The Greeks in Bactria and India c9.s1.103

c9.s1.103

All these Greek cities must have contained many non-Greeks within the wall, even if the local natives largely lived in suburbs outside the wall, and the question is how the non-Greeks within the wall were organised. I have supposed elsewhere,³ on the analogy of Alexandria in Egypt, that they were organised according to nationalities in quasi-autonomous bodies or corporations called *politeumata* or *catoeciae* (*κατοικίαι*), the latter perhaps the more usual name in the Seleucid sphere,⁴ though the name *politeuma* was not confined to the Ptolemaic sphere, as there was one of Syrians at Seleuceia.⁵ If this be correct, the system goes back to Alexander; indeed it may be doubted whether his Alexandrias in Asia, at the start, were properly speaking *poleis* at all and not rather a collection of *politeumata*, the Greek one being merely the most important; it has been seen that his system was strange to his Greek settlers (p. 18 n. 2). In any case, however, the Alexandrias became *poleis* under the Seleucids.⁶ One may take it that, in any city where there were enough Greeks, they were the citizen body who really constituted the city, provided the magistrates, and were known by the city name, Alexandrians or Seleuceians or what it might be; certainly that was so at Seleuceia on the Tigris and also at Susa, where the inscriptions, which go down to A.D. 21, represent it as a Greek city with the usual forms, though it is known to have had many other inhabitants.