The Greeks in Bactria and India c17.18

c17.18

It appears then (unless there be something later which I have missed) that all we can get at, taking the most favourable view, is that a Greek king, who may have been Demetrius, retreated to Mathurā. So much is known from other sources: the Yuga-purāṇa records the withdrawal of the Greeks from the Middle Country (App. 4), while Ptolemy and the coins show that Menander subsequently ruled in Mathurā (pp. 227, 228 n. 2, 245). Certainly the reason for this withdrawal given or implied in the inscription—that the Greeks were frightened away by the invasion of Khāravela, though *ex hypothesi* he was attacking their enemy Pushyamitra—cannot be right; it may have pleased Khāravela to think so (if the inscription really be his and not of a later time), but one must follow the Yuga-purāṇa, which is explicit that the Greeks left the Middle Country because of Eucratides’ invasion. It is true that this statement of the Yuga-purāṇa cannot be checked; but as the account given in the Yavana sections of that document is supported by the Greek Apollodorus where we possess him (Chap. iv), one feels confidence in its statement about the Greek withdrawal, though no fragment of Apollodorus on the subject has survived. But the inscription, though its somewhat conjectural decipherment affords no firm ground to the historian, may be right about the fact of the withdrawal, even though the reason be wrongly given.