The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s4.213

c10.s4.213

The explanation is furnished by the nameless donor at Karli, who calls himself, not Yavana, but Dhammayavana.⁷ The late Sylvain Lévi’s translation was ‘Yavanus secundum legem’,¹ one who had been legally made a Greek (I presume he meant by a grant of citizenship): but, as I understand it, Dhamma (Sanscrit Dharma) is not ‘lex’,² and I am going to venture on another explanation, premising that of course the word here has nothing to do with the Buddhist Dhamma, the sum total of the spirit and precepts of Buddhism. I have read various discussions of the word, and take it to mean the whole duty of a man³ according to the sphere in life which he occupies; the word always carries a sense of obligation⁴ (in the legal meaning of that term). Now a common conception in Indian literature, whether Buddhist or non-Buddhist, is the Dharmaraja, the king who does the whole duty of a king; and by analogy Dhammayavana should mean a Greek who does the whole duty of a Greek. The duty of a king was a known thing—primarily to do justice;⁵ but what was the duty of a Greek as a Greek? One can seek duty in three spheres, moral, religious, and social-political. Dhamma here does not apply to the moral sphere, for the simple basic moral principles without which civilisation cannot exist were common to every civilised people, to the Jew, the Persian, the Indian equally with the Greek. And it does not apply to the religious sphere, for a Greek as a Greek had no religious duties; no man’s religion was any-one’s business but his own, and any religious obligations which a Greek might feel were either personal to himself or were part of his duty to his city, *i.e.* not religious at all but political. So we come to the social-political sphere; and here a Greek *had* duties which differentiated him from other men. For normally he was a citizen of an autonomous city, and as such he owed a well-defined set of duties to that city and his fellow-citizens. The Dhamma of a Greek as a Greek, then, was his duty as a citizen of a *polis*, and the Indian who called himself Dhammayavana thereby claimed that he carried out the duties of a Greek *citizen*; that is, he was a citizen of a Greek *polis*. I have therefore reached by another route what I take to be Lévi’s conclusion: this Indian called himself a Yavana because he was a Greek citizen. It is strange that, at the farthest point of the earth’s surface which any Greek citizen can so far have reached, we should find these Indian citizens, when long years of excavation at Doura and in Babylonia have failed to throw light on the question of Asiatic citizens in the Greek cities in Asia (pp. 21 *sq.*). But the citizenship of Indians in Greek cities is independently attested by the Kharoshthi monograms on the coins of some of the later kings in the eastern Punjab,¹ which show that their moneyers were sometimes Indians (see pp. 356 *sqq.*).