The Greeks in Bactria and India c9.s2: Chapter II. Literature and Social Contacts
The Greeks in Bactria and India c9.s2
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Chapter II. Literature and Social Contacts
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WHAT kind of people now were these Greeks whom the Seleucid settlement scattered throughout Asia? For the third and much of the second centuries B.C. the answer is simple: just Greeks, with all that that implies. Most certainly they were not, as it was once the fashion to suppose, a people of Eurasians and Levantines. I have said elsewhere what I have to say about Greek ‘decadence’ in the Hellenistic period;¹ there is small sign of it down to about the middle of the second century B.C., and I trust that, as regards the Farther East, readers of this book will come to the same conclusion. But the later period may need some special consideration, for in the latter part of the second century much of the Greek and Greek-speaking world lost its political independence. In 168 Macedonia fell to Rome. Between 163 and 141 Iran and Babylonia passed out of Seleucid hands into those of the Parthians. In 146 Greece itself became a Roman province, and in 133 Rome took over the Attalid kingdom of western Asia Minor. About 130 the Graeco-Bactrian kingdom fell to the Yueh-chi, and by about 110 or even earlier the Saca invasion of Greek India had begun. We might therefore expect to find some alteration in the first century B.C., and to a certain extent we do. Leaving the Roman provinces aside, there was a change in Egypt in the direction of mixture of blood and of social ideas; but Egypt was not a land of Greek cities and offers no analogy with Asia. There was, we shall see, a change in India; but the circumstances in India which mattered were special to that country and cannot be used as an argument for anything else. What concerns us at present is the Middle East under Parthian rule, and there, so far as can be seen, the loss by the Greeks of their political background had the somewhat unexpected result of instilling fresh vigour into them and leading to a stronger assertion of their Greek-hood, if we may judge by what happened in the sphere of literature and learning; and to talk much about Greek decadence prior at any rate to the Christian Era would, as I see it, give a very false impression.
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¹ In Hellenistic Civilisation.
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Greek decadence in Asia has usually been assumed off-hand as an inevitable result of intermarriage between the Greek and the Asiatic, and it may be well to look at this question of mixed marriages. When we talk of the unfortunate consequences of mixed marriages as they affect the children we are usually thinking of the mating of the European with some totally different stock, for example the negro. Such a thing did not, and could not, come within the purview of the Greeks of the Middle East: intermarriage between Greeks and the Asiatic peoples there had much more resemblance to intermarriage between members of two European peoples to-day, though the analogy goes a little too far. But, even so, long-continued intermarriage on any scale would have resulted in the absorption by Greeks of non-Greek ideas and outlook. With Greek settlements scattered throughout Asia, there must always have been occasional mixed marriages, marriages of inclination; but that is unimportant when one is considering the race generally, and the question is, how much intermarriage was there? The answer once given was that it must from the first have been, if not universal, at any rate widespread, the evidence adduced being Alexander’s settlers and a couple of sentences in two speeches in Livy purported to be made by Roman generals to their troops before action.¹ I need not linger over this, for no one to-day would quote those particular speeches as evidence for anything: they are Livy’s own dramatisation of what he thought would be useful arguments to put into the mouths of Roman consuls engaged in screwing up their men’s morale; and in fact Livy himself in a more serious speech, that of the Rhodians before the Senate in 190, has recorded a precisely opposite view (p. 37 n. 2). Alexander’s settlers in the East certainly married native women;² but by 301 their numbers had been greatly reduced by Peithon’s massacre (p. 72) and by the long wars of the Successors, and the settlement of Asia as we know it was essentially Seleucid. To-day, I suppose, the evidence adduced would more probably be the inscriptions from Doura,¹ which reveal some mixed families and also, beside the Greek names, a welter of non-Greek names in the city, drawn from half the languages and religions in Asia. That these inscriptions give a picture of a city in decay is true enough; but they belong to the first and second centuries A.D., and the picture they give is of a Parthian rather than of a Greek city. Doura had once, no doubt, been a Greek polis. But the Doura we know was not exactly a Greek city under Parthian rule, like Susa or Seleuceia; the Parthians had occupied and rebuilt it² as a frontier post towards Rome, and much of Greek civic and family life alike had broken down in the process. It may be doubted whether Doura is much evidence for anything but itself, though it affords certain material which will be noticed later (pp. 37 sq.); but with what happened at that late time this book is not really concerned, and for the Hellenistic period we must look for other indications.
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¹ Livy XXXVI, 17, 5 (191 B.C.): Syri et Asiatici Graeci, vilissima genera hominum et servituti nata; XXXVIII, 17, 11 (189 B.C.): Macedones, qui Alexandriam in Aegypto, qui Seleuciam ac Babyloniam, quique alias sparsas per orbem terrarum colonias habent, in Syros, Parthos, Aegyptios degenerarunt. Note ‘Parthos’; it took some courage to write that after Crassus and Antony. Servituti nata is merely taken from Aristotle, Pol. III, 14, 1285 a l. 21 (cf. I, 2, 1252 b l. 9), Asiatics are slaves by nature; written before Alexander.
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² V. Chapot (Mélanges Glotz I, 1932, p. 179 n. 3) has attributed to me the amazing statement that Alexander sent out (fit expédier) new colonists, especially women. What I did say (CAH VI p. 429) was that he ‘probably meant to send out further settlers, and above all European women’. Only he died.
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¹ SEG II, 754–824 (= Cumont, Fouilles pp. 355 sqq.); VII, 331–800.
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² Beside the Reports, cf. N. C. Debevoise, Amer. J. of Semitic Languages XLVII, 1931, p. 73.
