The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s4.275

c10.s4.275

I come at last to the Menander legend, though the important document for it, the Milindapañha, has had to be treated separately (see Excursus). There is no one concerning whom it is more difficult to distinguish fact from fiction; but the important matter is that he should have had a legend at all. A ruler, to acquire a legend, had to be someone who greatly struck the imagination of his contemporaries; and it is noteworthy that, among Alexander’s more immediate successors, whatever their qualities—great rulers, fighters, administrators—not one became the subject of legend, not even Demetrius the Besieger, seemingly so well fitted to be a hero of romance. Of all Alexander’s heirs in the West, there was only one with whom legend became busy, Cleopatra VII of Egypt;¹ and if Menander forms the third of a trio of which the other members were Alexander and Cleopatra, he must at the least have been a notable figure in his day. And whether my deduction (see Excursus) that the germ of the Milindapañha is to be found in a Greek document inspired by the Alexander-story be right or wrong, Menander was at any rate again the third, with Alexander and Ptolemy II, in another trio of Hellenistic monarchs who questioned learned men of the East. But though a Greek historian did connect his name with Alexander’s (p. 143) and though Greeks may even have played a part in the formation of his legend, that legend, so far as it survives, is essentially Indian and Buddhist.