The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s6.48

c10.s6.48

How Strato governed Sind and Surastrene, or whether these provinces had broken off prior to the Saca conquest, is quite unknown; nothing of their history can be recovered. But as the later Saca rulers in Surastrene and Malva, Nahapana and Castana, seem to have copied the coins of Apollodotus II,² they at any rate had them to copy, and this king, who from his name was presumably a descendant of Apollodotus I Soter, may therefore have had something to do with the government in the southern provinces which Apollodotus I had originally conquered; he was not in the direct line, and may have been quite content to serve Menander's son, who *was* in the direct line, as Antimachus II served Menander (p. 230). But there are two considerable difficulties about Apollodotus II. A hoard of 221 coins was found at Amarkot near Dera Ismail Khan on the Indus which consisted solely of drachmae of the two kings named Apollodotus—82 of Soter, 96 of Philopator, 43 too worn to say.³ If this hoard stood alone, few would doubt that, as the older numismatists believed, Soter and Philopator were the same person. But it seems certain that they were not: Philopator's monograms, and notably his Kharoshthi letters, suffice. The hoard *might* furnish some further reason for supposing that Philopator governed Sind and the southern provinces; but the absence from the hoard of all coins of any king but these two, who were apparently a good distance apart in time, is inexplicable on any ordinary grounds, and one must suppose that it was a freak collection made by somebody who claimed kinship with the line of Apollodotus and collected only the coins of the two kings of that name. The other difficulty concerns his date. It has been seen that the reigns of Dionysius, Zoilus II, and himself, or parts of them, must fall within the lifetime of a single moneyer, and Apollodotus II should come before Zoilus II, as Zoilus overstruck one of his coins; this would agree with the natural supposition that he was a grandson of Apollodotus I and Zoilus II a grandson of Zoilus I (below). But there exists a coin of Apollodotus II which has been overstruck by Azes¹ with the ‘naval victory’ type with which he overstruck coins of Hippostratus when he put an end to Greek rule in the eastern Punjab (p. 349); and this would *prima facie* make Apollodotus II a contemporary of Hippostratus, reigning till about 30 B.C. But this is so impossible to reconcile both with the Zoilus overstrike and with the fact that none of the coins of Apollodotus II show the square omicron that it must be taken to mean that Azes after his victory, till he could reorganise things, overstruck any older coins he could get, as Euthydemus had once done in Bactria (p. 104).