The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s4.230

c10.s4.230

The stability of his realm must have largely depended on the co-operation of friendly native elements, and the existing native organisations must often have been retained unaltered. Only one vassal king is actually known, the ruler of Mathurā,¹ though there must have been others, and no doubt a vassal king would sometimes receive the title *strategos* as governor of his country, just as Alexander’s vassal-kings Taxiles and Porus had ranked as his satraps;² but in such a native vassal-kingdom there *might* also be a military force under a Greek general, like Eudamus in the realm of Porus. Doubtless too there might be an Indian *strategos* over this or that satrapy, just as (not to mention Alexander) Iranian satraps are heard of not only in Bactria but in the kingdoms of Antigonus I and the Seleucids.³ We get indications later which show that the native organisation of many Indian peoples must have persisted without much change; the peoples of the eastern Punjab were able, as soon as Greek rule ended, to set themselves up as independent kingdoms or republics and start coining (p. 324), and the same must be true of the Abhīras of Abiria, as after Greek rule had ended they moved south in a body and founded a kingdom. It may be taken, on the authority of the Milindapañha (see Excursus), that Menander’s Council was composed of men of different races—Greeks, Bactrians, perhaps Anatolians—just as Alexander at the end had made some Persians his kinsmen and introduced them into the *agema*; and doubtless Bactrians (whom Indian writers might class as Yavanas) had some share in high positions. There was of course force behind the satrapal organisation if required, the force of the army; no doubt the western element in the army itself was kept as strong as possible, and even though Menander was cut off both from Bactria and from the possibility of recruiting more Iranian cavalry, the western element in his army may have sufficed for the needs of an empire where the native peoples had no national feeling and where large elements among them were (at any rate for a time) friendly to the government. But his empire, it seems, was essentially an Indian empire with a small Greek ruling caste; it was not a Greek empire, as the Seleucid was meant to be, but something much more in the nature of a partnership, as Demetrius had intended (p. 181); this is further shown by the Indian citizens in the cities, and by Menander, like Demetrius, choosing an Indian city to be his capital. Doubtless the Greek hoped to be the predominant partner, but in actual fact the Indian element in the empire may have had the preponderance; to the bulk of the population it can have made little difference whether their king was named Menander or Asoka, except that we may hope that Greek rule was the milder. Nothing quite like this ever happened elsewhere in the Hellenistic world; it probably went beyond anything of which Alexander had dreamt.