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The Greeks in Bactria and India c12: Excursus: The Milindapañha and Pseudo-Aristeas

The Greeks in Bactria and India c12

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English

Excursus: The Milindapañha and Pseudo-Aristeas

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The Milindapañha¹ or Questions of Milinda is the one extant work professedly dealing with any of the Greek monarchs in the Far East; for Milinda, beyond any question, is the king Menander.² It exists in a Pali version and, in part, in a Chinese translation of the fourth century A.D. of which two recensions are extant. The Pali work falls into two well-marked divisions; the first comprises pp. 1–89 in Trenckner’s edition of the Pali text, being books I–III inclusive;³ the second and longer part comprises all that follows. It is now generally agreed that Part II is later than Part I and the work of a different hand,⁴ and it is also generally agreed that Part I (or perhaps I should say the original of Part I) cannot be placed too long after Menander’s death; but I need not quote the datings suggested, for none of those who have professedly dealt with the work have investigated Menander’s chronology and have usually put him near the end of the second century B.C. or even in the first century. The Chinese translation includes Part I and a few pages of Part II.

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¹ I cite this work in Rhys Davids’ translation of the Pali version, 2 vols. = *Sacred books of the East* vols. XXXV–VI, 1890, 1894; I give his pages and in brackets the pages of Trenckner’s Pali text; Part I is vol. I pp. 1–136. I have also consulted L. Finot, *Les questions de Milinda* 1923 (translation of Part I); O. F. Schrader, *Die Fragen des Königs Menandros* 1905; Winternitz II, 1920, pp. 139 sqq. (II pp. 174 sqq. of the English translation, 1933); P. Pelliot, *Les noms propres dans les traductions chinoises du Milindapañha*, JA 1914 p. 379; Mrs Rhys Davids, *The Milinda Questions* 1930. I have been unable to see R. Garbe, *Der Milindapañha, ein kulturhistorischer Roman* 1903, and A. Gueth, *Bhikku Nyanatiloka, Die Fragen des Milinda* 1919. For the Chinese translation I have used Demiéville’s exhaustive study, who gives (pp. 75 sqq.) a French translation *sub tit.* *Sûtra du bhikshu Nagasena*. A bibliography of the literature relating to the Chinese version is given by Siegfried Behrsing in *BSOS* VII, ii, 1934, p. 335, and of that relating to the Pali version *ib.* p. 517.

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² See now Pelliot *op. cit.* pp. 380–5, and for the interchange of *l* and *n* Sylvain Lévi, *JA* 1915 p. 101.

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³ It concludes with ‘Here ends the answering of the problems of the questions of Milinda’, Rhys Davids I p. 136.

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⁴ Rhys Davids (against the general belief) argued for a single author, as does Mrs Rhys Davids *op. cit.* I cannot believe myself that the very different pictures of Milinda himself in Parts I and II are by the same hand.

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The work is cast in the form of a dialogue between Menander and a Buddhist sage Nāgasena, with an introduction in which Menander, at his capital Sāgala, appears as a great king fond of learned disputations, together with his 500 Yonakas, four of whom play a part in setting the scene for the dialogue proper. In the first part Menander’s professed object is not the pursuit of knowledge but a dialectical victory over Nāgasena, though he does not in fact keep his end up very well. In the second part, in which Menander gives Nāgasena a succession of dilemmas to solve, the king has become a Buddhist devotee humbly seeking knowledge, who at the end forsakes his throne and the world and enters the Order. Part II, notwithstanding its merits as literature—has it not preserved for us the Song of the Two Fairy Birds?—has no pretensions to be history; what I shall have to say deals with Part I. The charm with which the whole work is written and its importance for Buddhist doctrine—it stands just outside the Tripitaka, the Pali Canon of Buddhist Scriptures¹—has led to it being much treated by Indian and Buddhist scholars, but chiefly of course for its doctrinal content; and it has been asserted, in all good faith but without sufficient knowledge from the Greek side, that it has no value for history and contains no trace of anything Greek.² It has never been examined by any Greek scholar, and it is time that this should be done. With Buddhist doctrine I am not concerned; my aim is to try to get the relation of Part I to Greek rule in India.

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¹ For the Canon see Winternitz II chap. 1 and *CHI* pp. 192 sqq.

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² E.g. Winternitz II p. 141 n. 1 (Eng. trans. p. 176 n. 2), also citing Garbe *op. cit.* p. 114; Mrs Rhys Davids *op. cit.* p. 21. It is a commonplace.

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Kings who liked disputations were a commonplace in Indian tradition, as were philosophical discussions in Indian life; some sage, arriving at a village, would challenge all and sundry to dispute with him, the conclusion being that the vanquished became the disciple of the victor,³ as at the end of Part II Milinda becomes the disciple of Nāgasena. Also, with the Dialogues of the Buddha, the dialogue had become in India a well-established literary form for the conveyance of instruction in religion or philosophy. What was not known in Indian literature—what had never happened before and was not to happen again—was that the interlocutor in a dialogue should be a foreign king and that the aim of the interlocutor should be a dialectical victory; for the interlocutors in the Dialogues of the Buddha, like those in the Dialogues of Plato, are only an agreeable piece of machinery for eliciting the opinions of Buddha or Socrates. The model of the Milindapañha has often been sought in one of the Dialogues of the Buddha, the Sāmaññaphala Sutta;⁴ but though it is pretty certain that one section of the introduction to the Milinda echoes the introduction to the older dialogue,⁵ the scheme of the two works is totally different. In the Sāmaññaphala Sutta the king Ajātasattu, who really wants to know, asks one reasoned question, naming various learned men (some of them known to be historical) who have been unable to give him the answer, and the Buddha then makes a long reply; there is no working out of the argument by question and answer. But though Indian scholars may be reminded of the Sāmaññaphala Sutta or the Upanishads, any Greek scholar who looks into the Milinda will at once be reminded of something very different, a Hellenistic work in which the writer makes a foreign king put a large number of questions to the wise men of the writer's own race and creed, the whole work being designed to do for the religion of the Jewish writer what Part I of the Milinda was designed to do for the religion of its Buddhist author: the Letter of Pseudo-Aristeas. I shall come to this work presently; I hope that it may help to resolve one or two of the problems which the Milinda presents to the Greek scholar.

