The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s6.197

c10.s6.197

One may now attempt to put together the story of Hermaeus. W’ou-ti-lao was Spalyris, Saca governor of Ki-pin (at the time Kabul) and of as much of the Paropamisadae as the Sacas of Kabul held; his son and successor was Spalagadames. Yin-mo-fu, son of the king of ‘Greek-town’, was Hermaeus,⁸ son of Amyntas, king of Alexandria and of whatever went with Alexandria; and as Wen-chung allied himself not with the king of ‘Greek-town’ but with his son, Amyntas was unable to act, perhaps dying, as Yin-mo-fu is thenceforth treated as king; and as he was king before Yuan-ti’s accession in 48 B.C. we have a *terminus post quem non* for Hermaeus’ accession, and one substantially in accord with the date deduced from the use of the round and square omicron successively on his coinage. The prime mover in the conquest of Ki-pin-Kabul from Spalagadames was Wen-chung; he had no troops of his own, but the whole prestige of the Han was behind him, and he must either have had allies or been able to secure them. At some period which cannot be ascertained but which was later, perhaps very much later, than the death of Chang-k’ien in 114, China had succeeded in securing what Chang-k’ien had sought in vain, a perpetual alliance with the Yueh-chi;¹ whether the alliance still existed in Wen-chung’s day cannot be said, but an indication remains of help rendered to China by that people at some unknown time or times,² and it was the help of one of their princes which Wen-chung obtained³ against the Kabul Sacas. Of the five Yueh-chi princes, the Kushan chief Miaos, who was in the country between Chitral and the Panjhir district,⁴ was the nearest to Alexandria; he supplied the necessary force, presumably for a consideration, Spalagadames was defeated and killed, and Hermaeus was installed by Wen-chung as king in Kabul. Doubtless Hermaeus, whose abundant silver coinage shows that the Panjhir mines were working well, paid Miaos in cash, precisely as the kings of Macedonia or Pergamum had been used to hire a tribe of Gauls for cash; but he also gave the Kushan a relative in marriage, who was probably his sister rather than daughter, seeing that he had only just come to the throne. The hand of Wen-chung can be seen here: Kushan help might be needed again, and it was the regular practice of the Han, as can be read in the Ch’ien-han-shu, to bestow an Imperial princess in marriage upon a barbarian ruler whose help or alliance might be useful; indeed if no Imperial princess was available they made one,¹ as bees can if necessary make a queen. In this way Hermaeus got the whole of the Paropamisadae, but as China’s vassal. Subsequently, as the emperor Yuan-ti took no interest in the remote West, he virtually threw off his (rather nominal) allegiance by putting to death the escort of a Chinese envoy, but was still interested in trade; hence the coin with his name and Chinese characters found on the road to China. He was still alive after 32 B.C., when Ching-ti succeeded; but he certainly did not reign till anywhere near A.D. 19, the date of the accession in northern India of the Parthian Gondophares. The foreign lords of the Paropamisadae after his death continued to copy his coinage;² finally came the Kushan Kadphises I, Miaos’ descendant, who claimed and conquered the Paropamisadae as the representative by blood of Hermaeus (App. 17). The whole story fits together extraordinarily well.