The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s7.139

c10.s7.139

We can now leave trade and turn to the relations between Greeks and Indians. Two peoples can hardly live side by side in the same country for a long period without a certain amount of mutual borrowing; but speaking generally, we know far less than we could wish of the interaction between the civilisation of the Greeks and the civilisations which they met with in Asia and Egypt. A number of people in Asia Minor, in Syria, in Judaea (till the movement was quenched in blood)—that is, in the lands whose natural outlet was to the Mediterranean—borrowed a good deal from Greek civilisation and became, as we say, hellenised, or partially so; but if we except the religious sphere—the effect upon Greeks of the religions of Asia and Egypt and the invasion of the Mediterranean world by those religions—it seems that the only people who really affected Greeks in turn were the Babylonians (Chap. II). The interaction between the civilisations of Greece and India, which is what concerns us here, produced certain interesting effects for a time, but (leaving the Buddha-statue out of the question for a moment) they were not lasting, and what we see is rather one-sided: we see what little Indians took from Greeks because we have the Indian literature, but it is not so easy to see what Greeks took from Indians, because the Greek literature is lost. Indian civilisation was strong enough to hold its own against Greek civilisation, but, except in the religious sphere, was seemingly not strong enough to influence it as Babylonia did; nevertheless we may find reason for thinking that in certain respects India was the dominant partner. It must be emphasised that Greeks were not in India for the purpose of hellenising Indians, and there is no sign that they ever attempted to do so; they had come to India for a definite purpose, which had failed, and they stayed there to rule what they could because there was nothing else they could do. An Indian who was a citizen in a Greek *polis* was bound to some small extent to hellenise himself; he would have to learn enough Greek for purposes of daily life and understand something of Greek civic forms, but hellenisation in the proper sense—the adoption of Greek culture as one’s own culture—is not likely often to have happened. A few of the educated, we shall see, read a little Greek literature and were slightly affected by it, but it did not go very far: we get no trace of the ‘culture-Greek’ of the West, or even of Indians taking Greek names, as was common enough among some Asiatic peoples; the Indian Yavanas of the cave-inscriptions, who were Greek citizens, kept their Indian names and culture, though one had been slightly affected by Greek custom.¹ The two peoples merely lived side by side on good terms; had the terms not been good, Greek rule could never have lasted as it did and there could not have been any Gandhāra school of art. Two Greek kings, Demetrius and Apollodotus, were taken up into the great Indian epic, the Mahābhārata (p. 165), which was still receiving additions; and except in the extreme East (p. 324) Greek rule everywhere was overthrown, not by any action by Indians, but by a new and more numerous body of foreign invaders. We must look more closely at the borrowings for their own sake; but, except for the Buddha-statue, the history of India would in all essentials have been precisely what it has been had Greeks never existed.