The Greeks in Bactria and India c9.s1.176

c9.s1.176

I must conclude this sketch of the Seleucid settlement with some notice of the land system which lay behind that settlement, though some of it is well known.² The greater part of the land in the empire was, *in theory*, the possession of the Seleucid king for the time being; Seleucus must have claimed that Asia, so far as it had been Persian, was ‘spear-won territory’,³ precisely as Ptolemy claimed Egypt.⁴ The exceptions were the lands of the old Greek cities of Asia Minor which had been there before the Persians, and perhaps the lands of some hill tribes who had never acknowledged Persian rule; but it would seem that the Seleucids claimed to be overlords of the temple states, old as they were. Most of the Seleucid cities and colonies were of necessity founded on King’s Land, thus greatly diminishing its extent; but one city, Antioch towards Pisidia, stood on land taken from a too powerful temple state, the vast domain of the god Mēn,⁵ and there may have been others. The Seleucids, unlike the Ptolemies, also sold land out and out on condition that it was joined to the territory of some city,⁶ which helped further to diminish the area of King’s Land. In the case of the allotments (*cleroi*) made to the settlers in a military colony, the succession law of Doura (p. 7), dating from the earliest days of the colony and undoubtedly laid down by the king, shows that the king retained a right of escheat on failure of heirs. He did not therefore entirely part with the ownership of the allotment, but as when he sold land to be joined to city territory he did entirely part with the ownership the city territory must have been in the same position; that is to say, it looks as if one of the distinctions between the *polis* and the military colony was that in the case of the former the king retained no interest in the land, while so long as a place was a military colony he did retain an interest.