The Greeks in Bactria and India c9.s1.24

c9.s1.24

The military colony⁹ goes back to Alexander. Traditionally he founded 70 ‘cities’; but comparatively few can be identified, and the number, right or wrong, includes his military colonies; the same is true of many of the ‘cities’ attributed to Seleucus.¹ The first Antigonus continued Alexander’s system, as did the early Seleucids, and it is only rarely that we know under which king any particular colony was founded. The places called Alexandropolis, for example, must be military colonies which claimed to go back to Alexander;² Doura and Orrhoë are recorded to have been founded under Antigonus I;³ but the majority probably belonged to the Seleucid settlement. A military colony was settled either with time-expired troops, sometimes mercenaries, or with men able and willing to serve; normally, though by no means always, it was located at or beside a native village, and was usually, it seems, perhaps always, founded by the provincial governor on the king’s order, as some of the names show (p. 11); the king had to provide the land and money required, but he could and did delegate the actual work to a subordinate, whereas a subordinate could not found a *polis*. Each settler received a *cleros*, an allotment of land which carried with it the obligation to serve in the army when called upon; hence the name cleruch, one who had a *cleros*, the regular name in the Hellenistic period for a settler in a military colony.⁴ The succession law of Doura⁵ shows that the allotments there were at the start grouped together into larger units; it cannot be said whether this system was general or not, but the name given in that law to these larger units, *hekas*,¹ has not occurred elsewhere. The reason for this arrangement is unknown, but it had nothing to do with the one-time system of land-ownership by the *genos* (the clan, or family in the widest sense), for at first the *genos* did not exist at Doura;² it might conceivably point to some system of collective farming under a head man. The same law shows that from the beginning the *cleros* could, on failure of the male line, pass to and be held by a woman; doubtless in that case she had to provide a man for the army. This elasticity in the law of inheritance, and the *hekas* (if it existed at other places), differentiated the Seleucid *cleros* in the third century B.C. from the better-known Ptolemaic *cleros*, and may have been one reason, though not the principal one, why the cleruch system was so much more successful in Asia than in Egypt.³