The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s3.107

c10.s3.107

The bearing on the matter of Eucratides’ Dioscuri type must be noticed. The Dioscuri were a known Seleucid type; their heads had been used on a bronze issue of Seleucus I,² but the first adoption of the complete figures was due to Antiochus II³ and had been continued by his son Seleucus II;⁴ doubtless it was connected with the successes of these two kings against the Ptolemies and, in the case of Antiochus II, with his acquisition of Samothrace, home of the Cabeiri. Eucratides’ type of the Dioscuri galloping was new, and it appears also on a sealing from Babylonia,⁵ which had been his sphere before he went eastward; but it was a development of the type of his grandfather Seleucus II in which the horses are prancing, and naturally has no connection with the type on the Roman denarius. Now the Dioscuri were, in a very special sense, the saviours (*Soteres*), and Eucratides’ use of the type meant that he had come to the East as *Soter*, a ‘saviour’, just as Apollodotus and Menander had appeared in India as ‘saviours’ (p. 175). It must be repeated that neither the name nor the idea of *Soter* had yet become a commonplace, and in Eucratides’ hands it was, and was meant to be, an invitation to the Greeks of the East to be ‘saved’, that is, to join him against their rulers; he had come to deliver the one-time Seleucid East from the Euthydemids, and it was in consequence of his success as a ‘saviour’ that Philippus called Antiochus ‘Saviour of Asia’, a title possibly coined by Antiochus himself.