The Greeks in Bactria and India c8.8

c8.8

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.