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One point is that Greeks, with their dominant civilisation and language, could and did absorb a good deal of foreign blood without losing their Greekhood.³ Cyrene, for example, was a great Greek city—no one will deny the title to the city of Callimachus and Eratosthenes—but all the original Greek settlers had taken Libyan wives, and the Greek women of Cyrene and Barca continued to observe some of the taboos of their Libyan ancestresses.⁴ Miletus was a great Greek city, but it was full of Carian blood. No one calls Themistocles a half-breed, or that great organiser Antiochus I, but both had foreign mothers. The saying that nationality depends chiefly on the mother is at best barely a half-truth. What happened at Cyrene must have happened to Alexander’s settlers, for where the father is of a higher civilisation than the mother the children are apt to follow his language and civilisation; there is a notorious modern instance and that in an isolated community.⁵ In any case the Seleucid settlement, speaking generally, was undoubtedly a settlement of men and women. When late in the third century Miletus issued a request to the Greek world for colonists to resettle Myus, the men who came brought their women and children,¹ and the Seleucid settlement must have been of that nature; this is supported by the Susa inscriptions, in which, though late, every woman's name but one is Greek. No doubt a time was to come when many Greek communities in Asia, outside of Rome's sphere, would take in more foreign blood than they could absorb and would ultimately merge in the Asiatic world about them, but that process, though there must have been many local variations, did not begin till after the Christian Era and belongs essentially to a much later period than the Hellenistic.
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³ Note how Plato (Menexenus 245 D), through the mouth of Socrates, boasts that Athenians are pure Greek and not half-breeds at bottom (μιξοβάρβαροι) like some cities.
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⁴ See CAH IV p. 109.
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⁵ The children of the mutineers of the Bounty by Tahitian mothers and their descendants all spoke, and became, English.
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¹ Milet I, 3, nos. 34-93.
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Another point is that though Greeks had not the faintest objection to any kind of mixed marriage in itself, they had a great deal of pride in their Greekhood, and efforts to keep that Greekhood intact, both in blood and civilisation, can be traced: Polybius² bears witness to this generally for the early second century B.C., and Tacitus³ and Pliny⁴ are explicit about Seleuceia as late as the first century A.D. An inscription from Doura of the year 33-2 B.C. has revealed the existence of genearchs,⁵ heads of the gene (the genos may be called a clan, or family in the widest sense); they have been compared to sheikhs,⁶ but the inscription is too early for that, and in any case they had not always been sheikhs. For the succession law at Doura (see ante, pp. 8, 31), which dates from the inception of the colony and is primarily Athenian law, ignores altogether the claim which in Athenian law the genos would in certain contingencies have had to the land;⁷ there were therefore, it would seem, no gene at the start at Doura. They were adopted from the practice of old Greece after the settlement was well under way, and one of the functions of the genearch must have been to maintain the Greekhood of the *genos*, for *genos* and *genearch* cannot have been artificially introduced for any other purpose.¹ For even at Doura toward the end of the first century A.D., amid all the mixture of nationalities and beside the vulgarised Greek of the lower classes, the writing and speech of the upper class, the old Graeco-Macedonians, show (as has recently been said) that after two centuries of Parthian rule they still proudly clung to their nationality and their traditions.²
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² Livy XXXVII, 54, 18 (190 B.C., from Polybius): non, quae in solo [modo] antiquo sunt, Graecae magis urbes sunt quam coloniae earum, illinc quondam profectae in Asiam; nec terra mutata mutavit genus aut mores. Phrygia and Pisidia are explicitly included, ib. 54, 11. The speech need not be Polybius' own composition: the matter was important to Rhodes, and the gist of the actual speech of the Rhodian envoys might have been preserved by one of the Rhodian historians whom Polybius used.
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³ Tac. Ann. VI, 42, neque in barbarum corrupta, sed conditoris Seleuci retinens.
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⁴ Pliny VI, 122, libera hodie ac sui iuris Macedonumque moris.
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⁵ SEG II, 818; on the date see Bellinger and Welles, Yale Class. Stud. V, 1935, p. 133 n. 50.
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⁶ Cumont, Fouilles pp. xxii, 344.
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⁷ P. Koschaker, Sav. Z. XLVI, 1926, p. 300 n. 5.
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¹ On this aspect of the *genos* at Doura see F. Chapouthier, *L’influence grecque à Doura-Europos*, *RevEA* xxxiv, 1932, p. 74; and cf. Polybius’ reference to the *genos* above (p. 37 n. 2). That *γενεάρχης* was used at a much later time to translate a Persian term (Herzfeld, *Sakastan* p. 54) has no bearing on its original institution.
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² C. B. Welles, *Sav. Z.* lvi, 1936, p. 101: ‘Offenbar haben die Makedonen... noch an ihren stolzen Ursprung und ihren Traditionen treu festgehalten.’
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Finally, we have the rare blessing of one quite definite and conclusive piece of evidence on this matter. The well-informed writer, a Greek of Carrhae or Seleuceia, who was Plutarch’s main source for the Parthian chapters of his *Life of Crassus* and who wrote between 50 and 36 B.C. (see p. 51), recorded that the Parthian general Surenas had two half-breeds with him;³ these men are not only called by a special name, μιξέλληνες, ‘mixed Greeks’, but are definitely ranked with the ‘barbarians’; and they make *proskynesis* (obeisance) to Crassus, a Persian habit, not a Greek one. The very rare word μιξέλληνες (I have only found three other instances of it) had been used either as an expression of contempt⁴ or to denote some half-breed community who were not reckoned as Greeks and who might possess a special name of their own,⁵ like the Griquas in Cape Colony, who were not reckoned as Afrikanders; and this means that in Mesopotamia, or in some Mesopotamian cities, as late as 50 B.C., those men of mixed blood who were becoming orientalised were not reckoned as Greeks at all but formed a class apart with a special and contemptuous designation. The importance of this fact for the question in hand needs no discussion, and there I may leave it: in the Middle East the Greek of the first century B.C. did not essentially differ from the Greek of the third.
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³ Plut. *Crassus* 31: πρῶτοι δὲ τῶν βαρβάρων ἀπήντησαν αὐτῷ δύο μιξέλληνες, οἳ καὶ προσεκύνησαν κ.τ.λ. They *may* have been two of Surenas’ interpreters; but the *δίγλωττος* actually mentioned (*ib.* 28) was an ordinary interpreter for Latin.
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⁴ Polyb. 1, 67, 7: among the Carthaginian mercenaries were a number of μιξέλληνες, mostly deserters and slaves.
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⁵ Hellanicus, *F.Gr. Hist.* 1 p. 125 fr. 71 a, a community of μιξέλληνες on Lemnos called Σίντιες, whom Hellanicus refers to as Thracians; *Ditt.*³ 495 l. 110, a separate community in the territory of Olbia. The correlative term, μισοβάρβαροι, is used by Xenophon (*Hell.* 11, 1, 15) to describe the half-breeds who formed the population of Κεδρεῖαι in Caria.
