The Greeks in Bactria and India c9.s1.182

c9.s1.182

Much of the land, however, was not in the king’s own hand, but was held by great landowners, sometimes probably under grants which long antedated Persian rule, the king being their feudal superior. These men lived in castles or strongholds¹ on their estates, which were cultivated for them by a serf peasantry, and maintained bodies of mounted retainers, who had supplied the cavalry for the Persian armies. It seems that in Asia Minor some of them lost their estates and were sometimes replaced by Greeks;² but nothing of the sort is known in the East, nor is it known that any city or settlement was ever founded on their lands. So far, however, as these landowners were Iranians—and taking the Seleucid empire as a whole the majority would be Iranians—it would seem that the Seleucids never won their confidence; this is clear from the very small amount of Iranian cavalry in the Seleucid armies.³ That cavalry was the best in Asia; if the Seleucids did not use more of it, it can only have been that they dared not. Alexander had seen that one of the great problems was how to include in one polity the Greek city and the Iranian baron, and he had refused to acquiesce in the belief that Hellenism and Iranism were ‘perpetual and instinctive enemies’.⁴ But the Seleucid kings, for good or ill, had not followed Alexander’s lead but had come down heavily on the side of the Greek city and of their own nationals. There will be more to say about this when we come to Bactria, but these few words may serve to indicate the problem which faced the Greeks, men from cities who were not familiar with feudal systems, though these were less strange to their Macedonian rulers.