The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s4.134

c10.s4.134

No city anywhere was ever officially named 'Ιὼ Μοῦσα, 'Hail, O Muse'. The words are the first words of a lyric addressed to the Muse whose name was the name of the city, and the city must have been mentioned or praised in the lyric; the poem, we may suppose, was famous locally, and the citizens, or more likely their neighbours, nicknamed the city from it; I have myself seen the first words of another lyric used in a somewhat similar way.² The name of the Muse and her eponymous city was no doubt Calliope, chief of the Nine,³ for the last Greek king in the Paropamisadae, Hermaeus, married a Calliope who is universally supposed, from the type on their joint coins, to have been a princess from one of the surviving Greek principalities east of the Jhelum (p. 337); the name was at home in Menander's kingdom. But there was another Greek city called Calliope in Comisene,⁴ which in the time of Antiochus III was already subject to Parthia; and the natural connection of the two names would be that Calliope in India was started off with settlers from Calliope in Parthia, that is, that some Greek volunteers had quitted Parthia in order to follow Demetrius to India. The Muses had come into fresh prominence in Hellenistic times as goddesses of the Museum at Alexandria and of the philosophic schools at Athens; Muse-names occur in Asia later,⁵ and one, a girl called Clio at Susa,⁶ is earlier than Menander, but no Muse except Calliope ever gave her name to a city. But 'Calliope' in Parthia was only a popular nickname (p. 13), and ‘Calliope’ in India therefore can have been no more than that; and as Ptolemy’s co-ordinates put Iomousa near the confluence of the Chenab and the Indus, it was doubtless the city which Alexander had founded at the confluence of those two rivers;¹ its official name therefore was Alexandria, and it was presumably the capital of the southern Punjab. Iomousa proves for certain that Greek lyrics were being written in Menander’s kingdom; it would be astonishing if they were not, seeing that we possess a Greek lyric ode written at Susa half a century or more later.²