The Greeks in Bactria and India c12.141

c12.141

The conclusion is that certain things in Part I of the Pali Milinda and certain resemblances to Pseudo-Aristeas can only be explained by postulating a short Greek Questions of Menander, in which Menander questioned an invented figure, the Buddhist sage Nāgasena; the questions must, as a matter of the historical development of this form of literature, have consisted largely of *aporiai*, though there may have been others. This work, like the various versions of the Alexander-questions, must have had some sort of introduction or scene-setting, from which the Pali author took the Yonakas and their names; the parts of the introduction to the Pali work dealing with the previous existences of Milinda and Nāgasena and so forth were naturally not in the Greek work. From the Greek work came the fact that Sāgala was Menander’s capital, and probably the details of his birthplace; but that and the reference to the four-square Hellenistic cities might have come from some other Greek source. We have seen (p. 249) that some Greek in India may have written a Praise of Menander, and that in any case there was some Greek poem which mentioned him. There may in fact have been a regular Menander literature; and we seem to possess traces of another bit of it, an Indian Avadāna intermediate in time between the Greek Questions of Menander and the Pali Milinda. It survives in a Chinese translation made in A.D. 472 by a sramana from the West, and is called ‘Avadāna of the discussion between the king Nan-t’o (Nanda) and Nāgasena’.¹ It has been pointed out that the Indian original must have been older than the Pali Milinda because the name Nanda still kept the first *n* of Menander;² but there is more than that. The first three of the four questions asked by Nanda-Menander are serious questions relating to Buddhism; but the fourth is merely two commonplace *aporiai* on the Greek model, ‘Why is summer hot and winter cold? And why is a summer day long and a winter day short?’³ These *aporiai* show that the work stood nearer to the Greek Questions of Menander than did the Pali Milinda, from which *aporiai* have completely vanished.