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³ Rhys Davids, *Buddhist India* 1903 pp. 247-8, *Buddhism* 1896 p. 98. The *Upanishads* also give cases of kings instructing Brahmans (L. H. Gray, *Enc. of Rel. and Ethics* VII p. 721), but that is a rather different matter.

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⁴ Translation by Rhys Davids in *Dialogues of the Buddha* I, 1899, p. 65 (= *Sacred Books of the Buddhists* II).

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⁵ Rhys Davids (*Milinda*) p. 8 n. 2.

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There are however two preliminary points. It has been suggested that certain passages in the Pali text of book I of the Milinda are interpolations;¹ but, if they are, it happens that none of them are material for what I want, so this need not be considered. More important is the widespread belief that the Pali text is not the original, but is a translation of a work written either in Sanscrit or some northern Prakrit.² Part of the argument for this is philological and must be left to Pali scholars, but there has also been a desire to account for differences in the Pali and Chinese versions by supposing both to be translations from a common original. This supposition does not commend itself to me.³ It is hard to believe that a Chinese translator some five centuries later, dealing with a foreign language and a long forgotten geography, would be bound to reproduce his original unaltered, even if (a large assumption) he desired to do so (one could find many analogies); and it is said that the Chinese text itself has been subject to revisions and modifications,⁴ which must surely affect the question. The question then whether the Pali text be original or derivative is one for philology, but it does not affect what I have to say, which, put briefly, is this: there are in the Pali Milinda as we have it certain small but quite definite Hellenistic Greek elements which cannot be explained on any current theory. I must now examine these and see whither they lead us. These Greek elements can more or less be dated; to date the Pali text of Part I is not my province, but reason may appear for suggesting a terminus post quem non.

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¹ Winternitz II p. 143 n. 2 (Eng. trans. p. 178 n. 1).

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² Rhys Davids I p. xi, II p. xii; Pelliot op. cit. p. 380; Winternitz II p. 142 n. 1; Demiéville p. 4; Mrs Rhys Davids op. cit. p. 5; J. Rahder, Groot-Indië, cited by Behrsing op. cit. p. 343.

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³ Neither did it to Rhys Davids, II p. xii, though he believed in an older original on philological grounds.

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⁴ Demiéville pp. 3, 4.

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The first thing is the word Yonaka, used for a Greek; it is used twice of Greeks generally,⁵ and twice of Menander's 500 Yonakas; except for Milinda Part I the word seemingly only occurs once again in India, in inscription 19 from the Nasik cave (p. 257 n. 3).⁶ The ordinary Sanscrit word for a Greek was Yavana¹. This is the Greek 'ἸάFων, and it certainly came to India through Achaemenid Persia, for in the Old Persian of Darius' inscriptions the form used is always Iauna,² which was also the colloquial form.³ The fact that Hebrew made of it Javan (Yawan) and the Hittites Yevanna has led to a suggestion that it came to India not through Persia but through Semitic Babylon;⁴ but this seems impossible, for in the Babylonian version of Darius' inscriptions the form used is always ia-ma-nu or ia-a-ma-nu,⁵ corresponding to a form Yamanim in a document from Ras Shamra,⁶ and this cannot possibly make Yavana. The Prakrit word, used in the third century B.C. in Asoka's inscriptions, is Yona. I have never seen its relation to Yavana discussed, so it is probably unknown; the obvious supposition is that Yona stands to Yavana as 'Ιων to 'ἸάFων (the relationship of the two Greek words is also unknown)⁷ and that it was derived directly from 'Ιων, for no similar Persian word has been cited and the third century is late for a borrowing from Persia.

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⁵ Pp. 2 (1), 105 (68).

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⁶ I have found no clear statement that it never occurs elsewhere; but the only earlier Pali writings are the books of the Buddhist Canon, which are not likely to

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¹ Lévi, *Quid de Graecis* p. 3, n.: Yavana Sanscrit, Yona Prakrit. That Yavana in this period usually, though not always, means Greek has long been settled by many lines of evidence. O. Stein's recent contention (*Indian Culture* 1, 1935, p. 343) that it never means Greek is mere paradox; he examines one line of evidence only, and from the Greek side inadequately.

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² F. H. Weissbach, *Die Keilinschriften der Achämeniden* 1911: Behistun §6; Persepolis e §2; Naks-i-Rustam §3. So in the inscription from Darius' palace at Susa; Kent, *JAOS* LIII, 1933, p. 1, ll. 33, 42, 48, who gives it as Yaunā.

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³ 'Iaovαῦ in Aristophanes, *Ach.* 104.

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⁴ C. C. Torrey, *Yawān and Hellas*, *JAOS* XXV, 1904, p. 302.

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⁵ See note 2, above.

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⁶ E. Cavaignac, *Mélanges Bidez* I, 1934, p. 86.

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⁷ Busolt, *Griech. Gesch.* I² p. 283; Ion ('Ιων) 3 in PW (Eitrem). See Addenda.

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Yonaka also did not come through Achaemenid Persia,⁸ as it corresponds to nothing in classical Greek; it is not 'Ιωνικός (which incidentally does not mean Ionian), but implies a form 'Ιωνακός, unknown to classical Greek; and the appearance of the word is far too late for a borrowing from Persia, for no one would put Part I of the Pali Milinda earlier than the late second century B.C., and the Nasik cave inscription is probably not earlier than the refer to Greeks, and neither Lévi in *Quid de Graecis* nor Weber in *Berlin SB* 1890 pp. 907 *sqq.*, who give every mention of Yavanas they can find, gives any other instance of Yonaka. I thought I had discovered another in B. C. Law, *Some Kshatriya tribes of ancient India* 1923 p. 250, who among his ancient sources cites a passage containing the word Yonaka from a work called *Sāsanavamsa*; but I found that this work was written in Burma in 1861 (Winternitz II p. 176)—not the only time in this period that a modern work has been quoted by somebody as ancient authority.

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⁸ Weissbach, *Ionaka* in PW, says 'wahrscheinlich = altpersisch iaunaka'; but as he gives no reference for 'iaunaka' I take him to mean that this would be the O.P. form and not that such a form actually existed. It makes no difference either way to my argument.

