The Greeks in Bactria and India c9.s1.14

c9.s1.14

The Greek settlement of Asia was one of the most amazing works which the ancient world ever saw, for it was not the natural result of an overspill of population, as had been the early Greek colonisation of the shores of the Mediterranean; it was undertaken deliberately, and though there was an overspill it was the kings who used and directed it. The Seleucid idea was to give to the framework of their empire substance and strength by filling it out with Greeks; Greeks were to supply its lack of living tissue. Indeed it is conceivable that the early kings dreamt of a day when the empire should no longer be a framework at all but should have become a complex of contiguous and quasi-autonomous city states, the whole under a quasi-divine king who managed policy and saw to security. This is the period we want to know about, the period from 312 to 262 B.C. when Seleucus and his son were settling Asia; and we hardly know anything. Some light has been thrown upon the Middle East in recent years by excavations, but the light has all fallen upon later times, usually the Parthian period; the first half of the third century is still almost a blank, and we have to deduce what happened as best we can.