The Greeks in Bactria and India c15.36

c15.36

³ Rostovtzeff op. cit. In his text, pp. 59 sqq., he calls the founder Antiochus III, on rather slight grounds, but in the later note on p. 66 he inclines to return to Antiochus II, the usual opinion. But I do not believe in the suggestion (p. 65) that there was an earlier cult of πρόγονοι under Antiochus I which included Alexander and the Achaemenids, and that Antiochus III (or II) 'eliminated' them 'from the list of his πρόγονοι'. Rostovtzeff (see p. 62) is going on the reference by the Ionian League to the policy of the πρόγονοι of Antiochus I in OGIS 222, a much-discussed expression, most recently treated by C. B. Welles, Royal Correspondence in the Hellenistic period 1934 p. 81. Now the policy is an essential part of the business; and if the references given by Rostovtzeff in the notes to p. 62 be examined, it will be found that there is only one real parallel to the phrase in OGIS 222, but that is a very exact parallel indeed. In l. 17 of Ditt.³ 434/5 (Chremonides' decree of 267 B.C.)—a document of the same generation as OGIS 222—Chremonides makes Ptolemy II, in showing zeal for the liberation of Greece, follow τεῖ τῶν προγόνων καὶ τεῖ τῆς ἀδελφῆς προαιρέσει, the policy of his πρόγονοι and of his sister (Arsinoe II); both inscriptions refer to the policy of the πρόγονοι, and no one, I think, has ever doubted that in Chremonides' decree the word means Ptolemy I and no one else at all; the official pedigree of Ptolemy II as it was in 267 is well known from Satyrus and Theocritus (Tarn, JHS LIII, 1933, p. 57), and does not include either Alexander or anyone else who could have had a policy about Greece except Ptolemy I. It follows that the πρόγονοι of Antiochus I in OGIS 222