The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s3.205

c10.s3.205

Before going on, a word must be said about the chariot. A Greek king fighting from a chariot seems so strange that it has led to a suggestion¹ that the story of the chariot driven through the blood is merely a reproduction of the story of Tullia driving her carriage through the blood of Servius in Livy (I, 48, 7). But ‘Trogus’ source’ is much earlier than Livy himself (p. 50), and though Livy doubtless got the story from some annalist, an eastern Greek is hardly likely to have read Roman annalists; and I am not prepared to say that the chariot story is untrue. Both Persians and Indians used war chariots; so did Seleucus I at Ipsus, and on his coins Athena fights from an elephant-chariot. There is a bronze issue of Antiochus IV on which Victory drives a two-horse chariot² (the war chariot); some coins of Maues, with one of the Telephus monograms and the type ‘Zeus enthroned’ and therefore struck at Kapisa (App. 16), show a two-horse chariot in which a radiate king with a spear or sceptre is being driven by a charioteer;³ a century later a coin of Wima Kadphises, the conqueror of northern India, shows the king being driven in a two-horse chariot.⁴ Finally, one of the coins of Mithridates I of the time when he was virtually master of Bactria (p. 222 n. 2) shows Victory in a two-horse chariot,⁵ which exactly fits and may even refer to the battle in which Eucratides was killed.