The Greeks in Bactria and India c9.s2.101

c9.s2.101

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.