The Greeks in Bactria and India c11: Conclusion
The Greeks in Bactria and India c11
- Language
- English
Conclusion
c11.1
MUCH was lost to the history of Hellenism when the Greek accounts of their empire in Bactria and India which once existed were allowed to perish. The story of the Greeks in the Farther East is notable in two aspects, first as the history of a march state and secondly as a unique chapter in the dealings of Greeks with the peoples of Asia; and to omit the Euthydemid dynasty from Hellenistic history, as has usually been done, and to confine that history to the four dynasties which bordered on the Mediterranean—one of which, the Attalids, was of very secondary importance—throws that history at least out of balance. A few words may be said by way of conclusion about these two aspects of the Graeco-Bactrian empire.
c11.2
Professor Toynbee in his great work has dealt once for all with the characteristics of the march state at large¹ and has given many instances of how such a state, under the stimulus of external pressure, might be expected to develop such strength that it would not only master the pressure but would have plenty of energy over for other purposes. It might perhaps be said that in the Greek world Macedonia had been such a state: exposed to barbarian pressure from the North and to the pressure of Olynthus and Athens from the side of the sea, the little country developed such amazing vitality that it not only mastered both pressures and for two centuries shielded Greece from the barbarism of the Balkans but was able also to conquer the great empire of Persia. But however that may be, Bactria under the Euthydemids was a perfect illustration of the history of a march state.
c11.3
¹ A. J. Toynbee, *A Study of History* II (2nd ed. 1935) pp. 112-208, ‘The Stimulus of Pressures’. A march state was a state on the boundary of the community to which by race and culture it belonged, and as such acted as the shield of the interior against pressure from some alien community, in the case of Bactria the northern nomads. The classical instance is Brandenburg as the Teutonic outpost against the Slavs.
c11.4
When in the middle of the third century B.C. the hand of the Seleucid slackened on the dangerous north-eastern frontier and a body of Parni from the steppes broke in and set up the little kingdom which Greeks called Parthian, Bactria not only stood in the gap and shielded the Graeco-Iranian world from the nomads for over a century, but the story of Macedonia repeated itself, line upon line, in the Farther East: Euthydemus was Philip II, Bactria was Macedonia, the derelict Mauryan empire was the Persian empire, and Demetrius was a second Alexander. As Philip had completed the making of Macedonia and the welding of its feudal princes and its tribes into a people actively aware of its unity, so Euthydemus was able to complete the process—others may have begun it—of turning Bactria, with its Iranian barons, its Greek settlers, its serf peasantry, into a real state, which promptly developed such strength that while it held off nomadism with one hand it was able to annex most of Northern India with the other. Alexander had had difficulty enough in conquering the powerful Iranian barons of the marches, and as he knew that mere conquest was useless unless you could find a way of living with the conquered afterwards, he had sought to reconcile them by marrying into their class. Whether by accident or design, Seleucus had also married the daughter of a march baron, which may—we do not know—have favourably affected the fortunes of her son Antiochus I in the North-East. But in some way Euthydemus did succeed in doing what Alexander had meant to do; he did reconcile the great landowners and secure their co-operation. That no doubt was always possible, on terms; but what is extraordinary is that he did it while at the same time he was also transforming the peasantry and substituting for the open serf village of Alexander’s day the quasi-autonomous communities in large walled villages which Chang-k’ien found in Bactria. We would give much to know his secret; what it meant to unite Bactria can be seen by looking at the complete failure of the Seleucids in regard to the rest of Iran, which fell away from them almost automatically as soon as the Parthians made it possible, while in Bactria the Parthians could never get a footing. Alexander had seen that ruling Iran was going to be the real difficulty, and before he died he had decided that the only solution was frankly to take her into partnership and create a Graeco-Iranian state. Whether even his genius and driving power could have carried this through against the opposition of the old-fashioned Macedonians was never to be put to the test; but Euthydemus, aided by the ever-present danger from the nomad world, was able to do it in Bactria.
c11.5
Demetrius took the ideas of Alexander and of his father to India, and the kingdom he established there was not Greek but Graeco-Indian, some sort of a partnership. He had several advantages; one was the political position so skilfully exploited by himself and his lieutenants, which threw a good deal of India on to his side from the start; another was the fact that the attitude of Greeks, or of some Greeks, towards Indians differed somewhat from their attitude towards other ‘barbarians’; they regarded them more as their equals. He was quite consciously copying Alexander: he meant to sit on the throne of the Mauryas as Alexander had sat on the throne of the Achaemenids. But there had been two Alexanders, the conqueror and the dreamer; and Demetrius’ idea of an empire which was to be a kind of partnership between Greek and Indian was inspired by the Alexander who had dreamt of a human brotherhood. How much with Alexander may have been sentiment we do not know; he was great enough to indulge in all the sentiment he pleased, did he desire to. But naturally one does not attribute sentiment to Euthydemus and his son; what *they* wanted was a great empire, but they thought that in the world of their day co-operation between Greek and Asiatic, such as Alexander had envisaged, offered the best chance of making one. Something of their strength is shown by the fact that Demetrius’ general Menander, who was not of his blood, carried on his policy wholeheartedly after his death; none of Alexander’s generals had done as much.
