The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s6.184

c10.s6.184

Very various interpretations,¹ which need not detain us, have been given offhand of this story, often with little regard to circumstances or dates. The only real attempt to consider the several factors has been von Gutschmid’s,² and I have no doubt that his explanation is correct: Yin-mo-fu is Hermaeus; Ki-pin here is Kophen;³ Yung-kiu is Yonaki, ‘Greek-town’.⁴ W’ou-ti-lao he did not explain beyond saying that he was a Saca; for no king with a name the least like W’ou-ti-lao is known. But in fact a perfectly good explanation of the name had already been given by Wylie, though von Gutschmid did not know this: it is the word ἀδελφοῦ (adelphou) on the coins of Spalyris.⁵ This explanation has gained enormously in probability since it was put forward, for Professor Herzfeld has brilliantly shown that the name Phraotes, which Apollonius in Philostratus gives to the king of Taxila, is *apratihata*, one of Gondophares’ predicates in the Kharoshthi legend on his coins;¹ and if part of one king’s title could be turned into a king’s name, so could that of another. The other Saca ruler who called himself on his coins *βασιλέως ἀδελφοῦ*, the ‘king’s brother’, Spalirises,² cannot come in question, for he did not die but became successively Great King and Great King of Kings; and Spalyris³ (Spalahores in the Kharoshthi) did have a son Spalagadames⁴ who presently succeeded him.⁵ It is true that Spalyris on his coins does not appear as king, while W’ou-ti-lao is called king; but Pan-ku’s source, which can only be Wen-chung’s Report, was merely mistranslating the words *ἀδελφοῦ τοῦ βασιλέως*, ‘brother of the king’, in Spalyris’ title as ‘Adelphou the king’. It must be remembered that, so far as is known, Wen-chung was the first Chinaman to come into actual contact with Greeks or the Greek language. He probably knew Saca,⁶ but that might not help him much if the Parsii of Kabul still spoke some form of Persian; and he cannot have failed to get some very muddled interpreting. Besides Adelphou as the king’s name, he never got the name Alexandria but only the adjective *Ἰωνακή* (Ionake, ‘Greek’) which he took for the name of the city; he was not the only person in the Farther East to make that particular mistake.⁷