The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s3.201

c10.s3.201

As Eucratides left India without doing what he meant to do—he must at least have meant to secure the Punjab up to Alexander's frontier the Beas—it must have been serious trouble in Bactria which recalled him. The story of his death has to be reconstructed from a chapter of Justin which is one of the most confused and worst excerpted anywhere in that unsatisfactory writer, but with care it can be done. The first thing to notice is that Justin gives two different and mutually exclusive versions of Eucratides' death—that he was killed by his son and that he was killed by the Parthians. The formal story,¹ often repeated in modern works, is that he was killed on his way back from India by the son he had made joint-king (socius regni), who, as though he had slain an enemy and not a father, drove his chariot through the blood and gave orders that the corpse should be cast forth unburied. This piece of nonsense has usually been supposed to mean that Heliocles killed his father; but there is no chance whatever of it being true as it stands. A victorious king at the head of his army might indeed be assassinated by his young son,² but he would not be so assassinated without things happening, and the murderer would not have leisure to insult the corpse or the opportunity of giving orders that it should not be buried. In fact, as has been seen, there is no likelihood of Heliocles having been joint-king with his father, socius regni; and he succeeded his father and had a long reign, a thing quite inconsistent with Justin’s story. Moreover, though Justin calls it assassination and parricide, he gives away the fact that it was really death in battle by saying that ‘the son’ was in a chariot and had ample leisure afterwards. Here comes in his second version, in which he has named the victors in the battle: after the list of provinces conquered by Eucratides—for that, as we have seen (p. 199 n. 3), is the meaning of his ‘Bactriani’—he adds that the ‘Bactriani’—meaning Eucratides—were finally crushed by the weaker Parthians,³ which is a very different matter from being assassinated by his son. Putting the two versions together, what we get is that Eucratides was killed by the Parthians and was killed by ‘a son’; and the story is perfectly consistent if we suppose either that Justin has misunderstood whose son it was or that a proper name—that of the son’s father—has dropped out somewhere between Justin and the original source; the mistake once made, it was inevitable that Justin should seek to improve the occasion in his usual manner by making moral remarks about parricide. Eucratides was indeed killed by ‘a son’; but it was by a son of one of the dead Euthydemid princes, with Parthian help.