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The sketch of Susa given in the last chapter purposely omitted what, to my thinking, is the most important thing about that city, the existence of Greek poems; one still recalls the thrill of learning that Greek poetry was being written east of the Tigris near the Christian Era. Four poems are now known. Three are metrical epigrams; one celebrates the already mentioned Epiphaneia of Apollo,¹ while the other two,² which are of fair length and praise a certain Zamaspes of Susa, furnish some pretty historical problems; the later of the two is dated, A.D. 1–2. The fourth poem³ is a lyric ode in an intricate metre addressed to Apollo by his Syrian title Mara, and is now thought to have been written not later than the first century B.C.⁴ The poem may be of importance for the history of religion—it has been thought to be an early expression of the later belief that all deities merge in the Sun—but what is material here is that it is an acrostic, the first letter of each line giving the author’s name, ‘Herodorus son of Artemon a Seleuceian on the Eulaeus’. A number of poems are known in the West which give the author’s name in an acrostic in a similar way;⁵ in this respect Herodorus’ ode is one of a class, and that shows once more that a single culture-sphere extended from the Adriatic to the Zagros. In view of the freedom of intercommunication across Asia in the Hellenistic period it would be astonishing had it been otherwise; we may find reason to suppose that in the second century B.C. that culture-sphere extended to Greek India.
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¹ SEG VII, 11.
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² *Ib.* 12, 13 (dated).
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³ *Ib.* 14.
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⁴ Cumont’s revised opinion, in a letter to M. P. Nilsson, *Arch. f. Religionswiss.* xxx, 1933, p. 164 n. 3.
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⁵ The initial letters of the first 23 lines of the ’Αναγραφὴ τῆς ’Ελλάδος of Dionysius son of Calliphon (*GGM* I p. 238; Dionysius 115 in *PW*) give Διονυσίου τοῦ Καλλιφῶντος; professedly early third century B.C. There are two acrostics, ll. 109–34 and 513–32, in the Οἰκουμένης περιήγησις of Dionysius (*GGM* II p. 103; Dionysius 94 in *PW* col. 917; Graf, *Akrostichis* in *PW*, who also mentions some others); Hadrian’s time. See further J. U. Powell, *New Chapters in the history of Greek literature*, third series, 1933 p. 202, who cites two good specimens from Kaibel, *Epigrammata Graeca* nos. 979 (late first century B.C.) and 1096. I may add two more: (1) the Hymn of Maximus from Talmis in Ethiopia (*BCH* 1894 p. 150; Kaibel, *Berlin SB* 1890 p. 781; G. Manteuffel, *Eos* xxxi, 1928, p. 181; cf. A. D. Nock, *Harvard Theolog. Rev.* xxvii, 1934, p. 59), where ll. 1–22 give Μαξίμος Δεκουρίων ἔγραψα; (2) a Latin Hymn to Apollo from Talmis, Bücheler, *Carm. Lat. Epigr.* 271, cf. Nock *op. cit.* p. 61.
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Susa brings us naturally to the Greek literature and learning of the Middle East;¹ science apart, it produced four serious writers of some importance, three of whom will be frequently referred to as sources in this book. The reproach has often been brought against the Seleucid empire that it produced little literature, which in one sense is true: when the Middle East began to produce writing which was worth while it was no longer Seleucid. What happened in Asia Minor and Syria under Seleucid rule happened in the Middle East also: all men of real importance migrated, as did Poseidonius of Apamea in Syria to Rhodes and Diogenes of Seleuceia to Athens, and most of the lesser men followed their example; two Stoics, Apollophanes of Antioch-Nisibis² and Apollodorus of Seleuceia,³ went to Athens to study under Ariston and Diogenes respectively; Agathocles of Seleuceia,⁴ called ‘the Babylonian’, lived at Cyzicus and wrote that city’s history; Euphranor of Seleuceia⁵ became a pupil and perhaps a successor of Timon the Sceptic. Only two men of any learning are known in the Seleucid period who did not move to some old Greek city: Apollophanes of Seleuceia,⁶ body-physician to Antiochus III, and a certain Diogenes of Seleuceia, a sort of Epicurean, probably identical with the voluminous writer of the same name who lived at Tarsus in the second century B.C. and who went from city to city improvising a lecture or a poem on any theme given him;⁷ he spent some time at the court of Alexander Balas, who collected philosophers and apparently found him amusing.¹ There had been much valuable scientific and geographical work done under the first two Seleucids, but of the known names Berossus was a Babylonian priest writing at the request of Antiochus I, and Megasthenes, Patrocles, and Demodamas were Greeks or Macedonians from the West who had no successors. The famous Stoic of the second century B.C., Diogenes of Seleuceia, called ‘the Babylonian’, became head of the Stoic school at Athens, and his reputation drew to that city many other Greeks from Asia²—Antipater and Archedemus from Tarsus, Boethus from Sidon, the before-mentioned Apollodorus from his own city of Seleuceia; among his pupils was Panaetius of Rhodes, who was to surpass his teacher. What is noticeable about this list, so far, is that even our very fragmentary tradition has remembered the names of six men from Seleuceia who were interested in learning in one way or another; the great city was not entirely given over to money-making, and one may recall that its councillors, even at a much later date, were chosen for wisdom as well as for wealth.³
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¹ No real study exists. There are brief sketches in V. Chapot, *Les destinées de l’Hellénisme au delà de l’Euphrate*, Mém. soc. nat. des antiquaires de France LXIII, 1904, pp. 241 sqq., and in Ed. Meyer, *Blüte und Niedergang des Hellenismus in Asien* 1925 pp. 24 sqq.
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² Susemihl I p. 75; v. Arnim, *Apollophanes* 13 in PW. Stephanus, s.v. ’Αντιόχεια no. 3, shows that his Antioch was Nisibis.
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³ Susemihl I p. 84. V. Arnim, *Apollodoros* 66 in PW, doubts his identity with ’A. ὁ ’Εφιλλος of Diog. Laert. VII, 39.
