The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s3.156

c10.s3.156

Menander on his recall had abandoned everything south of Mathurā, had created a new frontier (pp. 227 *sq.*), and must soon have returned himself to the Punjab; the estimate of Demetrius and himself as to what could still be held in India must have largely depended on native circumstances and attitudes which are unknown to us. Apollodotus must have previously returned to the north (p. 164); doubtless he met Eucratides’ invasion in Gandhāra, which is known to have been part of his realm. Eucratides, after crossing the Hindu Kush, took Kapisa from Agathocles, and presumably all the Paropamisadae; Agathocles must have met his death, as all his coins show a young head and had he lived he would have had a better claim to rule India than Menander. Eucratides’ conquest of Kapisa is known from an invaluable issue made by him of square bronze bilingual coins with the type ‘Zeus enthroned’ and a legend in Kharoshthi, ‘The god of the city of Kapisi’.¹ This issue is of great interest. In the first place, Zeus enthroned was the special type of Antiochus IV; this suggests that Eucratides still considered himself, or desired to be considered, a loyal vassal of Antiochus, and this may be borne out by the fact of his presently using this type to overstrike the coins of the defeated Apollodotus. In the second place it throws much light on some of the types used by Greek kings in India. The humped Indian bull on Graeco-Indian coins, for example, is certainly the bull of Siva and represents Pushkalāvatī (p. 135 n. 5), but it had been a common Seleucid type;¹ in the same way both the elephant and the elephant’s head were common Seleucid types, and even Menander’s ox-head occurs on coins of Seleucus II.² Evidently the Greek kings in India often took Seleucid types and fitted them, more or less modified, to other kingdoms and other gods. At Kapisa we see the whole process. The standing Zeus-types of both Demetrius II and Agathocles had probably been meant to represent the elephant-god of Kapisa who dwelt on Mount Pilusāra (pp. 138, 158); but as Eucratides, perhaps to show his loyalty, desired to use Antiochus’ type of Zeus enthroned for the god of Alexandria-Kapisa, and as this type was doubtless well known as being that of Antiochus, he modified it to represent the elephant-god by adding to it the forepart of a small elephant in front of Zeus and also a representation of Mount Pilusāra. Finally, to remove any doubt, the somewhat naive explanatory legend was added; one only wishes there were more such legends.