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middle of the first century B.C. (p. 257 n. 3). The questions to be answered are, where did the author of Part I of the Pali Milinda find the word Yonaka, and why did he use it instead of either of the current terms, Yavana or Yona? Where he found it is not in doubt; for the form 'Ιωνακός, though unknown to classical Greek, existed at this time in the current Hellenistic Greek of the Farther East, one instance being certain and another almost certain. One of Ptolemy's innumerable sources gave him the phrase 'Ιωνακὰ πόλις, 'Greek-town', for a city on the Gulf of Bushire, presumably Antioch in Persis;¹ and the word seemingly occurs again in the Ch'ien-han-shu. The story of Yin-mo-fu who ruled in Yung-kiu in the time of the Han emperor Yuan-ti (48-33 B.C.) is dealt with elsewhere (p. 339); all that need be said here is that the story as Pan-ku gives it must have been taken from a report made by the Chinese general Wen-chung who played a part in it, for no other source for an incident in the remote Paropamisadae seems possible; and Wen-chung can only have got the name Yung-kiu (Jong-k'ut), which is Yonaki, 'Greek-town',² from people on the spot. Yonaka therefore was taken from the current Hellenistic Greek of the time,³ whether from the spoken language or from some Greek writing, which means that in either case the author of Part I of the Milinda knew some Greek. This is confirmed by the fact that the wealthy Indian merchant who called himself a Yonaka in the Nasik inscription was a citizen of the Greek city Demetrias (p. 257) and as such probably knew some Greek also.

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¹ Ptol. VI, 4, 2; see Tarn, JEA xv, 1929, p. 11 n. 4. It is not uncommon for Ptolemy to give, as a town, the description without the name, e.g. VI, 1, 5, κωμό-πολις; VI, 7, 9, 'Αραβίας ἐμπόριον. See p. 13.

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² On the various spellings and the sound see p. 340 n. 4.

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³ The word Jonaka is said to be still in use on the west coast of India for foreigners; K. R. Pisharoti, Indian Culture II, 1936, p. 575.

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Why the author of Part I of the Milinda used the term Yonaka will, I hope, presently appear; but I must point out in passing that if the Pali work was derived from a Sanscrit or Northern Prakrit original it is difficult to see why the common Sanscrit or Prakrit word, Yavana or Yona, was not used; and it is equally difficult to see how, if the Hellenistic Yonaka was used, it kept its place in a translation, seeing that even in Part II of the Pali text it has been replaced by an explanatory term, as it has in the Chinese translation. In fact the word Yonaka is a considerable difficulty in the way of current beliefs.

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I come to Menander's 500 Yonakas. They are introduced without any explanation of what they were.⁴ That they were really his Council—the ordinary Council of every Hellenistic king, which in another aspect was his 'Friends'—is not in doubt; the number 500 is of course conventional and is fully explained elsewhere (p. 267). The author himself might perhaps have known what Menander's Yonakas were, but the point is that he assumes that his Indian readers will know also, a large assumption. He is supposed to have written in north-western India, and this assumption shows that the allusion to Menander’s Yonakas was written at latest soon after Menander’s death. Even so, it may have puzzled Indian readers, for later times at once felt the need of explanation; in Part II of the Pali text ‘Yonakas’ is replaced by ‘ministers’,¹ and a corresponding expression is used by the Chinese translator of Part I.² What emerges so far, then, is that the writer of Part I of the Pali Milinda knew some Greek and that the reference to the Yonakas was written very soon after Menander’s death; even so, he asks rather much of his Indian readers.

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⁴ Pp. 36-7 (22-3), the king is attended by 'the 500 Yonakas'. That is all.

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¹ II p. 373 (419), ‘the 500 high ministers of the king’.

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² Demiéville p. 95 (xxviii), ‘Les ministres de l’entourage du roi’. So pp. 90 (xxiv), 93 (xxvii).

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In fact he asks still more of them. He himself seems to be so familiar with the four-square type of Hellenistic city—the type described by Polybius (VI, 31, 10) as cut into four quarters by two great roads crossing at right angles in the middle of the city, with four gates at the ends of the two roads—that he can use it as an illustration: Nāgasena says ‘It is like the case of the guardian of a city who, when seated at the cross-roads in the middle of the city, could see a man coming from the East or the South or the West or the North’;³ and this is identical with what Strabo (XII, 566) says about the cross-roads of Nicaea in Bithynia, ‘so that from one stone in the middle of the gymnasium a man could see the four gates’. Indians had their own system of town-planning, but their cities were not built like that.⁴ It used to be said that we hardly knew a Greek city built like that either,⁵ except Alexandria in Egypt and Nicaea in Bithynia; but this was due to the cities excavated having mostly been old cities in Asia Minor remodelled, and it now appears that enough cities in Syria which exhibit the four-square plan are known to warrant the statement that this seems to have been the usual plan of the new Seleucid foundations,¹ and it was of these that Polybius was thinking. Whether there was a Greek city in India built on the four-square plan is naturally unknown (once again, the location and excavation of Bucephala are badly needed); the nearest in distance to Sāgala actually recorded is Cartana-Tetragonis in the Paropamisadae (pp. 98 sq.). The author of Part I of the Milinda might have been a travelled man and might have seen such cities. But the point is that he expects his Indian readers to take his allusion, that is, to be familiar with the idea of treating Hellenistic cities of the four-square type as the normal type of city, rather than the Indian towns they knew. He could not really expect this; the probability therefore is that he just took his illustration from some Greek work because it was useful. For that the Greeks of India had been very familiar with the four-square type in Bactria-Sogdiana seems to follow from the fact that in Arab times the great cities there (except Bokhara) still retained the typical four gates.²

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³ P. 95 (62). Finot’s translation p. 107 is identical.

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⁴ K. Rangachari, *IHQ* IV, 1928, pp. 102-3: according to the *Silpaśāstras*, if a city be square with four gates at north, east, south, west, the middle part must be a square with a temple at each corner and four roads connecting the four temples—a very different matter. (For his sources (one unpublished) see *IHQ* III, 1927, p. 813; the earliest *Silpaśāstras* are supposed to be fifth or sixth century A.D., *i.e.* Gupta period.) For the normal square in the middle of the city, containing the temples, palace, and ancillary buildings, with four broad streets demarcating it, (compare *e.g.* the Parthian square at Hatra), see also B. B. Dutt, *Town Planning in Ancient India* 1925 pp. 258-64. One of these late writers, Mānasāra, is said to refer to towns with two large streets crossing each other at right angles in the centre (Dutt p. 124); but none such is known, and it might be a Greek or Roman echo; all these writers deal only with *theory*. The usual belief (Rangachari, *IHQ* III p. 824) is that in *fact* Indian towns grew up haphazard, like Delos.

