The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s4.277

c10.s4.277

One standing feature of the mass of Alexander-legends is the attribution to him of acts and things which really belonged to others, whether they lived before or after his lifetime; and a similar feature in Cleopatra’s legend is the attribution to her of the works of Alexander himself and of earlier Ptolemies. And in Menander’s case, despite the small amount of material which has survived, we can still trace the transfer to him of stories originally told of the Buddha or of Asoka. That his ashes should have been entombed in a stupa or stupas was proper to a dead Chakravartin; but Prinsep recognised long ago that Plutarch’s story² of his ashes being divided among the cities of his kingdom, each one of which raised a stupa over its portion, was a transfer to him of the story in the Book of the Great Decease that the relics of Buddha were divided among eight peoples and enshrined in eight stupas; though it is conceivable that behind the Menander story lay some real political contest for the honour of being his burial-place, like the contest for the corpse of Alexander. Similarly the story which concludes the second part of the Milindapañha, that he handed over his kingdom to his son, retired from the world, and became not only a Buddhist but an Arhat, is merely a transfer to him of the story that Asoka late in life became an Arhat; and certain preliminaries to the meeting of Menander and Nāgasena in the Milindapañha are supposed to be taken from the story of the meeting of Asoka with Tissa Mogaliputta.¹