The Greeks in Bactria and India c15.10

c15.10

There is a story preserved in almost identical language by Livy and Appian,⁷ which therefore (I think no one will dispute this) originally came from Polybius; and as it concerns people who lived in Polybius' own city, Megalopolis, during his own youth, it is extraordinarily well attested and the details must be taken as trustworthy. The story is that in 192 B.C. there was living in Megalopolis as a citizen a Macedonian named Philip who boasted that he was a descendant of Alexander, and ‘to gain credence for his story’ he named his two sons Philip (after Alexander’s father) and Alexander, and named his daughter Apama. In Megalopolis at that time, therefore, it was believed (or some believed) that there had been an Apama who was a very close relative of Alexander’s in the sense that his father Philip was a very close relative; for the man who wanted ‘to gain credence for his story’ would surely have named his daughter after Alexander’s mother Olympias or his sister Cleopatra had it not been believed that there had been a woman named Apama who was at the very least as close a relation as they. Now as matter of history it is certain that Alexander had no relative named Apama, and tolerably certain that that rare name is Achaemenid¹ and not Macedonian at all. But though there was no Apama connected with Alexander, there was a very well-known woman of that name connected with Seleucus: at Susa in 324 he married an Apama who was a daughter of the Sogdian baron Spitamenes² and almost certainly an Achaemenid on her mother’s side, and she bore him a son, Antiochus I. We have accordingly now got to find two things: an Apama who shall be (supposed to be) a very close relative of Alexander’s, and a woman through whom some Seleucid king prior to the second century could claim *lineal descent* from Alexander (it has to be a woman, as the male line back to Alexander’s contemporary Seleucus I was at the time accurately known to everybody); and as the name Apama is rare, and no Apama is known in the period of Alexander and the Successors except Seleucus’ queen, the conclusion is inevitable that the answer to both questions is identical—Seleucus’ queen Apama became a daughter of Alexander, and the fictitious Seleucid descent from Alexander was traced through her as (the real) mother of Antiochus I.