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⁵ The two great cross-roads which appeared in the first air photographs of Seleuceia on the Tigris seem only to be lines between the tels. Excavation did not go far enough to show the plan of the city.

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¹ Fr. Cumont, *CAH* XI p. 634.

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² W. (V. V.) Barthold, *Turkestan down to the Mongol Invasion*[^2] 1928 pp. 78 (Balkh), 85 (Samarcand), 100 (Merv), 147 (Gurgānj).

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We have then two allusions in Part I of the Pali Milinda which are very near in time to Menander and which presuppose a knowledge of certain Greek things in the reader. Another Greek item is shown in a list of people which runs Yonakas, Kshatriyas, Brahmans, householders (bourgeois).³ An Indian Buddhist writer would naturally put Kshatriyas before Brahmans, but no one but a Greek was going to put Greeks first of all; to Indians they were, at best, imperfect Kshatriyas (p. 173). This item, like the word Yonaka, is from some current Greek source, oral or written.

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³ P. 105 (68).

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The next point is whether Menander’s birthplace is historical or not. Seeing that the author of the Greek allusions in the Pali Milinda, whether he were the Pali writer or another, was very near in time to Menander, it would be absurd to reject his evidence about the birthplace; it is very much better than the evidence for most people’s birthplaces in the Hellenistic world. In the Pali text Menander was born in a village called Kalasi not far from Alasanda (Alexandria of the Caucasus) and 200 yojanas from Sāgala;⁴ I need not go into the distance, as Professor Rapson has said all that is necessary.⁵ The name of the village has been doubted, because the Pali text also makes Nāgasena born in a village called Kajangala under the Himalayas, and the only known village of that name was on the Ganges it has been suggested that a later interpolator added names at random;⁶ but the argument is not a valid one, for it makes the untenable assumption that there cannot have been a second village of the same name. Another writer has proposed to correct Kalasi into Kapisa;⁷ but an Indian author of the North-West would not have called Kapisa a village, and it is not scientific to turn an unknown name into a known one without some clear reason. In any case, whether the unknown name Kalasi be correct or not, we have the invaluable fact that Menander was born in a village. Hellenistic queens did not live in villages, neither were Hellenistic princes born in them; consequently—and this is the point which matters—Menander was born a commoner, and was not therefore a Euthydemid (see further p. 141).

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⁴ P. 127 (82-3).

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⁵ *CHI* p. 550.

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⁶ Demiéville p. 23 n. 1.

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⁷ A. Foucher, *JA* 1929, I, p. 244; *BSOS* VI, 1930-2, p. 344.

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This conclusion is not affected by the very different version of the Chinese translation several centuries later, which makes him born a prince.¹ He had already, in Part II of the Pali Milinda, become a prince, descended from a long line of Kshatriya ancestors;² it is usual enough, in the successive stages of a story, for a commoner who achieves fame to turn into a prince, but no one has ever known a prince turn into a commoner. That is simple; but the Chinese translator has gone on to alter the locality of Menander’s birth. He describes Alasanda as 2000 yojanas from Sāgala instead of 200 (i.e. he makes it Alexandria in Egypt) and makes Menander born heir to the throne of a country near Alasanda beside the sea.³ It is indeed unfortunate that a number of French scholars should have championed this as against the Pali version, and should have believed that Alasanda from the start meant Alexandria in Egypt and that the Pali writer altered an original 2000 into 200.⁴ If the Pali text be the original, such a theory is of course indefensible. But even if not, the theory first violates the sound canon of historical criticism that the smaller number is to be preferred unless there be very good reason to the contrary, and then lands us in a historical absurdity; for where does anyone propose to find, near Alexandria in Egypt about 210-200 B.C., a country on the sea ruled by a Greek dynasty? The matter is really free from difficulty. The Chinese translator had never heard of Alexandria of the Caucasus; if he had heard of the capital of the Paropamisadae at all, he would only know the name Kapisa (p. 433 n. 1 and App. 6); to him Alasanda meant, and could only mean, the only Alexandria he knew of, Alexandria in Egypt, and he altered 200 yojanas to 2000 accordingly, but he called attention to this by recording the distance in yojanas as well as in Chinese li, which should put anyone upon his guard. Also he knew nothing himself about Menander, but he found that in the book he was translating he was called a great king, and that the second part of that book made him born a prince, so he inevitably made him born a prince also; and as he did know that Alexandria in Egypt was on the sea, and as Menander’s birthplace was said to be near Alexandria, he naturally made him a prince of a country on the sea. It is very simple if taken in the proper order.

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¹ Demiéville p. 79 (ix), ‘naquit au bord de la mer comme prince héritier du roi d’un pays’; so p. 90 (xxiii).

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² II p. 206 (329).

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³ Demiéville p. 168 (cviii) and see n. 1 above.

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⁴ Pelliot *op. cit.* pp. 413-17; followed by Demiéville p. 168 n. 2, Finot p. 157 n. 86, and Grousset pp. 55 n. 3, 58 n. 1. Lévi, *IHQ* XII, 1936, p. 126, also followed Pelliot in making all the mentions of Alasanda in the *Milinda* refer to Alexandria in Egypt. This is impossible. Beside the passage in Part I here discussed, the name occurs three times in Part II: Rhys Davids II pp. 204 (327), 211 (331), and 269 (359). In the last passage it is Alexandria in Egypt beyond question, as you cross the high seas to get there. But in the two former passages the name occurs in lists of places in *India*, and can only be Alexandria of the Caucasus; surely 211 (331), ‘from Kotumbara and Mathurā, from Alexandria, Kashmir, and Gandhāra’, is plain enough.

