The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s3.66

c10.s3.66

It had more than once been suggested that Eucratides had some connection with the Seleucids,¹ but the first definite proof (though it is far from being the whole proof) that he himself was a Seleucid was given in 1922 by Sir George Macdonald in the work already quoted,² who relied on two things: that Eucratides on his coinage used the Seleucid bead and reel moulding introduced by Antiochus III, and that on the coin which figures his parents, Heliocles and Laodice,³ Laodice wears the diadem while Heliocles does not and was therefore a princess of a reigning house, which from her name should be the Seleucid. Let me add that when Eucratides represented himself on his coins as helmeted he put on his helmet the badge of the founder of the dynasty, the bull’s horn and ear which had appeared on the helmet of the first Seleucus.⁴ This must suffice for the moment; the most decisive proof must be left to its right place (p. 202). I may notice here that no one now doubts that the Heliocles and Laodice coin represents his parents, and as he was a Seleucid he can only have been such through his mother,⁵ who was therefore certainly a Seleucid princess; and her diadem shows that she was the daughter of a king, not of some collateral. This gives, in passing, two interesting facts about Seleucid princesses: one is that the conjecture that the unmarried princesses, like those of the Ptolemies, were officially called βασίλισσα, ‘queen’, is certainly correct, as Laodice wears her diadem in her own right;⁶ the other is that it was evidently Seleucid practice to marry superfluous daughters, for whom no royal bridegroom was at hand, to great commoners, as Seleucus II (we have already seen) gave a sister to Diodotus, strategos of Bactria (p. 73).