The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s6.40

c10.s6.40

It will be best to defer considering the Paropamisadae for the present and to turn to the eastern group. It has been noticed that Menander was succeeded by his widow Agathocleia as regent for their son Strato. She was the first woman actually to bear rule in any Hellenistic kingdom, though the rule of queens had not been unknown in old Macedonia; Parthia of course promptly copied, and when Mithridates I died in 138-7 he left his queen Ri..nu regent for his young son Phraates II;¹ subsequently the rule of women became common among the Ptolemies, and one queen of Ptolemaic blood, Cleopatra Thea, virtually ruled what remained of the Seleucid empire. Strato I is shown by his coin-portraits to have had a very long reign,² associated at the end with his grandson Strato II; in middle age he wore a beard, as two Seleucid kings had done (p. 299). A group of three kings, Apollodotus II Philopator, Dionysius, and Zoilus II Soter, show a common and peculiar monogram on their coins, some of which were therefore all struck by the same moneyer in one mint;³ a hoard found on the upper Sutlej contained coins of these three kings and of no others,⁴ and a hoard of 200 coins of Zoilus was found near Sāgala (Sialkot).⁵ Another king, Apollophanes, whose coins are extremely rare but show Euthydemid types, certainly belongs to the same group, as another peculiar monogram which he shares with Zoilus II and Strato again shows that at one time all three shared a common moneyer;⁶ these monograms mean that these four kings—Apollodotus II, Dionysius, Zoilus II, and Apollophanes—were sub-kings, or perhaps in some cases successors, of Strato. Yet another king whose coins are extremely rare, Polyxenus, should from his types be a member of this group.¹ All the kings here mentioned (including Agathocleia) use Menander's regular type of Athena Alkis on their coins, and must therefore, it would seem, have either belonged to his family or governed some part of his one-time kingdom. A peculiar statement in Plutarch (p. 48 n. 5) may mean that after Menander's death the eastern capital was shifted from Sāgala to Bucephala, which appears later as (probably) the capital of Hippostratus (p. 326).