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The next thing is the names of those four of Menander’s Yonakas who play a part in the introduction or scene-setting to Part I of the Pali Milinda, Devamantiya, Anantakāya, Mankura, Sabbadinna; what is material is not so much the names, whether real or fictitious, as the nationalities. That the first two names are Demetrius and Antiochus has never been doubted, though they have seemingly been ‘adjusted’ to make some sort of sense in Pali.¹ It seems equally certain that the third name is Pakor (Pacorus).² Pacorus was a common Parthian name, occurring in India as Pacores, but Mankura can hardly have been a Parthian and must have been some other north Iranian, Bactrian or Sogdian; looking at the doubts whether the first Arsaces was a Parthian (Parnian) or a Bactrian the difference cannot have been great, and I understand that the two languages, Pahlavi and Sogdian, are closely connected, and that Sogdian borrows from Pahlavi.³

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¹ Rhys Davids I pp. xviii-xix, who suggests that Devamantiya might mean ‘Counsellor of the gods’ and Anantakāya ‘having an infinite body’. For other such ‘adjustments’ see p. 458 n. 2.

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² Pelliot p. 405; it is the Chinese Man-k’iu, the name of Pakor II in the Hou-han-shu (E. Chavannes, T’oung Pao VIII, 1907, p. 178).

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³ R. Gauthiot, Mém. de la société de Linguistique XIX, 1916, p. 126, with instances.

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The fourth name, Sabbadinna, is unexplained, for one cannot take seriously suggestions like Sarapodotos or Pasidotos, the latter of which is not even Greek;⁴ it has indeed been said that the name cannot be explained from Greek, Sanscrit, or Pali.⁵ The Chinese translator gives no help, for it is supposed that he took the name literally as meaning ‘endowed with everything’ or something of the sort, and translated it by K’ien, ‘the avaricious’.⁶ The word Sabba- occurs in various Indian names, like Sabbamitra,⁷ or Sabbakami, the Pali name of Ananda’s disciple Sarvakama,⁸ or the king Sambos-Sabbas of the Alexander story;⁹ but I must suppose that Sabbadinna, which would presumably be Sarvadatta in Sanscrit,¹⁰ makes no sense in either language, or this explanation would have been given long ago. Ptolemy (VI, II, 6) gives an otherwise unknown tribe, Σαβάδιοι, in Bactria; but a connection with this would involve treating -dinna as a mere ‘adjustment’, to give the name an Indian look. More hopeful is the group of names which centre on Sabazios (Thracian Sabadios) and are allied, through the equation Sabazios-Sabaoth, to Jewish Sabbath-names;¹ for though a comparison with the Macedonian (? Thracian) name Sabataras² (probably connected with Sabadios) or with the common Jewish name Sabbataios-Sambathaios would involve the same difficulty about -dinna, a better suggestion can be offered which would make -dinna an integral part of the name. If Gressmann be right,³ there was in Anatolia a goddess Sambethe-Sabba (the traditional name of the Chaldaean Sybil, Berossus’ daughter) corresponding to the god Sabbatistes, worshipped by the well-known Sabbatistai of Cilicia;⁴ and a name Sabbadotos, ‘the gift of (the goddess) Sabba’,⁵ would be a normal Greek formation on the lines of Theodotos, Diodotos, Apollodotos, and would in Pali be Sabbadinna.⁶ This would not of course make the man a Jew, any more than the Sabbatistai were Jews; he would be a more or less hellenised Anatolian. Menander, it seems, had some Anatolian troops (p. 250); and there would be no objection to an Anatolian being on his Council, seeing that under Antiochus III an Anatolian, the Carian Hermeias, was vizier. If this be well founded, Sabbadotos must have been the man’s real name, for no Indian would have known of the goddess Sabba or been able to invent the name; he (and naturally the other three also) would therefore be historical. However that may be, since it has been seen that the Greek allusions in Part I of the Milinda must have been written soon after Menander’s death, that work is at any rate good evidence that his Council was a mixture of nationalities, precisely as one would expect.⁷

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⁴ If it were, it could only have the nonsense meaning of ‘given to everyone’, just as the real name Pasiphilos (P. Cairo Zen. III, 59454) means ‘dear to everyone’.

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⁵ Mrs Rhys Davids op. cit. p. 26.

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⁶ Demiéville p. 100 (xl) and n. 4; if K’ien be really Sabbadinna, which is not clear to me. Why Demiéville calls the name Sabbadinna an ‘appellation sans doute ironique’ escapes me.

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⁷ Rhys Davids II p. 45 and n. 3; cf. Przyluski, Açoka p. 266.

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⁸ Przyluski, Açoka p. 51.

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⁹ Sambos in Arrian, Curtius, Diodorus, and the Metz Epitome; Sabbas, Plut. Alex. 64; Sabos, Strabo xv, 701.

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¹⁰ Sanscrit datta = Pali dinna = Greek dotos.

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¹ On this subject see Cumont, *CR Ac. Inscr.* 1906 p. 63.

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² Ditt.³ 267; cf. O. Hoffmann, *Die Makedonen* p. 164, connected with Sabadios-Sabazios.

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³ Gressmann, *Sabbatistai* and Beer, *Sambethe* in PW.

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⁴ *OGIS* 573.

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⁵ Somewhere I have seen it suggested that the Cappadocian name *Ἄββατος* (in the genitive) of Michel 546 should be *Σάββατος*.

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⁶ Cf. Devadinna, ‘the gift of the god’, in an inscription of Asoka’s time; de la Vallée-Poussin p. 155.

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⁷ So the Parthian kings’ Council, copied from Hellenistic usage (Fr. Cumont, *CR Ac. Inscr.* 1931 p. 245), must sometimes have included foreigners (Greeks), since Hestiaeus of Susa was a ‘Friend’, *SEG* VII, 1.

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Nāgasena has been investigated most thoroughly, and the conclusion reached is that he was an invented character; he has no known existence apart from the Milinda.⁸ It seems therefore that the Indian Buddhist who wrote Part 1 of the Milinda, with a large selection of Buddhist monarchs and Buddhist sages to choose from, selected as the principal characters in his Dialogue a foreign king and a non-existent sage. Why? To answer that question, which goes to the root of the matter, I must leave the Milinda for the present and turn to Pseudo-Aristeas. The investigation, I fear, is going to take us right down one of the by-paths of Hellenistic literature; and I must begin by analysing Pseudo-Aristeas.

