The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s7.135

c10.s7.135

But one other trade must, I fear, be carried back to Greek times, one that thrusts roughly on our notice the shadow-side of all ancient civilisations, that slave basis of which the historian must never lose sight. Among a dry list of articles for which there was a ready market at Barygaza the Periplus lists certain things which the king would buy, and one of them is ‘good-looking virgins for concubines’;² and the way it is put indicates a well-known thing, a ‘standing order’ in that market. In some plays of Kālidāsa (fifth century A.D.) the king is represented as accompanied by a body of women called Yavanas;¹ these Yavana women had already appeared in the plays of Bhāsa in the first century A.D.,² and a name and tradition that could last so many centuries must have been old and well established, which takes time. It would seem, too, that the tradition was true. In Kālidāsa’s play Mālavikāgnimitra, Agnimitra has a brush on the Sindhu river with some Yavana cavalry, a story which is certainly a genuine tradition (p. 228), as usually supposed; and if Kālidāsa’s use of the word Yavana goes back in one case to the second century B.C., doubtless it goes back to the Greek period in the other case also. It might perhaps be argued that these Yavana women merely meant ‘westerners’, seeing that there seems to be evidence in Ptolemaic times for an export of girls from Syria;³ but in view of the meaning of Yavana in the Mālavikāgnimitra this would be difficult to support. Certainly these Yavana women only make it *probable* that an export of Greek girls to India was going on under Greek rule; but there is confirmation from the Greek side, for Poseidonius says that Eudoxus shipped some girls—singing girls or ‘flute-girls’—for his attempted voyage to India round the Cape⁴ (end of the second century B.C.), and Poseidonius’ testimony to this traffic is valid even should we regard his story of the Gades ship which doubled the Cape and inspired Eudoxus’ attempt as not proven. Earlier back than the period of Greek rule in India this particular traffic can hardly go, for Megasthenes says that Chandragupta’s girls were Indians, bought from their fathers.⁵ Certainly in the third century Ptolemy II was importing Indian girls into Egypt along with Indian dogs and cattle,⁶ and it has been thought that the high tax in Egypt in the first century A.D. on girls for prostitution imported from the East by the sea-route might go back to, and witness to, their import in Ptolemaic times;¹ but we may believe that the better-class Greek would feel some difference between importing ‘barbarian’ girls and exporting girls of his own race to ‘barbarians’. If however this export of Greek girls to India be a fact, it is difficult to disconnect its origin from the vast increase in slave-trading, with Delos as its centre, which took place in the Mediterranean in the late second and early first centuries B.C. after Rome had broken the Hellenistic Powers, and if this be so, the mixture of nationalities among the merchants of Delos would show that the traffic was largely in the hands of foreigners, who were not likely to be particular about the nationality of their wares.