The Greeks in Bactria and India c15.21

c15.21

There are several things to be said about the fictitious Seleucid pedigree. I think Yule was the first, though not the last, to suggest that the Alexander-descents of the Hindu Kush country were connected with the Bactrian Greeks;⁴ it was a wonderfully brilliant guess, for now that it is known that the Euthydemid kings (and the house of Eucratides too, for that matter) claimed to go back to Alexander little doubt seems possible. These descents are discussed in Chapters VII and IX; here I need only point out that one of them further defines the position of Apama. Marco Polo relates that in his day the (now extinct) family of the Mirs of Badakshan claimed to be descended from Alexander and a daughter of King Darius.¹ Alexander did marry Darius' elder daughter, Barsine, at Susa in 324;² but it is not Barsine who is meant, for Marco Polo also says that when he was at Balkh (i.e. Bactra) ‘the people of the city tell that it was here that Alexander took to wife the daughter of Darius’.³ The wife Alexander did marry at Bactra was Roxane, daughter of the Bactrian baron Oxyartes; and in Bactria therefore she had become Darius' daughter, just as she is in the Greek Alexander-romance⁴ and some other Greek sources.⁵ Apama then in the fullest version of the legend became a daughter of Alexander by his wife Roxane daughter of Darius III; the fact that the real Apama was an Achaemenid, and that she and the real Roxane both belonged to the Bactrian nobility,⁶ doubtless helped, as perhaps did the legendary story that (beside Alexander IV) Roxane did have another child who died.⁷ Naturally the makers of legend were not troubled by the trifling fact that the two women must in reality have been much the same age; legend, like law, cares not for trifles. One Hellenistic instance must suffice. When Antigonus I sent to Polyperchon a boy to play, under the name of Heracles, the part of an illegitimate son of Alexander, he chose (doubtless for some facial resemblance) a boy nearly six years too young for the alleged occasion of his birth;⁸ but the discrepancy did not trouble the common man at the time, and has troubled few historians since.