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⁸ Demiéville p. 67 concludes his examination by deciding that there is no mention anywhere of Nāgasena which is independent of the *Milinda*. Cf. Finot p. 12: Nāgasena is unknown to Buddhist tradition and is not historical. This is borne out

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The Letter of Pseudo-Aristeas¹ tells the story of Ptolemy II inviting to Alexandria 72 Jewish Elders to translate their Scriptures into Greek—the legendary account of the origin of the Septuagint; there is an introduction or scene-setting explaining how Ptolemy was led to do it, and an account of his entertainment of the Elders. Among other things he gives seven great banquets, at which he puts a question to each of the Elders and the Elder answers it; there are ten questions on five nights and eleven on the last two. The author introduces throughout the work praise of the Jewish religion and customs, and it has been universally recognised that it is a propaganda work designed to commend the Jewish religion to Greeks. Another thing now universally recognised is that its date is very much later than the time of Ptolemy II; it has even been put after the Christian Era. Wendland dated it c. 90 B.C. or later; Thackeray put it about 120 to 80 B.C.;² Février merely put it before 30 B.C., that is, before the end of the Ptolemaic dynasty;³ Momigliano, comparing various letters in I Maccabees, thought it was c. 110–100 B.C.;⁴ the latest study known to me, a detailed examination of the language in the light of Hellenistic Greek, decides that the linguistic evidence so far as it goes supports an already well-known dating, c. 100 B.C.⁵ Many arguments have been adduced to prove this or that dating which are not valid, but one was given by Wendland in his Introduction which seems to me pretty conclusive for a date not earlier than c. 100 B.C.,⁶ and I have not been con-

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¹ I use the text of P. Wendland, Aristeae ad Philocratem Epistula 1900, and cite by his paragraph numbers. A list (not quite exhaustive) of writings on the subject will be found in E. Bickermann’s study, Z. f. d. neutestamentliche Wissenschaft xxix, 1930, p. 280. Some I have not seen.

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² H. St J. Thackeray, The letter of Aristeas 1917.

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³ J. G. Février, La date, la composition, et les sources de la lettre d’Aristée à Philocrate 1925.

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⁴ A. Momigliano, Aegyptus xii, 1932, p. 161.

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⁵ H. G. Meecham, The letter of Aristeas 1935. This date is that adopted by Wilamowitz, Deutsche Literaturzeitung xxi, 1900, col. 3320, and by Christ-Schmid⁶ ii, i, 1920, p. 621.

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⁶ Among the names of the 72 are Ananias and Chelkias, the latter a rare name; these are the names of the two Jewish generals of Cleopatra III in her war with Ptolemy Lathyrus.

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by a wild Indo-Chinese tradition (G. Cœdès, BEFEO xxv, p. 112) which makes Nāgasena a pupil of Dhammarakkita (Asoka’s missionary to the West) who lived in Asokagrāma (Pātaliputra) and had been Menander’s teacher before Nāgasena.

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vinced to the contrary by Dr E. Bickermann’s attempt to fix the date between 145 and 127 B.C.¹ For the purposes of this Excursus I take the date as c. 100 B.C., though all that I really need at this stage is the certain fact that Pseudo-Aristeas wrote much later than the reign of Ptolemy II. For it has then to be asked why the Jewish author should have chosen as his protagonist Ptolemy II, a king long dead and done with; and perhaps if we can answer that question we shall know why the Buddhist author chose Menander.

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¹ Bickermann op. cit. His valuable examination of the formulae in the royal letters puts the work within the limits 145 to 100 B.C., though strictly speaking the facts he gives p. 289 n. 1 prove a date c. 100. His dating before 127 depends entirely (for the sea-port matter Pseudo-Aristeas is self-contradictory) on the implication in a phrase of Pseudo-Aristeas that Idumea was not part of Palestine, 127 being the date of its annexation to the Maccabee realm. But Bickermann has himself shown that much of Pseudo-Aristeas’ description of Palestine is simply a compound of the Old Testament and of ideas about the Ideal State, and one cannot, I think, pick odd items out of this farrago and say ‘These are dated history’; the independent Idumea is only O.T. Edom. He has not noticed that Pseudo-Aristeas was so ignorant about Palestine that he makes the Jordan encircle Judaea and then join another river near Egypt and run out to sea with it (116–17).

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Now, though Pseudo-Aristeas is late, there is one part of the work which is most obviously third century B.C.—the questions addressed by Ptolemy II to the Elders and their answers.² This document, except for some interpolations which I shall come to, is paragraphs 187–294 inclusive in Wendland, and I must have some distinguishing names; I shall therefore use ‘Pseudo-Aristeas’ for the late author of the Letter and those parts of the work which he wrote himself, and shall refer to the third-century document as ‘the Questions of Ptolemy II’ or simply ‘the Questions’.

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² Thackeray op. cit. p. xiii says that Ptolemy’s questions in 187, 193, 194, 196 are late and indicate a tottering dynasty. The case is precisely the opposite: Ptolemy asks how he may be invincible in war and a terror to his enemies, and (twice) how he may keep his possessions unimpaired, i.e. the conquests made from the Seleucids and Antigonids by his father and himself. The writer knew Ptolemy II pretty well. I do not know of any other question which has been used to support a late dating except 250 (see p. 427).

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These Questions of Ptolemy II, though embodied by Pseudo-Aristeas in a Jewish propaganda work, are in no sense Jewish propaganda. A reference has been thought to be detected in 228 to the fifth commandment of Moses; but even if this be so it has no propaganda value, for many people beside Jews honoured their parents.³ In 263 occurs a statement which is very close to James iv, 6, and I Peter v, 5, ‘God resisteth the proud but giveth grace to the humble’;⁴ but attempts to find the source of 263 in the Old Testament have not been very successful,⁵ and it is centuries earlier than the two Epistles. There is nothing else. The Questions never mention Jewish religion or customs or even the Jewish people; these were not the things on which, in that document, Ptolemy was seeking information. His questions are about himself and his own rule—the duties, privileges, ambitions of a king; and this is underlined in 294, where at the end he thanks the Elders, not for telling him anything about their own religion or ideas, but for giving διδαχὴν ἐμοὶ πρὸς τὸ βασιλεύειν, ‘teaching me how to rule’. The document is in fact a περὶ βασιλείας or treatise on kingship,¹ but written by a hellenised Jew and not by a Greek. At the turn of the fourth-third centuries B.C., and right down the third, nearly every Greek philosopher wrote a περὶ βασιλείας as a matter of course;² the Hellenistic kingships were a new thing, and philosophy worked hard at shaping the theory of the new phenomenon, though most of the literature is lost. The Questions are full of the well-known third-century terminology of the matter:³ beneficence,⁴ equity,⁵ good feeling towards all men,⁶ and above all the famous φιλανθρωπία or love of one’s subjects,⁷ which is said (265) to be the most necessary possession of all for a king.

