The Greeks in Bactria and India c9.s1.32

c9.s1.32

The purpose of the military colony was primarily defence; there was a chain of seven across Asia Minor to prevent the Galatians attacking Ionia;⁴ those in Bactria-Sogdiana, started by Alexander, were to safeguard the frontier against the nomads (Chap. III); those in Media were to bridle the hill tribes;⁵ but those in normally quiet districts like northern Syria served the double purpose of settling Macedonians and Greeks in Asia and constituting an army reserve. Naturally they were walled. At some places in Asia Minor, and presumably everywhere, the military colony called itself a *koinon*,⁶ that useful word which did duty for almost any form of association from a League to a dining club; a village in old Greece might also call itself a *koinon*,⁷ and by analogy a military colony might be referred to as a village.⁸ The elected officials therefore of a military colony, like those of any private *koinon*, must have tended to copy city officials so far as might be, and it had some power of managing its internal affairs. It was a planned foundation and had something which may be called a written charter;¹ perhaps a stereotyped form existed. In the Mediterranean countries the great majority, if not all, of the settlers were no doubt Greeks or Macedonians, but east of the Euphrates this element tended to become thinner. There were cases in which Greeks, if there were any at all, can only have been a small minority, as at Avroman in Kurdistan, where the settlers named in the parchments are all Asiatics;² Mysia in the Parthian satrapy³ and Pterion in Media⁴ must have been primarily settled with Anatolian mercenaries, Mysians and Cappadocians of Pteria; Thracian colonies are recorded east of the Tigris,⁵ and we shall meet a colony of Pisidian mercenaries in India (p. 250); but probably Greek was always the *official* language, as it still was in the first century B.C. at Avroman.