The Greeks in Bactria and India c9.s1.152

c9.s1.152

It may be useful to give here what sketch is possible of one of the new Greek cities in the East, Susa, the ‘city of lilies’, though most of our knowledge belongs to the Parthian period; for it is most probable that two of the Greek centres in the Farther East, Bactra and Pushkalāvatī the capital of Gandhāra, were cities of the same general type as Susa, though they did not start as military colonies. The inscriptions of Susa¹ range from the reign of Antiochus III to A.D. 21; there are none before Antiochus III, nor is the official Greek name Seleuceia on the Eulaeus found earlier, so it looks as if Susa only became a *polis* in that king’s reign; the earlier military colony there has already been noticed. Much of our information comes from a letter² written in A.D. 21 by the Parthian king Artabanus III to Susa, which quotes at length a decree of the city. It is addressed to ‘Antiochus and Phraates, the magistrates and the city’, this last a common phrase for the Council and the People together. Antiochus no doubt was the *epistates*, who according to Parthian practice would be a citizen; the Parthian Phraates, as he is named second, was of less importance,³ and was probably the Parthian official in charge of the great Achaemenid palace,⁴ which must have been extra-territorial, so to speak, as the burden of its upkeep could never have been thrown on the Greek *polis* and must have been borne by the king.