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⁴ Susemihl II p. 383; FHG IV p. 288. E. Schwartz, *Agathokles* 24 in PW, puts him before Alexander, which is impossible because (1) ‘the Babylonian’ means from Seleuceia, (2) fr. 8 treats the Aeneas legend, which makes him Hellenistic, and (3) Athen. XIV, 649 f (fr. 6) discusses a rare word used at Alexandria. If he was Zenodotus’ pupil he was third century B.C.
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⁵ Susemihl I pp. 115 n. 541, 116; v. Arnim, *Euphranor* 6 in PW.
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⁶ Polyb. V, 56, 58; Susemihl I p. 822; Wellmann, *Apollophanes* 15 in PW.
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⁷ Susemihl’s reason (II pp. 258-9) for identifying the two seems conclusive. V. Arnim, *Diogenes* 46 in PW, identifies Diogenes the Epicurean, known from Diogenes Laertius, with the writer of Tarsus, but makes a separate person of Diogenes of Seleuceia (ib. no. 47); it was however very common for a man to be attributed to two cities, meaning that he was born in one and worked in and probably became a citizen of the other; see Tarn, *Hell. Civ.* p. 80.
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¹ Athen. v, 211a sqq. The actual story of the singing girl may or may not be true, like that of the philosopher Persaeus and the singing girl; they rather suggest a cliché.
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² Diogenes and his pupils: Susemihl I pp. 82 sqq., II pp. 62 sqq.; primarily from Diogenes Laertius.
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³ Tac. Ann. VI, 42, opibus aut sapientia delecti.
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One other Greek who is earlier than the Parthian period must be noticed here, the grammarian Herodicus of Babylon;⁴ in his case this means Babylon and not Seleuceia (pp. 252 sq.). He migrated to Greece, and took part in the controversy between Aristarchus of Samothrace at Alexandria and Crates of Mallus at Pergamum; this dates him to the reign of Ptolemy VI Philometor, and that in turn shows that he must have been one of the settlers of Antiochus IV when that king refounded Babylon as a Greek city; he can hardly therefore be claimed as a Greek of the Middle East, but in his well-known epigram⁵ he said that he had two homes, Hellas and Babylon, which is further evidence that the Greek culture-sphere embraced Babylonia. His other writings were perhaps no great matter, but his epigram may have had the honour of being quoted in a poem attributed to Virgil,⁶ and it contains a most recondite allusion which will be of use in a later chapter (p. 253).
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⁴ Susemihl II p. 24, who put him too late; Gudemann, Herodikos in PW; Christ-Schmid, Gr. Literaturgesch. II, I, 1920, p. 271.
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⁵ Athen. v, 222a.
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⁶ In Catalepton II: Bücheler, Rh. Mus. XXXVIII, 1883, p. 507; Christ-Schmid loc. cit.; Gudemann op. cit. See however Susemihl’s argument against this, II p. 25
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So far, save for the Babylonian Berossus, no actual literary production in the Greek Middle East has been met with; and this corresponds to what happened in Syria, where native Greek literature only started with Meleager and Philodemus in the anarchy of the last Seleucids, while its effective period belongs entirely to the time when Syria was a province of the Roman empire.¹ But once the Middle East had become Parthian, a process completed when in 141 B.C. Seleuceia accepted the rule of Mithridates I, things began to change; it must be supposed that the loss of their political background called out in these Greeks a more strenuous assertion of their Greekhood, a matter quite irreconcilable with any belief in their decadence or orientalisation. Migration to the West seems to have ceased; perhaps Syria under the last Seleucids and Greece and Asia Minor under the Roman Republic were not so attractive to literary men as they had been. So far we have had names from two cities only besides Seleuceia, Antioch-Nisibis and Babylon; a number of others now come into the picture—Susa, Artemita, Antioch in Mesene (Charax Spasinu), Seleuceia on the Persian Gulf, very likely Carrhae; and it must be emphasised once more that we only possess chance fragments from a lost tradition. The process began, in the generation that saw the Parthian conquest, when Diogenes' pupil Archedemus returned from Athens to Babylonia—the tradition says to Babylon, but it must mean Diogenes' home city, Seleuceia—and established there a Stoic school ‘with succession’,² that is, a parallel in the East to the schools at Athens and Rhodes (if the latter yet existed) in the West; how long the succession lasted is unknown, but Plutarch’s few jejune words conceal what must have been one of the most important events in the history of the Greek East. A generation later a rhetorician, Amphicrates, visited Seleuceia, and the people begged him to stay and set up a school of rhetoric there;³ the impertinence of the unimportant man’s reply, ‘A dish will not hold a dolphin’, is not bettered by it being a quotation from Euripides,⁴ but what is known of Amphicrates’ style, the Asianic style at its worst,⁵ may suggest that Seleuceia did not lose much. But though this story presupposes that in the second century B.C. there was no school of rhetoric at Seleuceia, it seems certain, from the correct Greek and good style of Greek scribes down to a late period (and perhaps one should add from the emergence of Greek historians, p. 44), that under Parthian rule proper training in grammar and rhetoric could be obtained in some of the Greek cities.¹
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¹ See Cumont’s brilliant account, *CAH* XI pp. 640 sqq.
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² Plut. *Mor.* 605 B: εἰς τὴν Πάρθων μεταστὰς ἐν Βαβυλῶνι Στωϊκὴν διαδοχὴν κατέλιπε.
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³ Plut. *Lucullus* 22; early first century B.C.
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⁴ Dindorf, *Poetae scenici Graeci* p. 712 fr. 1062 (237). I have not seen it given elsewhere.
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⁵ Susemihl II p. 373.
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¹ M. Rostovtzeff, *CAH* XI p. 125; cf. C. B. Welles, *Sav. Z.* LVI, 1936, pp. 100-1.
