The Greeks in Bactria and India c8: Introduction

The Greeks in Bactria and India c8

Language: English

Introduction

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It may be well to begin with a statement of the plan of this book.¹

¹ In this book, the name Demetrius alone always means Demetrius of Bactria, and Demetrius II alone always means his son; every other Demetrius, including the Seleucids Demetrius I and II, always has some distinguishing word unless the context renders the meaning unmistakable. Seleuceia alone always means Seleuceia on the Tigris. The word ‘Greeks’, east of the Euphrates, includes Macedonians, unless the latter are particularised; probably by the second century B.C. the two were indistinguishable, and anyhow there are no means of distinguishing them. The term ‘Indian scholar’ (on the analogy of ‘Greek scholar’) means one engaged in Indian studies and has nothing to do with nationality.

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Asia under Greek rule, as matter of political history and not of distinctions of race or civilisation, may be divided into three parts. The first division consists of the countries west of the Euphrates and of the Syrian desert, Asia Minor and Syria, which were to become Roman and were for centuries to be dominated by Graeco-Roman civilisation before they ultimately returned to the East; with this division this book has nothing to do except by way of an occasional illustration. The second division, roughly speaking, consists of the countries between the Euphrates and the Persian desert, which were subsequently to form the kingdom of the Arsacids, known to Greeks and Romans as Parthia; from the Greek point of view it may be called the Middle East. The third division, which I call the Farther East, comprises Iran east of the Persian desert and India so far as it was under Greek rule. This division by the Persian desert is a real one, and very old; it is found in one of Darius’ lists of the provinces of his empire.² This book is really concerned only with the Farther East, the story of eastern Iran and northern India under Greek rule; it is an attempt to recover what can be recovered of the history of a lost dynasty and of a rather extraordinary experiment. This story begins with Chapter III, and from that chapter to the end the book (except for art) is meant to be as complete as I can make it.

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² Persepolis e §2 (F. H. Weissbach, *Die Keilinschriften der Achaemeniden* 1911), which after the western provinces gives specifically ‘the lands in the East’, those east of the desert.

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But every story has a background, and the background to mine is the Middle East; it has seemed advisable therefore to add to the book an introductory part, Chapters I and II, which shall sketch certain aspects of that background and will, I hope, make it easier to see the connections between the story of the Farther East and that of the Seleucids. This introductory part has not, and is not meant to have, any claim to completeness, except perhaps as regards the account of the Greek literature in Chapter II. It is not an account of the Seleucid realm; it is a sketch only, designed to bring out certain points which bear upon facts utilised later, and may be a help to the understanding of them; these points are, chiefly, the Seleucid administrative divisions, the nature of the Seleucid settlement, the Greek literature of the Middle East (which is important on the question of our sources), and the relations between Greeks and Asiatics.

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The world east of the Euphrates was the scene of the interaction of Greek civilisation with three other civilisations, those of Babylonia, Iran, and India. Of these, India, and Iran in part, belong to my subject. But Babylonia does not, and I am not giving an account of Babylonia under Greek rule, which would call for a separate study and special qualifications. I use Babylonia to illustrate certain matters; that is all.

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It is unfortunate that in Britain, and I think everywhere, the story of the Greeks in India has been treated as part of the history of India alone. For in the history of India the episode of Greek rule has no meaning; it is really part of the history of Hellenism, and that is where its meaning resides. It is one of the misfortunes of ancient history that we become hypnotised into writing as though the importance of a thing were somehow proportionate to the amount of information about it which has survived; the papyri, for instance, tend to make the Ptolemies seem more important than the Seleucids. If we can manage to avoid this perversion of thinking, we shall recognise that any history of the Hellenistic states with the Farther East omitted is a sadly mutilated history; for there were not four Hellenistic dynasties—Seleucids, Ptolemies, Antigonids, Attalids—but five, and on any showing the Euthydemids, both in the extent of their rule and in what they tried to do, were vastly more important than the Attalids, the protégés successively of Egypt and of Rome. The Greek empire of Bactria and India was a Hellenistic state, with many of the usual characteristics of such states but with one very important one of its own, and its history was a branch of Seleucid history, just as the Euthydemid dynasty was on the distaff side a branch of the Seleucid line; as a Hellenistic state it must be treated, and I hope that this book may do something towards bringing it back into the sphere to which it belongs.

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This book does not go beyond the end of the Hellenistic period. The conventional end of that period in the West is the occupation of Alexandria by Augustus in 30 B.C., and by a curious coincidence the last Greek kingdoms in India fell about the same time; and anything later than the Christian Era is only noticed for its possible bearing on what goes before. But the period which I have sought primarily to reconstruct is comparatively a short one; it comprises about two and a half generations, from 206 B.C., the year in which Antiochus III quitted the East, to somewhere between 150 and 145 B.C., the death of Menander; one may call it the first half of the second century B.C., and it is covered by three reigns, the latter part of that of Euthydemus and those of his son Demetrius and of Demetrius’ son-in-law Menander. That half-century is the important matter, and on the success or otherwise of my reconstruction of those years everything else must depend.

