The Greeks in Bactria and India c9.s1.87

c9.s1.87

The towns of the East which ranked as *poleis*, cities with Greek organisation, appear to have fallen into two distinct classes. Those of the first class were, it would seem, really Greek cities, though they may have contained more foreigners than a city in old Greece; the decree of Antioch in Persis,¹ on the Gulf of Bushire, is no more distinguishable from the decree of an old Greek city than are the decrees of the new Greek cities in Asia Minor,² and a whole group of cities is known which passed similar decrees,³ decrees which, having the same object, would follow a common model; they are Seleuceia on the Tigris, Apamea on the Seleia (Silhu) in southern Babylonia, Antioch in Sittakene, Alexandria (Charax) at the mouth of the Tigris, and the three Seleuceias in Elymais—Susa (Seleuceia on the Eulaeus), Seleuceia on the Hedyphon, and Seleuceia on the Erythraean Sea, *i.e.* the Persian Gulf (p. 43). These cities may be taken as representative of those in the East with dynastic names, and all were really Greek; there was a Council and Assembly at Antioch in Persis, and the Council of 300 at Seleuceia on the Tigris is explicitly mentioned,⁴ as is the popular Assembly;⁵ there was the usual organisation by tribes, as there was at Seleuceia in Pieria,⁶ shown by the mention of prytanies at Antioch in Persis⁷ and of a deme (with a Macedonian name) at Alexandria-Charax.⁸ At Seleuceia in Pieria the magistrates formed a board or college of *archontes*,⁹ as was beginning to be the case in old Greek cities; and the same thing is found at Susa (p. 27), it may be taken to have been the same in all the cities of this class. At Susa there was a gymnasium and a stadium,¹⁰ at Greek Babylon a gymnasium¹¹ and a theatre,¹² and the same inscriptions show that games were held in both cities: we may suppose therefore that cities of this class in the East usually possessed a theatre, for in Asia Minor a theatre and games were part of the ordinary equipment of a city with a Seleucid dynastic name,¹³ and it is certain that they would possess a gymnasium, seeing that in Asia Minor even a *polis* with a native name would have a gymnasium.¹ We know the importance attached to the gymnasium by the Greeks in Egypt; we know that Alexander’s Greek settlers in the East complained at first that his system was not ‘Hellenic life and training’;² and for a Greek city in the East a gymnasium, the centre of both physical and intellectual training for the common man who did not specialise in the higher learning, must have been all-important.