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Production began in the second century with the astronomer Seleucus,² of Seleuceia-on-the-Erythraean-Sea,³ which stood on the north-east shore of the Persian Gulf somewhere between Charax Spasinu at the mouth of the Tigris and Antioch in Persis (p. 17) on the Gulf of Bushire. Strabo calls him a Chaldean,⁴ but it is incredible, if so, that Greek tradition did not preserve his Babylonian name, as it did that of every other Babylonian astronomer it knew—Kidenas, Sudines, Naburian. Those Greeks, like Artemidorus of Parium, Epigenes of Byzantium, Apollonius of Myndus, who came from the West to study astronomy and astrology in the Babylonian schools used to call themselves Chaldeans as a sort of title of honour;⁵ and this no doubt is what the word means, though it is always possible that the Greeks of Seleuceia on the Persian Gulf were called Chaldeans to distinguish them from those of Seleuceia on the Tigris who were called Babylonians, the designation in either case being territorial; but however that may be, Seleucus was almost certainly a Greek. His precise date cannot be given, but he must at any rate have overlapped the Parthian conquest. He spent his life maintaining, against Hipparchus, the theory of Aristarchus of Samos that the earth went round the sun;⁶ but apparently he had not mathematics enough to correct (as Hipparchus could and should have corrected) Aristarchus' mistaken belief that the earth's orbit was a circle instead of an ellipse. He studied the tides of the Persian Gulf, and his theory of *how* the moon made the tides¹ is of great interest, for he seems to have been groping after something which might with luck have led him to the discovery of gravitation, especially as Babylonian astronomers already had some idea of the sun's attraction;² but more important for my purpose is the light which he and his work throw upon the nature of this forgotten Greek city on the Persian Gulf.
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² The classical references are set out in Susemihl I p. 763; for modern literature see J. Bidez, *Les écoles chaldéennes sous Alexandre et les Séleucides*, Mélanges Capart 1935 pp. 81-2.
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³ Fr. Cumont, *Syria* 1927 p. 83 (quite certain). Modern writers have usually called it Seleuceia on the Tigris, as W. Kroll in PW Supp. V still does.
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⁴ Strabo XVI, 739.
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⁵ Bidez op. cit. p. 76. Bidez lays stress on the astrology; but Vettius Valens (ed. Kroll, 1908), *Anth.* IX, 11, p. 353, names Apollonius as an astronomical source in company with Kidenas, Sudines, and Hipparchus, and the fragments of Epigenes given by P. Schnabel, *Berossos* pp. 109 sqq., are serious enough; it rather looks as if astrology were only a second string.
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⁶ Plut. *Mor.* 1006 C.
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¹ Aëtius p. 383, Diels; see Tarn, *Hell. Civ.*² p. 270.
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² Bidez *op. cit.* p. 78.
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I come now to the four writers of the Middle East in the Parthian period who are of importance to the modern student, three historians and a geographer. The earliest in time seems to have been the historian Apollodorus of Artemita,³ a Greek city east of the Tigris where the main road eastward from Seleuceia bifurcated, the more important branch going northward by Ecbatana to Bactria and north-western India, the other going southward by Susa to Seistan and the lower Indus. Apollodorus wrote a history of Parthia in at least four books,⁴ which included the story of Greek Bactria down to the nomad conquest and also the Greek conquest of India; how much more it may have included cannot be said, but the story of the Bactrian Greeks seems only to have been incidental to the story of Parthia,⁵ just as a history of England must include a good deal of the history of France. He had evidently travelled widely,⁶ and he was presumably competent, as he was Strabo's regular source for the Farther East in the second century B.C. after Eratosthenes ended; there is much more of him in Strabo than the named fragments,⁷ and his account of the Greek advance to the Ganges and Pātaliputra can now be compared with an early Indian account (App. 4 and Chap. IV). His date must fall between the conquest of Bactria, c. 130 B.C. (Chap. VII), and the death of Mithridates II of Parthia in 87 B.C. The latter terminus is certain from this, that the classical writers we now possess know practically nothing of Parthia between Mithridates II, down to whose reign they had the Greek historians of the East, and the completion of the reconsolidation of the empire by Phraates III in 66 B.C., in whose reign contact with Rome was well established, Parthian history thenceforth running regularly in Roman channels. The Parthian king Sinatruces (77–70 B.C.) is indeed just mentioned from the Roman side when he made contact with Rome,¹ but otherwise this period is a blank,² merely characterised as one of confused civil wars;³ only in modern times have the bare names of the forgotten kings who filled it been recovered from cuneiform documents. There is no reasonable doubt that Apollodorus belonged to the flourishing period of the reign of Mithridates II, somewhere round about 100 B.C., the period that saw the Parthian survey of their empire (p. 55), made of course by Greeks; as two of Strabo’s named citations from Apollodorus deal with distances,⁴ it is conceivable that he himself had something to do with the survey.
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³ Fragments in *FHG* IV pp. 308 *sq.* (not yet in *F. Gr. Hist.*). Münzel, *Apollodoros* 58 in *PW*; Susemihl II p. 385.
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⁴ Fr. 7 = Athen. xv, 682c.
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⁵ This follows from Strabo's phrasing, xv, 686 = fr. 6: 'Α. ὁ τὰ Παρθικὰ ποιή-σας, μεμνημένος καὶ τῶν τὴν Βακτριανὴν ἀποστησάντων Ἑλλήνων. This fragment as given in *FHG* is far too long, and should stop at ὑφ' ἑαυτοῦ ἔχειν; the rest (as the sense shows) is Strabo, who is here citing Aristobulus (p. 144 n. 3).
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⁶ Strabo XI, 508, where the writer on Parthia who knew more of countries and peoples than the Alexander-historians *because he had seen more* is obviously Apollodorus. Münzel rightly made him travel.
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⁷ Two writers have recently, and justly, emphasised the fact that the named fragments of a lost historian are no more than a starting point for reconstruction: H. Strasburger, *Ptolemaios und Alexander* 1934 p. 16: E. Kornemann, *Die Alexander-geschichte des Königs Ptolemaios I von Aegypten* 1935 p. 42.
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¹ On the mention of him in Pseudo-Lucian, *Macrobii* 219, see p. 54 n. 4.
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² G. Rawlinson in 1873 headed the tenth chapter of his *Sixth Great Oriental Monarchy* ‘Dark period of Parthian history’. Except for the mere names from the cuneiforms that is still true.
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³ Plut. *Lucullus* 36; cf. Trogus, *Prol.* XLII.
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⁴ Strabo XI, 519 = fr. 3; XI, 514, omitted in *FHG*.
