The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s4.123

c10.s4.123

In Gandhāra, Ptolemy gives a town which has a Greek name, ‘Nagara which is also Dionysopolis’,⁹ and which certainly contained a Greek settlement (p. 159); but though the site, a little south-west of Jalalabad, was identified by the French archaeological mission,¹⁰ it was not excavated. The capital Pushkalāvatī, the ‘city of lotuses’, was organised as a Greek polis (p. 136) and has already been described. Its Greek name, Peucela (p. 237 n. 5), might be a Macedonian word, as two Macedonians named Peucolaos are given by Curtius.¹¹ But a Greek king Peucolaos is known from coins¹² whose name may be ‘King Peucela’; and I feel the same difficulty over the Macedonian Peucolaos as over some other names in Curtius, which may have been taken from the Greeks of India and tacked on to the Alexander story.¹ It is more likely that Peucela is taken from the province-name Peucelaïtis, itself an attempt to graecise Pushkalāvatī; similar names of town and province in conjunction, like Tyana-Tyanitis, Gabae-Gabiene, are extremely common, and it is not certain that the town-name is always the original one.