The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s7.168

c10.s7.168

But the much-canvassed question of whether, during its formative period, it underwent any or what Greek influence is another matter. Details have now been so thoroughly examined that there is no need to do it afresh,¹ even were I able; I need only give just what appears to myself. The fragments of Bhāsa’s plays, first century A.D., and the fragments of Buddhist dramas discovered in 1911 by Professor Lüders, have brought the Indian drama far nearer to the period of Greek rule than are the plays of the Gupta period; and if Professor A. B. Keith be right, and there was already a nascent Indian drama in the second century B.C. or at latest early in the first century,² then there must have been contact of some kind between the two arts. For the argument that we do not know that Greek plays were acted in India is worthless. There were Greek poleis, and a polis of any pretensions without a theatre is unthinkable (cf. p. 17); the one at Babylon has been excavated.³ And Egypt has at least taught us that whatever other works Greeks might take with them to foreign lands they would certainly take Homer and Euripides.⁴ There is no need to doubt Plutarch’s statement that Euripides and Sophocles were acted at Susa,⁵ for it is known that Sophocles reached India: on a fragment of a vase found near Peshawur and now in the Punjab Museum at Lahore is the scene from the Antigone where Haemon begs Creon for Antigone’s life,⁶ and as the vase was of local manufacture⁷ it proves at the least that somebody in Gandhāra was interested in Sophocles, and there is therefore no reason to doubt a knowledge of Euripides also at Pushkalāvatī or any other important Greek centre. Contact, then, there must in all probability have been.