The Greeks in Bactria and India c11.14

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.