The Greeks in Bactria and India c9.s1.7

c9.s1.7

The important thing in the Seleucid administrative division was the eparchy, of which each satrapy included a certain number; Appian’s 72 Seleucid satrapies mean eparchies, for he is using the terminology of a later day, though it does not follow that the number 72 is correct. So far as is known at present, the eparchy was a Seleucid innovation. It *may* have been Achaemenid, for *a priori* the common source of the Ptolemaic and Seleucid subdivision should have been Persian, but the actual evidence is very dubious,² and the Alexander-historians know nothing about eparchies; they do very occasionally use an eparchy name, but that again is probably only the common case of late writers using the accustomed nomenclature of a later day. When the Seleucid empire broke up, it was the eparchy, not the satrapy, which survived; the Seleucid administration was imitated over a large part of Asia, and it was imitated on the basis of the eparchy. In the Seleucid Succession states, like Bactria, Parthia, Elymais, the eparchies became the satrapies, *i.e.* the primary administrative divisions, of the new kingdoms, while states which were not properly Succession states but were copying Seleucid (or, what comes to the same thing, Parthian) organisation gave their satrapies eparchy names; so universal was the practice that it was followed even by little states like Adiabene and Characene, which had themselves only been Seleucid eparchies. One reason for the emergence by the first century B.C. of the eparchy as the general unit of the organisation of a new Asia was that it had often been a natural division, dictated by the lie of the ground, while the great satrapies were not; examples are the Bactrian satrapy, which had included northern Sogdiana and Merv, countries not geographically connected with Bactria, and the varying arrangements for the government of the hill land and the plain land which had both been included in the Persian satrapy of Arachosia (App. 9). The eparchies naturally varied greatly in size, as do English and Scotch counties, and it is possible that the eparchies of a satrapy did not always account for the whole of its geographical content; Ptolemy, who is careful over eparchy names, gives tribes in some satrapies as well as eparchies, and though one cannot press this, seeing that he so often mixes up items from different periods, still we do hear of unconquered hill peoples, like the Elymaeans of Susis, and the great satrapies may have included territory which was informally a sort of native reserve, the general of the satrapy being responsible for keeping the hill tribes in check. This may be why the Seleucid strategos retained his military status while his Ptolemaic counterpart became a civil official.