The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s6.2

c10.s6.2

WITH the death of Menander the little thread of literary information which has been our guide through the maze breaks off, and except for one episode the story of Greek rule in India can be taken no further from written history. In places that rule lasted for well over a century after Menander’s death, and a large number of kings are known: taking Bactria and India together, and assuming that the first Diodotus took the royal title, we know from literature and coins of thirty-six kings and one queen, Agathocleia;¹ a Kharoshthi inscription has added one more name, Theodamas.² The labours of numismatists³ have succeeded in producing a broad outline of events, and some points of interest can be recovered, notably as regards the revival a generation before the end; that is all, for no Greek historian seems to have taken the story of the Farther East further down than the death of Mithridates II in 87 B.C. (pp. 45, 48). Putting it very roughly, until the coming of the Sacas the house of Eucratides ruled most of the country between the Hindu Kush and the Jhelum, though we may meet some Euthydemid kings to the west of that river, and the houses of Euthydemus and Menander ruled from the Jhelum to Mathurā; somewhere about 80 B.C. the Sacas, who had previously established a kingdom in Sind and the Greek sea-provinces to the southward, came up the Indus, occupied Taxila and Gandhāra, and drove a wedge in between the two realms or state-groups. To which house or group the greater number of the known kings belong has been elucidated from their coin-types,¹ and these, together sometimes with identical monograms, furnish the only safe ground; attempts to group the kings by artistic considerations² do not, in my opinion, take us very far, for the method is subjective and is open to the accident of a better engraver turning up in some town. Some of the known names are probably sub-kings.