The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s2.69

c10.s2.69

Once in possession of Taxila, Demetrius had two possible lines of advance, on either side of the Indian desert: one south-eastward along the great road across the Punjab and by the Delhi passage to the Ganges and the Mauryan capital Pātaliputra, the other southward (at first southwestward) down the Indus to its mouth and whatever might lie beyond. Alexander had attempted the two lines successively; Demetrius took them concurrently. His own sons, as their portraits show, were as yet too young to lead a great advance; but he was fortunate in commanding the services of two lieutenants who must have been very able men, his brother or kinsman Apollodotus and his general Menander. The two are twice coupled in the classical tradition,¹ which indicates some close connection between them,² but in each case Apollodotus is named first, which suggests that he was the more important; doubtless the reason is that he was connected with the royal house, while Menander was not. Who Apollodotus was has already been considered (p. 76); for Menander I must refer to the Excursus (pp. 420 sq.). He was a Greek from the Paropamisadae, and certainly a commoner; his birth in a village might mean that his father was a great landowner, successor to one of those Iranian barons who figure so largely in the Alexander story,³ and that he was born in his father's stronghold to which the village was ancillary, but it more probably means that he was merely the son of a cleruch in a military settlement; in either case he had risen by his own abilities. As he died between 150 and 145 (p. 226), and as his latest coins (so far as portraiture can be relied on in Graeco-Indian coins) show a man of advanced years,⁴ he must have been nearer to the generation of Demetrius than to that of his sons; and he had certainly seen fighting, for Demetrius would not have put an unproved man in command of the advance to Pāṭaliputra. His portraits,⁵ for what they are worth, confirm the fact that he was not a Euthydemid; he has a different type of face, and the Euthydemid bull-neck is conspicuously absent. An Indian writer remarked later that among the Yavanas slaves could rise to be kings;⁶ doubtless he used 'slaves' in the Persian sense of everyone not royal (p. 355 n. 6), and was thinking primarily of the career of the most famous of the Yavana monarchs. But it must be emphasised that at the time of the invasion Menander was only Demetrius' general, a fact, it would seem, better understood by Indian writers of the period (p. 166) than by modern scholars.