The Greeks in Bactria and India c9.s1.65

c9.s1.65

It is worth looking at some of these nicknames in eastern Iran, though some lie outside the course of my main story. How completely they came to dominate literature is shown by a statement of Appian¹² that five new cities—Soteira, Charis, Calliope, Hekatompylos, Achaea—were named after Greek cities. There were no such Greek cities; his statement refers to the real names, but what he has given is not the real names but the nicknames; the real names of the first four are lost. Achaea and Calliope I shall come to. Hekatompylos, prior to Mithridates I, was the Parthian capital; but the word only occurs in Greek as Homer’s stock epithet for Thebes ‘of the hundred gates’, and means that the place had more gates than the stereotyped four of Hellenistic town-planning; its real name is unknown, and ‘Hekatompylos’ in our late Alexander-historians is only a case of the usual proleptic use of names of a later day. Whether the city stood at Damghan or Shahrud need not be discussed here; only excavation can decide.