The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s6.59

c10.s6.59

The loss of Patalene and Surastrene meant to the Greek kings the loss of political control over the sea-ports which gave access by sea to the western world, but the sea-ports themselves may not have been much affected. Demetrias-Patala, we shall see, remained a Greek city for some time longer, and its position under Saca rule doubtless resembled that of the Greek cities in Parthia, as Seleuceia or Susa, under the rule of the Parthians (p. 30). The political forms at Barygaza while it was under Greek rule are unknown. If the old shrines or temples (*ἱερά*) in the neighbourhood mentioned in the Periplus (p. 148) were Greek, as that work implies, then Barygaza was presumably a Greek *polis*, the missing capital of Surastrene; but one does not know how far one can rely on the archaeological knowledge of the merchant who wrote that work, and it is safer to draw no deductions from these temples. But there must at any rate have been a considerable settlement there of Greek traders—even in the middle of the first century A.D. the town was still using the currency of Greek kings—and that settlement still continued in being under Saca rule, for there is a clear indication of its existence in the reign of Augustus. A king Pandion or Porus (? king of the Pāndhya kingdom in Southern India) sent an embassy to him with a letter written on parchment in Greek,¹ and on the way the embassy picked up a gymnosophist, who accompanied them; this man belonged to Barygaza,² so it must have been in Barygaza that the envoys got their letter written. Greek then was still a living language there about the Christian Era, and may have persisted for some time as a lingua franca for traders from the West; one may recall that the women of Surastrene long continued to use the Greek salutation χαῖρε or χαίρειν (p. 235). But whether the Yavanas mentioned in an inscription of A.D. 106³ had much to do with the Bactrian Greeks may be doubted.