The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s4.267

c10.s4.267

But this was for his Indian subjects. It could not mean much to Greeks; yet there should have been something for them also, and perhaps one can detect what it was. Menander was not a god; indeed in the second century B.C. it was no great distinction to be a god. His queen Agathocleia also was not a goddess; but as we have seen (p. 249) she was ‘god-like’. Here comes in Professor Rapson’s discovery that some of the portraits of Athena on Menander’s coins have the features of Agathocleia;¹ she was not Athena, yet in a sense she might seem to be, as in a sense Antiochus IV might seem to be Zeus. Now to ‘woo Athena’ had become almost a Hellenistic proverb for the acts of a man who claimed to be exalted above his fellows;² still more of course to ‘wed Athena’, the action attributed, probably without foundation, to Antony at Athens.³ When Pentheus in Nonnus exclaims that, if the bastard Dionysus be a god, he will be a god too, and proceeds to recount his divine associations, his outburst includes the declaration ‘Pallas is my concubine’;⁴ and though Demetrius the Besieger had *said* that Athena was his sister, Plutarch hints plainly enough that there was more behind.⁵ Add that Menander’s enemy Antiochus IV had wedded Atargatis, and that it was advisable that he should do no less than Antiochus. The Greek equivalent, then, of his being a King of the Wheel was that he had done what no Greek king before him had done and had wedded Athena, though in a sense to which few would object; for his Athena, portrayed on his coins, was his human wife.⁶ Small wonder that, on her own coinage, Agathocleia had herself represented as Athena⁷ and called herself ‘godlike’.