The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s4.190

c10.s4.190

It is not the only case from India of a lost Greek story. There is a story in Pseudo-Plutarch⁵ that every year on the Jhelum an old woman condemned to death was buried alive in a mound called Therogonos, from which serpents then issued. Therogonos has been identified with Theraguhā,⁶ a grotto or sacred place near Nandivardana, and I suppose that the serpent story was not invented to explain Therogonos but that the Indian name was turned into Therogonos because of the serpent story; one is reminded of the poisonous serpents of Egypt who congregated at the tomb of the prophet Jeremiah,⁷ but the story cannot be complete as we have it, whatever it means. And there is the second Greek name of the Aravalli mountains.⁸ The first name, Apokopa, ‘precipitous’, is a commonplace, and was also given to a headland on the African coast south of Bab-el-Mandeb⁹ and to an inlet in South Arabia;¹⁰ but one would like to have the story which caused Greeks to call these mountains ‘The vengeance of Heaven’.