The Greeks in Bactria and India c12.40

c12.40

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