The Greeks in Bactria and India c9.s1.62

c9.s1.62

The recorded nomenclature of the cities has never really been considered, and it is important for the Farther East. Putting aside for a moment the Alexandrias (p. 18) and the foundations of Antiochus IV (p. 186), the only places which were founded directly as *poleis* from the start were *some*, probably the majority, of those which bore the four Seleucid dynastic names—Antioch, Seleuceia, Apamea, Laodicea—and perhaps (we do not know) one or two towns named after some god, like Heracleia or Artemita. By the middle of the second century B.C., however, every place which ultimately bore a Seleucid dynastic name had received that name and become a *polis*. But no city was ever officially named Antioch or Seleuceia alone; the confusion would have been impossible, and some geographical designation was always part of the city’s official name,⁴ so that *e.g.* a Greek of Susa in a formal document would call himself not a Seleuceian but a Seleuceian-on-the-Eulaeus. It was a very clumsy system, and naturally led in popular speech to many cities getting secondary or popular names, which may be comprehensively called nicknames; these were convenient and found their way wholesale into literature, with the result that east of the Euphrates we know the nicknames better than the official names, which have often been ousted altogether. These nicknames¹ were of many types; they might allude to some historical event, as Prophthasia (p. 14) or Zetis (App. 12); to some peculiarity of construction, as Hekatompylos; to virtues and vices, as Charis, Stasis, Apate;² to some feature of the population, as the ethnic names (p. 15); to something in the city worship, as Calliope and Soteira;³ even to material objects, as Kibotos (the ark),⁴ Aspis (the shield),⁵ Perikephalaia (the necklace),⁵ Syrinx (the mine),⁶ where the allusion is for us completely lost. As even stranger nicknames occur in India, it is necessary, before reaching that country, to understand what was happening. One must of course distinguish from nicknames those cases in late compilers where they copied from their sources the description of a place as though it were a name; such are Diadochou, ‘the city of the Successor’;⁷ Ionaca polis, ‘Greek town’;⁸ Portus Macedonum, ‘the harbour-town of the Macedonians’;⁹ Asylum Persarum, ‘the asylum of the Persians’;¹⁰ and even Komopolis, ‘a village-city’.¹¹