The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s7.149

c10.s7.149

Apart from Alexandria and the old Greek cities, Greeks of the Hellenistic period settled in Asia or Africa did not as a rule produce literature unless they were reacting against some definite threat to their Greekhood, like foreign rule. In Egypt they only wrote letters and epitaphs; for a long time their Greekhood was not threatened and they left literature to Alexandria, which was not Egypt. The western part of the Seleucid empire was much the same, until the late flowering of poetry in Syria when Seleucid rule was dying and Greekhood seemed likely to go down before the Arab and the Jew. But when the Parthians took over the Seleucid empire east of the Euphrates there was an outburst of literature in the Greek cities of Parthia (Chap. II); it was their response to the challenge of the foreign conquest, the assertion of their continuing Greekhood in the now dominant world of Iran. And in the same way, though almost all the evidence is lost, we can still get traces of the literature written by the Greeks in India, the assertion of their Greekhood against the heavy pressure of the civilisation of India. We have traced at least two Greek poems, one a lyric and one in hexameters or elegiacs, written in Menander’s empire (pp. 246–9); and a Greek original of part of the framework of the first part of the Milindapañha, which reached Alexandria, is about as certain as any work can be which is not actually mentioned anywhere (see Excursus). And the Indian author of Part 1 of the Milindapañha gives us our best idea of the attitude of a well-educated Indian to Greek literature. He knew the current Hellenistic Greek of the East and had evidently read a little current literature; the idea that he may have had some knowledge of Plato, though quite in the air, is not impossible, for Egypt has shown that Plato was a favourite enough author with Greeks abroad. But the man himself, his thoughts and beliefs, were not touched in the least; had no Greek ever existed, his treatise on Buddhist doctrine would still have been written without a thought or a word being altered, save for the omission of the Greek allusions. But it would not have been written in quite the same form or in quite the same setting. And this, we shall find, is what any borrowing from the Greeks of our period seems to mean in almost everything (unless possibly medicine); it is a matter of external form, but very rarely of substance.