The Greeks in Bactria and India c9.s1.121

c9.s1.121

In these eastern cities with native names the citizens must largely have been Asiatics, or there would have been no citizens, but the question of Asiatic citizenship in the truly Greek cities of my first class is not easy; indeed the real distinction between the two classes of *poleis* in the East may have been, Was the citizen body primarily Greek or primarily Asiatic? It would be tempting to suppose that the two classes were represented by the expressions *polis* and *polis Hellenis*, ‘Greek city’, in Isidore, but this is certainly not so, for Isidore’s usage shows that both expressions meant to him exactly the same thing;² the Parthian survey accurately entered every town with Greek organisation as a *polis*, and why Isidore himself occasionally added ‘Greek’ is obscure. The Greek cities must have admitted selected Asiatics to citizenship, because even in the third century B.C. old Greek cities were sometimes doing that;³ but the question is what happened to the generality of the Asiatics within the wall, the *politeumata*. Logically, a *politeuma* should ultimately have received citizenship and become a new city tribe; but whether this took place may be doubted. Certainly in a number of cities in the West one *politeuma*, the Jewish, did receive potential rights of citizenship, rights however which could not be transmuted into actual citizenship because that would have entailed worship of the city gods, *i.e.* apostasy;¹ but the way in which Jewish writers speak of their privilege suggests that it was not shared by the *politeumata* of other peoples. There is said to have been a Babylonian tribe at Charakmoba (Kir of Moab) in Syria;² but the known coinage of Charakmoba belongs to the reign of Elagabalus,³ so this may be outside the Hellenistic period, and in any case ‘Babylonian’ more probably refers to Greeks from Seleuceia. Stratonicea in Caria certainly had some Carian demes, but this was part of a most peculiar and complicated arrangement⁴ to which no parallel is known elsewhere and which cannot be used as evidence for other cities. On the other hand, the Syrian *politeuma* at Seleuceia was still a *politeuma* and not a tribe in the first century A.D. (p. 18 n. 5), and this agrees with what happened at Alexandria in Egypt, where the Phrygian *politeuma* was still only a *politeuma* at some period of Roman rule.⁵ The conclusion from the Middle East can only be the negative one that the evidence, such as it is, does not prove that the *politeumata* ever became tribes;⁶ that implies that if a city was Greek the Greeks meant to keep it Greek, and it agrees with this that in a Greek city the Greeks kept the citadel in their own hands,⁷ which gave them a certain control and a refuge if required. It is unfortunate that the long and fruitful excavations at Doura and Susa have thrown no light on this obscure question of Asiatic citizenship in a Greek *polis*; for more definite evidence we must wait till we reach India, though that is not evidence for anything but India itself.