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The second historian on our list is more important than Apollodorus, and we shall meet him pretty often in this book. It is certain that he is not identical with Apollodorus; the two have different accounts of the nomad conquest of Bactria,⁵ and while Apollodorus called a certain nomad people Asii, the substantival form, our historian used the (Iranian) adjectival form Asiani (see pp. 284, 292). Neither his name nor his city is known; his very existence has been forgotten, and I have to refer to him throughout by the clumsy appellation of ‘Trogus’ source’, meaning the source used by Trogus Pompeius for Parthia and the Farther East. But he survived in other works besides Trogus, and there is no doubt that he wrote a comprehensive history of the whole of the Greek and Parthian East.¹ I have already mentioned in the Introduction the way in which the fragments of our tradition tend to combine into a whole, like the fragments in the early third century B.C. Now this phenomenon in the West was certainly due to the presence behind the broken fragments of our tradition of a great lost historian, Hieronymus of Cardia, and similarly there must once have been in the East, behind our broken fragments, a definite and a comprehensive historian, who can be no one but ‘Trogus’ source’. For it is, I think, a sound canon of historical method in dealing with ancient history that sources are not to be multiplied beyond necessity; and this is especially true of the Farther East, where one cannot postulate many Greek historians. From ‘Trogus’ source’ then must ultimately come also, but not at first hand, the notices of the Farther East in Plutarch and many scattered items in late Hellenistic writers; and on one point the parallel with the influence of Hieronymus holds close. Hieronymus gave to the world the gazetteer or satrapy-list of Alexander’s empire,² and it can only have been ‘Trogus’ source’ who gave to the world the satrapy list, of which such valuable fragments remain in Claudius Ptolemy (Chap. VI), of the Indian empire as it existed under either Demetrius or Menander; in the case of each historian there is the same doubt whether he reproduced an official document or whether, as a historian might, he made the list himself.
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⁵ Sections 2 and 3 of Strabo XI, 511 are Apollodorus beyond question, though he is not named; for there is no alternative.
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¹ Justin XLIII, 1, 1: Parthicis orientalibusque ac totius propemodum orbis rebus explicitis. Said of Trogus; but it applies to the source he was following.
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² Diod. XVIII, 5 and 6; Tarn, *JHS* XLIII, 1923, p. 93.
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Certain facts in our historian’s life can be ascertained. He had travelled widely; he had seen and admired the first Parthian capital, Dara in Apavarktikene,³ and he had spent some considerable time in India. The proof of this is a curious one. Chandragupta the Maurya seized the throne of Magadha soon after Alexander’s death in 323, and if, as usually supposed, his helper Parvataka was Porus, it must have been before 318, by which year Porus had been killed by Eudamus;⁴ about 321, the last year in which Porus is mentioned as alive,⁵ is likely enough.⁶ But Justin, *i.e.* ‘Trogus’ source’, says that Chandragupta got his kingdom at the time when Seleucus was laying the foundations of his future greatness;¹ that is the year 312, the year in which Seleucus returned to Babylon, the starting-point of the Seleucid Era.² Now one Indian sect, the Jains, had a version of their own about Chandragupta’s accession which made the year either 312 or 313 (the tradition varies);³ ‘Trogus’ source’ therefore knew of the Jain dating, and can only have got it from some Greek in India who read Jain literature, unless, as is quite conceivable, he could read Sanscrit and Prakrit for himself (p. 381). For Plutarch’s story about Menander⁴ shows that ‘Trogus’ source’ not only understood what a stupa was (p. 135 n. 3) and not only knew the story of Buddha’s death as told in the Book of the Great Decease, but also knew that stupas were raised to dead Chakravartins (see on this p. 264); he knew therefore a great deal about India and must have lived there for some time; probably to him too goes back the introduction into Western literature of the name of the Pāndus of the Mahābhārata (App. 19). Indeed it seems to me an open question whether he was a Greek of Parthia who had lived for some time in India, or whether he was not rather a Greek of India who, perhaps late in life, settled in one of the Greek cities of Parthia to write his book.
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³ Justin XLI, 5, 2-4 is obviously from the description of one who had seen it.
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⁴ Diod. XIX, 14, 8.
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⁵ Id. XVIII, 39, 6.
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⁶ This is the date taken in *CHI* p. 698.
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¹ Justin xv, 4, 20: Sic adquisito regno Sandracottus ea tempestate qua Seleucus futurae magnitudinis fundamenta iaciebat Indiam possidebat cum quo facta pactione Seleucus...in bellum Antigoni descendit. The form of the second mention of Seleucus shows that ea tempestate goes with adquisito regno and not with Indiam possidebat, as taken by Sourindra Nath Ray, *IHQ* xi, 1935, p. 211 and by H. C. Raychaudhuri, *Indian Culture* ii, 1936, p. 559, who are using McCrindle’s translation, not always a safe guide. But it was a letter from Mr S. N. Ray in 1934 which set me on enquiry.
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² One cannot take it as 321 (Ray *op. cit.*) or hesitate between the dates (Raychaudhuri *op. cit.*) for two reasons: (1) because in the preceding sentence in Justin Sandracottus gets his kingdom after a war with the Macedonian satraps, and the last one, Peithon of Gandhāra, did not leave India till 316; and (2) because from 316 to 312 Seleucus was a homeless fugitive, a captain in Ptolemy’s service who owned nothing but his sword. Incidentally, the passage proves that the Seleucid Era known to ‘Trogus’ source’, *i.e.* that used in Bactria and India, was the Macedonian form which began in autumn 312.
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³ *CHI* p. 698; N. K. Bhattasali, *JRAS* 1932 p. 273, who quotes some Jain works, p. 284. The two datings mean that Chandragupta seized the crown of Magadha c. 321 and completed the conquest of his empire by 312; compare the two dates for the accession of Phraates III, Tarn, *CAH* ix p. 587.
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⁴ Plut. *Mor.* 821 D, E; not at first hand, for he makes Menander king of Bactria. See Chap. vi pp. 249, 264.