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³ For Greeks, cf. the famous parabasis of Aristophanes’ Wasps.

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⁴ 263, ὁ θεὸς τοὺς ὑπερηφάνους καθαιρεῖ τοὺς δὲ ἐπιεικεῖς καὶ ταπεινοὺς ὑψοῖ.

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⁵ Thackeray refers to I Sam. ii, 7; Prov. iii, 34. There are other passages also; but none is really very close.

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¹ Bickermann op. cit. p. 285 saw that the Questions would some day have to be analysed on the lines of a περὶ βασιλείας. Momigliano op. cit. p. 169 refers to the difficulty caused by the insertion of a treatise περὶ βασιλείας, but does not go into it further. This Excursus was finished before I saw either of these articles; but in fact Bickermann and myself both go back to Professor Goodenough’s illuminating study (next note).

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² See generally on these treatises E. R. Goodenough, The Political Philosophy of Hellenistic Kingship, Yale Class. Stud. I, 1928, p. 55. Cf. Tarn, Alexander the Great and the unity of mankind, Proc. Brit. Acad. XIX 1933.

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³ See generally Max Mühl, Die antike Menschheitsidee in ihrer geschichtlichen Entwicklung 1928; E. Skard, Zwei religiös-politische Begriffe: Euergetes-Concordia 1932; Tarn op. cit.

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⁴ Εὐεργεσία or εὐεργέτης, 190, 205, 210, 249, 281; beside the above works, see the references to kings’ letters in F. Schroeter, De regum hellenisticorum epistulis in lapidibus servatis 1932 p. 44.

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⁵ ’Επιεικεία and ἐπιεικής, 188, 192, 207, 211, 263, 290.

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⁶ Φιλία to all men, 225, 228.

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⁷ 208, 257, 265, 290. On φιλανθρωπία see especially S. Lorenz, De progressu notionis φιλανθρωπίας, 1914; J. Kaerst, Gesch. des Hellenismus II² p. 321 and references; Schroeter op. cit. pp. 26 n. 1, 45.

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That all this belongs to a περὶ βασιλείας and must have been written in the third century, not the first, should need no demonstration; the document belongs to the period when the περὶ βασιλείας was a most active literary form. But in fact a precise demonstration of the date is given in 252—the king must judge petitions justly.⁸ The Questions then belong to a time when the reigning Ptolemy might receive petitions. In the third century petitions were sent to the strategos of the nome, and some, though probably not the majority, did reach the king himself; but by the beginning of the second century special officials had been appointed to deal with them, and none ever reached the king.¹ The Questions therefore are third century; and as they must obviously be earlier than the troubles between Ptolemy IV and the Jews, they belong to the reign of Ptolemy III, when Ptolemy II was still a great memory. The famous question in 250, πῶς ἂν ἁρμόσαι γυναικί, forms no objection to this. It does not of course mean, as it has been taken to mean, ‘How can I get on with my wife?’—the writer had presumably no desire to court the fate of Sotades by putting such a question into a king’s mouth;² it is impersonal, ‘How can a man get on with his wife?’—a commonplace aporia.³

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⁸ κρίσει κατευθύνων τὰ τῶν ἐντεύξεων.

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¹ P. Collomp, *Recherches sur la chancellerie et la diplomatie des Lagides* 1926.

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² It has been applied to Ptolemy II and Arsinoe II and to Ptolemy Euergetes II and Cleopatra II. Neither view requires comment.

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³ We shall meet many *aporiai*, commonplace ‘hard questions’ or (colloquially) ‘stumpers’ (see further p. 430 n. 6). They were not confined to Greeks, and were proper to kings; the Queen of Sheba tried her collection upon Solomon, *I Kings* x, 1, and see Plutarch’s *Banquet of the Seven Sages* (p. 436). Though Plutarch there is very contemptuous about them, he was not above discussing them himself; see the essays *Mor.* 955 E ‘Whether water or fire be the more useful’ and 959 B ‘Whether the creatures of the land are more intelligent than those of the water’.

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Now undoubtedly, in the original Questions of Ptolemy II, the king questioned 70 Elders, divided into groups of ten (I shall come to that), and not 72 as Pseudo-Aristeas makes him do; the join where the two numbers were fitted together can still be detected. If 72 were the number, the last two groups must contain eleven apiece, as in Pseudo-Aristeas they do; and when, in the last group but one, Ptolemy questions an eleventh Elder, Pseudo-Aristeas 273 volunteers as the explanation of this τὸν ἐνδέκατον ἐπηρώτα διὰ τὸ δυὸ πλεονάζειν τῶν ἑβδομήκοντα, ‘he questioned the eleventh because there were two more than the 70’,⁴ that is, ‘the 70’ of the Questions which Pseudo-Aristeas is working into his book; otherwise the remark would be pointless, for he has already explained at length in his introduction that there were 72, and why there were 72, and given all their names. That 70 was the original number in the legend is presupposed both by the name Septuagint and by the obvious imitation of the 70 Elders of Exodus xxiv, 1, 9;⁵ 72 does not occur before Pseudo-Aristeas, and was invented by him to make six from each of the Twelve Tribes, as Epiphanius says;⁶ he therefore had to add two more questions to the original 70. I have already mentioned that there are certain interpolations in the Questions; beside these two questions and answers, there are the sections which mention Greek philosophers at the Court⁷ and which have nothing to do with the original Questions. The reason for their insertion by Pseudo-Aristeas is obvious. Though writing propaganda himself, he was building his book round an older document¹ which had no propaganda value but which was useful as being probably well known among hellenised Jews and as vouching for good relations between the Jews and the greatest of the Ptolemies, and he tried to make propaganda of it by explaining (235) that the Jew could beat the Greek philosopher on his own ground. Josephus, when he incorporated much of Pseudo-Aristeas in his own work, showed better judgment by omitting the Questions altogether, as having no value for his purpose.