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A word must be said here about the sources, though they will sufficiently appear as the book proceeds. They are of course very scrappy. But they were not always scrappy. There was once a Greek history which covered the Farther East generally, apparently down to 87 B.C. (pp. 45 sqq.), and there was another Greek history which also dealt with the Farther East, though seemingly only as an appendage to the history of Parthia (pp. 44 sq.); and the same thing has happened with regard to the Farther East as has happened with regard to another story whose historians have perished, that of the early third century in the Greek world about the Aegean: the scraps tend to combine, not into other scraps, but into at least the outline of a whole. There will be something to be said about this later (p. 46), but, as there was once a tradition, it is somebody’s business to attempt to recover the outline of it; one is not labouring in a vacuum. Our evidence is of many different kinds. On the Greek side, there are fragments of the lost historians preserved in several later writers, notably Strabo, Trogus-Justin, Plutarch, and Ptolemy the geographer (on whom see Chapter VI); various notices and indications in extant Greek and Latin writers, book VI of Pliny’s Naturalis Historia in particular containing much valuable Hellenistic material; and in place of the third-century inscriptions an almost unique wealth of coins, which give much more historical information than is usually the case with Greek coins. On the Indian side, there are some inscriptions and a little numismatic material, a bit of perhaps contemporary chronicle embedded in a later work (App. 4), indications of various sorts in literature (including Chinese and Thibetan translations of lost Indian writings), the excavations at Taxila, and the Milindapañha, which does not look quite the same to the Greek as to the Indian scholar and to which I have had to give a long Excursus. Towards the end we get a little real history, a rare blessing, in the Chinese historians Ssu-ma Chien and Pan-ku (App. 20); had China made the acquaintance of the ‘western countries’ a couple of generations earlier than she did, how thankful we should be.

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At present, coins apart, it seems to be only from the Indian side that fresh information can be looked for, and I must bear grateful testimony to the fact that (so far as I can see) the Indian material has been far better prepared for the Greek historian than the Greek material has ever been for the Indian; I can only hope that I have not missed too much of it, but the main task is to get the Greek side into some sort of order and to try to establish a framework which may be of use to others. The coins of course are all-important, and one cannot overpraise the work done on them by generations of numismatists; it seems to me one of the wonders of scholarship. But the numismatist as such has sometimes been unable to place or explain the facts which he has elicited; naturally so, for he is not expected to be a Hellenistic historian. Again I can only hope that I have not missed too much; with one or two exceptions, my knowledge of the coins has, of necessity, been confined to printed publications and the unrivalled collection in the British Museum; one is never safe from the unpublished coin in private hands, and it has proved impossible to ascertain what, if anything, there may be at Tashkent. Naturally I am not concerned with the coins as coins, but only as material for history.

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It is no part of my purpose to write about art; I am not qualified, and the book is long enough as it is. Artistic material is only treated where, as in the case of the Buddha-statue in Chapter ix, it has some definite bearing on Greeks and their activities. Much has been written of late years, and much more will be written, about those mixed arts of the East which originated in the Hellenistic period and especially about ‘Parthian’ art, the art which grew up in Iran under the rule of the Parthian military aristocracy; we are meeting names unknown a few years ago, like ‘Graeco-Bactrian’ and ‘Graeco-Sacan’ art. All

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these phenomena, except the art of Gandhāra (which stands on a different footing), appear to have one common characteristic: they are native arts which borrowed, and sometimes misapplied, a certain modicum of Greek form and ornamentation.¹ They furnish a subject of very great interest in itself; but they have little to do with the history of the Greeks of the Farther East, and even less with the Greek spirit.

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¹ This theme runs through Professor Herzfeld’s *Archaeological History of Iran* 1934; see *e.g.* p. 50, ‘only the most superficial features of foreign’ (*i.e.* Greek) ‘art are taken over; the essential ones are missed’; and p. 75, ‘it neither really understands nor assimilates the spirit of Hellenism’.

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the Roman world, and the most important events of the reign of Antoninus Pius, are related by his biographer, and the reader will not be sorry to find them here in a more concise form. The reign of Antoninus Pius is marked by the rare advantage of furnishing very few materials for history; which is only another mode of saying that its happiness was complete. During the twenty-three years of his administration, the Roman empire was governed by the same invariable maxims of justice and peace. The natives of a vast extent of country were protected by the same laws, and enjoyed the same privileges. The frontiers were defended by the same legions, and the same spirit of moderation and equity prevailed in the councils of the emperor. The death of Antoninus was lamented as a public calamity; and the memory of his virtues was preserved by the gratitude of his subjects, and the imitation of his successor.

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The reign of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, which followed, was a period of great activity and of great events. The empire was attacked on all sides by the barbarians, and the emperor was obliged to spend the greater part of his life in the camp. He was a man of a mild and philosophical temper, and he would have preferred the quiet of the study to the tumult of the field. But he was a prince of a high sense of duty, and he did not shrink from the task which was imposed upon him. He defended the frontiers with vigour, and he defeated the enemies of Rome in many a hard-fought battle. His death was a loss to the empire, and it was felt by all classes of his subjects. He was the last of the good emperors, and with him the golden age of the Roman empire may be said to have terminated.

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The character of the Roman government, under the Antonines, was that of a mild and paternal despotism. The emperor was the source of all power, and his will was the law of the land. But he was restrained by the influence of the senate, and by the force of public opinion. The senate was still a body of great dignity and importance, and its members were the principal officers of the state. The emperor was careful to consult them on all matters of importance, and he was always ready to listen to their advice. The public opinion was also a powerful check upon the actions of the emperor. The people of Rome were still a proud and independent race, and they were not afraid to express their dissatisfaction with the measures of the government. The emperor was aware of this, and he was always careful to avoid any act that would be likely to give offence to the people.

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The administration of justice was one of the most important duties of the emperor. He was the supreme judge of the empire, and he was always ready to hear the complaints of his subjects. He was assisted by a council of jurists, who were the most learned men of the age. The laws were administered with impartiality, and the rights of the citizens were protected. The taxes were moderate, and they were collected with fairness. The public works were carried on with vigour, and the cities of the empire were adorned with magnificent buildings. The trade and commerce of the empire were encouraged, and the people were prosperous and happy. The Roman empire, under the Antonines, was a model of good government, and it was the envy of the world.

Linked texts (2)

Milindapañha — Pāli
Naturalis historia — C. Plinius Secundus, Latin