c11.6
If we look at the state-forms of the Hellenistic kingdoms in their prime, say in the third century, we see in Ptolemaic Egypt absolute monarchy unfettered by any other element in the state; we see in Antigonid Macedonia a monarchy limited by the age-old rights of the Macedonian people under arms; we see in Seleucid Asia a monarchy limited by the rights of many more or less autonomous cities, rights which in most cases they had themselves created. All three state-forms could be traced back to some aspect of Alexander’s monarchy; all three dynasties could claim to be carrying on something which he had done. But there was another element in the matter, the huge mass of native subjects of the Alexander-monarchy; and we see no monarchy in the West which (putting religion aside) was subject to limitation, voluntary limitation of course, by the rights of its native subjects, though one does not know what Cleopatra VII might have done had she come at the beginning of Ptolemaic history instead of at the end.¹ But Hellenistic history would be imperfect had no dynasty made some sort of an attempt to put into practice, as the Stoics in some sense put into theory, not anything which Alexander had *done* but the greater thing which he had *dreamt*; and that is the importance of the Euthydemid dynasty during the three generations of its power (for politically Menander may be called a Euthydemid). The banishment of that dynasty from Greek to Indian history has been a sad impoverishment of the Hellenistic story.
c11.7
¹ It is interesting, in connection with Demetrius as King of Justice, to compare the conception in the Cleopatra prophecy of the justice she is to bring to the world; Tarn, *JRS* xxxii, 1932, pp. 136, 139.
c11.8
But the successes of Euthydemus and his son were bought at a price. Naturally we do not know exactly what the co-operation of Greek and Asiatic meant in their hands, or how far, if at all, they limited their own autocracy by rights conferred upon their native subjects. But dim as is our sight in the historical twilight which is all that has been vouchsafed to us, two things stand out sharply enough: that some Indians saw in Demetrius something resembling the ideal King of Justice of their own traditions, and that many of Demetrius’ Greek subjects were not in sympathy with his policy, just as many of Alexander’s Macedonians had disliked his policy with regard to Persia. The result was seen when Antiochus IV sent his cousin Eucratides to attack Demetrius. Apart from their traditional feeling of loyalty toward the Seleucid, many of the Greeks of Bactria undoubtedly preferred the simple nationalist policy of the hellenising Antiochus to what they must have considered the pro-native policy of Demetrius; Demetrius is not the only king in history who has fallen because his ideas were too advanced for the majority of his subjects to follow them. The most important fact in the history of the Greek East is that something not very unlike the modern struggle between nationalism and co-operation was fought out two thousand years ago under the shadow of the Hindu Kush.
c11.9
Perhaps I may be permitted here one moment of pure fantasy. There is in existence, I believe somewhere in the United States, a slab of stone brought from Swat on which a Greek artist has carved two figures. I have not sought to trace it, as it is not historical evidence; but the figures have appeared in a very remarkable work of fiction,¹ and one who saw the slab before it was sold has assured me that the description of them there given is entirely accurate. One of the figures is a Greek Victory, and facing her is a strange composite creature with the head of a Greek Zeus and the body, repulsively rendered, of a native; and it pleases me to imagine that some Greek nationalist was here giving his views of the Indian empire of Demetrius and Menander: ‘*This* then is the result of our victories—this mongrel monstrosity.’ It is but a fancy; and his
c11.10
¹ A story, *ad veritatem ficta*, called *The Silver Hand of Alexander*, by an anonymous author, in Blackwood’s *Tales from the Outposts*, vol. 1, 1932.
c11.12
view would assuredly not have been the only one, though it played its part.
c11.13
Unfortunate as were the results of Antiochus’ attack for the future of Greek civilisation in the East, one must in fairness admit that he had plenty of provocation. It may speak well for the Greeks of the Farther East that, both in Bactria and in India, they were never, except in the extreme east of their Indian realm, ousted by the peoples they ruled; but nothing ever prevented Greeks themselves from tearing each other to pieces so long as they had the power, and, as in the West, so in the East, they had fallen victims to themselves before they fell victims to the foreign conqueror. The weakened march state of Bactria itself was destroyed by a sudden blow. But its defence against its own domestic barbarians, the peoples it knew, always held good, like that of Macedonia. The Macedonian defence was broken once for a moment, but by a strange race from the distant North Sea; and when the Bactrian defence failed at the end it was broken by an unknown people from the borders of China, who not only possessed irresistible numbers but had perhaps been rendered desperate by their long failure to find any land where they could settle in peace. Had Fortune allowed Demetrius to consolidate Bactria and Northern India into one empire, it should have been strong enough to withstand even the Yueh-chi; but the lot fell otherwise.
c11.14
The story of the Euthydemid dynasty is then, in one sense, the story of a courageous experiment which failed, though there is nothing to show that it need have failed but for external interference. But the experiment is only one aspect of it. In our mechanical age to-day, when the hopes, or the fears, of many are that the future will be a future of men thinking and acting in droves, at the mercy of mass belief and mass propaganda and little less mechanised than the machines they serve, it may please a few here and there to go back for a moment to a simpler and less sophisticated world, a world of wonderful chances for the individual, where great risks might still bring great prizes for those who ventured. It is with some such thoughts in mind that I have attempted to see what could be recovered, if only in barest outline, of the lost story of the Greeks in the Farther East and of the dynasty which so nearly led them to amazing success. For one thing about that story is sure; win or lose, succeed or fail, it is the story of a very great adventure.