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⁴ Thackeray’s translation, ‘for their number exceeded 70 by 2’, misses the point of the definite article.

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⁵ See Thackeray’s discussion of the numbers, *op. cit.* p. xviii.

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⁶ Thackeray *ib.* p. 115.

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⁷ 200-202, 235.

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¹ Professor Nock tells me that the Orphic texts and the Sibyllines supply other instances of Jews of this period utilising existing material.

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One other point needs explanation, another sign of the adaptation of the Questions to propaganda purposes. As they stand, the answer of the Jewish Elders to every one of the questions contains, at the end of the answer, a reference to ‘God’ (or in one or two cases to the ‘Divine law’); and it will be noticed by anyone who cares to go through the answers that in practically every case the clause containing the word ‘God’ can be omitted from the answer without impairing the meaning in the least. The original Questions had nothing to do with the Jewish religion, and Pseudo-Aristeas has adapted them to his purpose by adding these references to ‘God’. He himself has made it clear (235) what he was doing: the Jews, he says, could outrun the philosophers because they took God for their starting-point.

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Now why did Ptolemy II, in the original Questions, go to the trouble of giving seven great banquets to the Elders in order to ask only ten questions each night, both questions and answers being very short? There must be some explanation of that number ten. The Jewish author of the Questions was steeped in Greek learning, as he knew about Greek treatises on kingship; had he before him some tradition, or some model, presumably Greek, which indicated that when a king questioned foreign wise men ten was the right number of questions for him to put? To answer that we shall have to do what one has to do sooner or later with so many Hellenistic problems and get back to Alexander.

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There is no reason to doubt Arrian’s story² that Alexander in India really did meet and converse with certain recluses (though imperfectly, since at least two interpreters were needed);¹ for Calanus is historical enough, whatever his real name was, and the fact that he did accompany Alexander shows that some sort of meeting took place. The meeting to which Arrian here refers is that near Taxila, afterwards worked up by Megasthenes,² at which Calanus was present; Arrian subsequently relates it again from Megasthenes as though it were a different one. The incident caught the imagination of more people than Megasthenes, and, like various other things, developed after Alexander was dead. Onesicritus indeed put out a story³ that Alexander had not talked to the men himself but had sent him to do it; but he could do no better than make one of his Indians give the ordinary Greek account of the Golden Age and the other talk a few Cynic commonplaces, and his version never exercised any influence.

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² Arr. *Anab.* VII, 1, 5-6, λέγουσιν. (On Arrian’s use of this word see E. Schwartz, *Aristobulus* in PW, and E. Kornemann, *Die Alexandergeschichte des Königs Ptolemaios I* 1935 pp. 21-30.) Arrian’s source here cannot be Callisthenes, who was dead, or Onesicritus or Megasthenes, who gave versions of their own (see in text), or the Cleitarchean vulgate, because Diodorus, Curtius, and Justin alike know nothing of a conversation between Alexander and any gymnosophists; and if Kornemann *op. cit.* p. 158 be right, it cannot be Aristobulus. Only Nearchus and Ptolemy therefore remain. Nearchus told the story of Calanus (Arr. VII, 3, 6), whoever else did also; but whether Arrian’s source he Nearchus, or Ptolemy, or both, the *fact* of the meeting is very well attested indeed, even if Kornemann (p. 158) be right that the *conversation* had received some Stoic-Cynic colouring before it reached Arrian.

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¹ Arr. VII, 1, 15 δι’ ἑρμηνέων, and therefore two at least (Indian into Persian, Persian into Greek). Onesicritus, Strabo XV, 716, says three, which may be true, i.e. the Indian-into-Persian interpreter did not know the particular dialect of the recluses.

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² Strabo XV, 718 = Arr. VII, 2, 2-4; to be distinguished from Arr. VII, 1, 5-6.

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³ Strabo XV, 715.

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What Alexander may actually have said to the recluses is not material here; what matters is the legend. Though the steps cannot be traced, our existing literature shows that, at some undefined period later than Megasthenes, two main versions of Alexander’s conversation with the Indian gymnosophists had come into existence: one, which I will call Y, is represented to-day by the Metz Epitome,⁴ Berlin papyrus 13044,⁵ and (with slight variations) Plutarch;⁶ the other, which I will call Z, is the version of the Alexander-Romance;⁷ both represent Alexander as putting a number of questions, though other incidents may differ. It has been contended that the list of questions in the Metz Epitome and the papyrus (these two lists are identical) is the oldest form, Plutarch and Z being derivatives;⁸ but I cannot see it quite like that. In Z Alexander comes to the Indians peaceably and is quite agreeable; in Y he is a tyrant who threatens them with death,⁹ though he ultimately relents; in this respect Z agrees with the historical fact (Arrian) while Y is a tendentious invention, which should therefore be later. Again, the question which in Z is ‘Which is bigger, land or sea?’ has become in Y ‘Which rears the bigger animals, land or sea?’ and the simpler form must be the older.¹ Y attempted to turn Alexander into a tyrant by shifting the time and the place of the questioning to Sambos’ revolt, of which Z knows nothing; in Plutarch we still have the historical Sambos on the Lower Indus, but in the Metz Epitome Sambos has been shifted to the Malli; Plutarch therefore in this respect represents an earlier version of Y. As every account in both Y and Z begins with the same question, ‘Which are more numerous, the living or the dead?’ it is clear that both ultimately derive from a common original. Many variations of this must have come into existence,² but in some respects Z, however much its different versions may have been worked over, represents (as we have seen) an earlier form, *i.e.* stands nearer to the common original, than does Y. The common original must be early, for of the Y documents, though the Epitome and the papyrus generally agree as against Plutarch’s variants, in one important point the papyrus agrees with Plutarch as against the Epitome;³ and as the papyrus has been dated to *c.* 100 B.C. or perhaps a little earlier,⁴ the original of the Y documents must be second-century at latest, and the common original of Y and Z earlier still.

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