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As regards Parthia,⁵ his history ran from the origins to the death of Mithridates II in 87 B.C., for the panegyric on that monarch epitomised by Justin¹ must have come from him and have been the formal conclusion of his book, just as Arrian’s panegyric on Alexander is the formal conclusion of his Anabasis; it shows also that he was living in Parthia when he wrote. Further down than 87 B.C. his history cannot have gone, for the reasons given in Apollodorus’ case, but equally the panegyric could hardly have been written during Mithridates’ lifetime; the date of the completion of his history may then provisionally be supposed to have been shortly after 87 B.C. As regards Bactria, it went down to the end of the nomad conquest, with an account of the nomads:² the latest incident mentioned by Trogus is the ‘perishing’ of the Sacaraucae, of which the date is discussed elsewhere (p. 306),³ and our historian is not likely to have continued the story of Bactria under Kushan rule. In India, the latest thing mentioned in Trogus’ prologues is the *res gestae* of Menander,⁴ though the Plutarch passage mentions Menander’s death and the distribution of his ashes; but the history may not have stopped there, for though Trogus mentions nothing further, his prologues are too brief to prove a negative. Menander died between 150 and 145 (p. 226), and if the provisional placing of the completion of our historian’s book soon after 87 B.C. be correct (and it cannot be *earlier*), then his sojourn in India must have been a good deal later than 145; he was in India at some time during the reigns of the two kings who divided northern India in the last third of the second century (see Chap. VIII), Antialcidas, who ruled everything between the Hindu Kush and the Jhelum from *c.* 130 to *c.* 100 or possibly rather later, and Menander’s son Strato I, who ruled the Greek possessions east of the Jhelum from Menander’s death to *c.* 100 B.C. or a little later.
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⁵ From here onward I am compelled to assume that the reader knows what comes later, especially Chapter viii.
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¹ Justin XLII, 2, 3.
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² Trogus, *Prol.* XLI, XLII.
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³ Probably it followed upon the Parthian capture of Merv, between 124 and 115 B.C.
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⁴ Trogus, *Prol.* XLI.
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There is a passage in Plutarch⁵ which bears all this out; the collocation of names, if not the whole passage, must go back to ‘Trogus’ source’, since he is the only possible source for the very peculiar knowledge displayed, and the passage shows that our historian included at least a sketch of the period after Menander’s death in his history and that my provisional date for the completion of that history is approximately correct. Plutarch says that, but for Alexander’s career, five Greek cities in the Orient would not have existed, namely Alexandria in Egypt, Seleuceia on the Tigris, Prophthasia, Bucephala, and Alexandria of the Caucasus. Prophthasia (i.e. Alexandria in Seistan, p. 14) is never mentioned elsewhere subsequently to its foundation, and this is the one hint in Greek literature of its importance. The only way to make sense of this perplexing list is to suppose that the last three names are *in pari materia* with the first two, and that what are being given are the capitals, or chief Greek cities, of different kingdoms at some particular period; and this seems to be true. Alexandria of the Caucasus (i.e. Alexandria-Kapisa, see App. 6) was the capital of the western Greek kingdom under Antialcidas when, *ex hypothesi*, ‘Trogus’ source’ was in India; after Antialcidas’ death his kingdom was divided (Chap. VIII). Bucephala appears later as (probably) the capital of the eastern Greek kingdom in India (p. 326); either the change from Menander’s capital Sāgala was already made by Strato, or else Bucephala is given for the same reason as Seleuceia—the official capital Sāgala was an Indian city and not a foundation of Alexander. Seleuceia is given as being the greatest Greek city in western (Arsacid) Parthia, the actual capital in the first century B.C., Ecbatana, having been an Oriental capital long before Alexander. Finally, Prophthasia was the capital of the Suren’s realm of Seistan, eastern Parthia (Chap. VIII), which was later to expand into Indo-Parthia; the Suren cannot well have become a (virtually) independent ruler till Mithridates II died, but the troubles in which that monarch’s kingdom broke up had started some years before his death,¹ and we must suppose that ‘Trogus’ source’ contained some allusion to the new kingdom. What are being given, then, are the four civilised kingdoms which at the beginning of the first century B.C. occupied what had once been Greek Asia east of the Euphrates, nomads being omitted; and that this was written soon after 87 B.C. is clinched by the extraordinary fact that the Greek city which was only second to Alexandria in Egypt, the Seleucid capital Antioch on the Orontes, is not mentioned. To one writing soon after 87 the omission of Antioch was only too natural, for it was no longer capital of anything; the surviving fragments of what had been the Seleucid realm in northern Syria were in complete anarchy, and in 83
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⁵ *De Alexandri fortuna aut virtute* 328 F; not at first hand, as is shown by the blunder Σογδιανή for Δραγγιανή (or conceivably Σακαστηνή).
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¹ Tarn, *CAH* IX pp. 586-7.
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Tigranes of Armenia was to step in. Everything fits; and there is certainly no other period in history that it *will* fit.
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The history we are considering was then completed shortly after 87 B.C.; and the *terminus post quem non* is a simple matter. Ptolemy’s (temporary) kingdom of ‘Indo-Scythia’ must be from ‘Trogus’ source’ (p. 233); it can be dated to about the generation from *c.* 110 to *c.* 80 B.C., and as the Sacas were in Taxila before but only shortly before *c.* 77, the latest date for the beginning of their advance up the Indus from Abiria would be *c.* 80.¹ But that advance was unknown to Ptolemy, *i.e.* to our historian; the *terminus post quem non* for the completion of his history is therefore *c.* 80 B.C. On the other hand, the Parsii had reached Kabul at some time prior to 87 B.C. and Ptolemy’s knowledge of their presence in the Paropamisadae (Chap. VIII), which *might* come from our historian, is consistent with the above dating. The limits of the lost history we have been considering are therefore now pretty well blocked out,² and the date of its completion is to be put round about 85 B.C.
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¹ See Chapter VI p. 233, Chapter VIII pp. 320 *sqq.*, and Appendix 16.
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² The general account of the Parthians in Justin XLI, 1 to 3, is partly from ‘Trogus’ source’ and partly Roman material; I need not analyse it here.
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It is unfortunate for us that our knowledge of this historian depends to a certain extent on Justin’s Epitome of Trogus. Certainly Justin on the East is not quite the same thing as Justin on the West, because he ultimately goes back or may go back to a good source and one has to weigh carefully what he says. But he has the same faults; he does not always summarise correctly, he has no interest in history as such and omits whole chapters of Trogus on the Farther East which to us would be invaluable, for Trogus himself gave a comprehensive account;³ and accuracy to him is of small importance compared with the chance of drawing a moral lesson. Certainly ‘Trogus’ source’ has had hard measure from Fortune. He may not have been a great historian; but he is a great loss.
