The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s4.173

c10.s4.173

The last name of importance in Ptolemy’s list is Mathurā, Μόδουρα ἡ τῶν θεῶν. This is generally rendered either as ‘Mathurā of the gods’ (which does not translate the Greek) or ‘Mathurā the city of the gods’, and attention is drawn to such things as that Mathurā was the traditional birthplace of Krishna, or was a centre for the diffusion of Buddhism, or was so full of Jain and Buddhist buildings that it looked like a holy city; one might add an inscription of much later date which says that the Vodva stupa at Mathurā was ‘built by the gods’.¹ But ‘city of the gods’ cannot be the correct translation.² I can find no instance in Greek, and none has been cited, where with a definite article followed by the genitive of the person the omitted word is ‘city’; it is always ‘son’ or ‘daughter’—that is the regular Greek usage—and there is no reason for translating Ptolemy’s phrase differently because the genitive of the person is plural and not singular; ‘daughter of the gods’ is good English³ and good Latin,⁴ and I think good Greek also,⁵ especially when you are none too sure just which god it might be. ‘Modoura daughter of the gods’ would then be an allusion to some story about a goddess or nymph called Modoura, an eponym of the city;⁶ Greeks were familiar with city-nymphs—the head of the nymph Cyrene on the coins of her city may be cited⁷—and no doubt Modoura was only the tutelary Yaksha⁸ or Yakshī of the city in Greek guise.⁹