The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s3.218

c10.s3.218

How and why Mithridates quitted Bactria is obscure. The proceedings of his Sacas, to be presently noticed, may have had something to do with it; but all that is known is that Heliocles finally recovered Bactria, Sogdiana (or southern Sogdiana), and presumably Merv, while Mithridates is found in possession of Seistan, Arachosia and Gedrosia.³ It may be supposed that Mithridates left a governor in Bactria called Phraates (not his son Phraates II, who was not yet born) and himself passed on to the conquest of Seistan and Arachosia, and that a rally of Bactria to Heliocles as the one effective force, aided perhaps by the return of the rest of Eucratides’ army from India, drove Phraates out. Demetrius II vanishes, and with him vanishes the last trace of Euthydemid rule in Iran. Somewhere about 155 B.C.⁴—a year or two either way—Mithridates either settled his Sacas on the lower Helmand in the province afterwards called Sacastene, or, as is much more probable, they settled themselves; he probably had as little choice in the matter as his namesake of Pontus had when he and Nicomedes of Bithynia settled the Galatae in northern Phrygia, for the Sacas were not settled on his frontier, as would have been customary, but secured a rich province in the interior. There they set up a kingdom, which was independent or virtually so from the start, as were the Galatae; it was to form a rallying point for their compatriots in the Saca invasion of