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³ Justin XLIII, 1, 1 (see p. 46 n. 1), and the Prologues.
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The third historian of the Middle East is the unknown Greek who was Plutarch’s main source in his Life of Crassus for Crassus’ Parthian expedition and who has already been cited. He has been called a Greek of Mesopotamia,⁴ and certainly the number of names which he gives of citizens of Carrhae, and his knowledge of the advice given by two of them to Publius Crassus in the battle just before his death,¹ point strongly to Carrhae as his city; on the other hand, his dislike of Surenas and his account of Surenas’ mock triumph at Seleuceia, which suggests an eye-witness, may point to Seleuceia; one cannot say for certain. His date is fixed within narrow limits: he wrote after the battle of Carrhae in 53 B.C., with which he was clearly contemporary, and before Antony’s Parthian expedition of 36 B.C., which he could hardly have avoided mentioning more than once had he known of it. His work, so far, has not been shown to be part of any comprehensive history;² it may have been simply a monograph on the Roman invasion of Parthia, just as Demetrius of Byzantium had once written a monograph in thirteen books on the Galatian invasion of Asia Minor. As a historian he must take high rank. He is very well-informed, and gives us a better account of the battle of Carrhae and its preliminaries than we possess of most battles of antiquity; also we know what *both* sides were doing. He is quite impartial, in that he dislikes the Romans and Surenas³ about equally, but he does not belittle either Surenas’ military genius or the dignity of Crassus’ end; and there is some interesting psychology, though that might partly be Plutarch. The appearance in a Greek city of the Middle East about 50 B.C. of a man with such a large measure of the historical sense throws a good deal of light on the nature of those communities.
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⁴ K. Regling, *De belli Parthici Crassiani fontibus* 1899 pp. 8–11, first effectively investigated this writer and called him an Asiatic Greek, but brought in the now discredited Timagenes theory; W. Otto, *Hyrodes* in PW, rightly discarded Timagenes and said a Greek of Mesopotamia.
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¹ Plut. *Crassus* 25, Hieronymus and Nicomachus.
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² I am not going to speculate on the identity of the unknown of Livy IX, 18, 6.
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³ In *CAH* IX p. 611 I said Rome and *Parthia*; I think now it was not Parthia but Surenas. See *Crassus* 21, the silly story of the train of concubines with his army, the whole point being mobility; 24, his effeminacy and foppishness; 30, he tricks Crassus; 32, the shameful mock triumph (note θηλύτητα, answering θηλύτητα in 24); 33, the mutilation of Crassus’ body. He does not belittle Surenas’ real qualities (21), but adds what he can to his discredit; while in 21 he defends Orodes for taking the Armenian front himself.
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It is however advisable to be sure that Plutarch’s source *was* a Greek and not, as has been suggested, king Artavasdes of Armenia,⁴ which if true would mean that a king of Armenia in the first century B.C. might possess the historical sense, a thing difficult to believe. The theory has never been examined. Plutarch says that Artavasdes wrote Greek tragedies and histories;¹ it would be strange, if he himself were using one of those histories, that he did not here say so; but it is not impossible, and in fact most of the story will fit Artavasdes as well as a Greek. The historian’s dislike of Surenas fits him better, for he was the brother-in-law of Orodes’ son Pacorus and as such would sympathise with the party of the nobility whom Pacorus represented rather than with that of the common man who looked to Surenas;² but it is not conclusive, for any Greek might have disliked Surenas, who had taken Seleuceia when Mithridates III stood a siege in it. On the other hand the account of Surenas’ mock triumph at Seleuceia seems to be from an eye-witness; but Artavasdes could have got the story from one. Plutarch’s statement that the Arsacid kings were the sons of Greek courtesans³ would of course be conclusive against Pacorus’ brother-in-law if it came from the source we are examining; but it is certainly a much later insertion, possibly Plutarch’s own, for the earlier Arsacids married their half-sisters or other princesses, and the first king whose mother was a Greek concubine was Vologases I, A.D. 57–77; the statement cannot be earlier than his reign.⁴
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⁴ Put forward, very briefly, by A. H. L. Heeren, *Vermischte historische Schriften* III, 1821, p. 412. M. Cumont suggested to me that I ought to examine this possibility, which modern writers dismiss offhand.
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¹ Plut. *Crassus* 33.
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² On the two parties in Parthia see Tarn, *CAH* x pp. 49, 50, 71.
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³ End of *Crassus* 32; this carries with it the abuse of Surenas just before.
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⁴ So the mistaken statement in *Crassus* 17 that Seleuceia was always hostile to the Parthians must be later than that city’s revolt, A.D. 37–43.
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We want some decisive point, and there appear to be two, both decisive against Artavasdes. One is that our historian, as already noticed, knew of the advice given by two named citizens of Carrhae to Publius Crassus in the battle just before his death; it seems impossible that Artavasdes could have known this. The second comes in the story of the performance of a scene from the Bacchae at Artavasdes’ Court,⁵ when Crassus’ head was brought in and the Agave, Jason of Tralles, took it in his arms instead of Pentheus’ mask. This story is the reason why Artavasdes was ever thought of, for he was there and our Greek could not have been; yet it seems decisive against him. Our historian shows that the choragus altered half a line of Euripides to agree better with the new situation.⁶ Granted that Artavasdes would have read the Bacchae, a king could hardly be such a professed and close student of the play that he would detect, and record, this trifling and unimportant alteration in the performance of a work in a foreign language. The people who did notice it would be the Greek actors, who knew the text by heart. Among the actors all the limelight falls on Jason, the only one mentioned by name, and he must be the source of the whole account; probably it was his best story for years. He was a strolling player; any Greek might have met him or sought him out. But though Artavasdes (not necessarily in person) gave Jason a present of money, would the king of Armenia at the same time have sought personally from a strolling actor another and more minute version of an incident which he himself had just witnessed and perhaps even arranged? I do not think so.
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Linked texts (5)
- Naturalis historia — C. Plinius Secundus, Latin
- Ab urbe condita — T. Livius, Latin
- Pāṭaliputra
- Alexandria
- Sagala