Persian and the Macedonian, and came near to success in an undertaking hardly less ambitious and far-reaching than had been Alexander’s conquest of the Persian empire. What this plan was will have to be elucidated by events. But it was a plan which could only have originated in some definite man’s brain, and that man was quite certainly Demetrius.