The Greeks in Bactria and India c9.s2.126

c9.s2.126

Isidore wrote a geographical account of the Parthian empire, which is lost, and the invaluable little work called Παρθικοὶ Σταθμοί, ‘Parthian Stations’, which has survived; it is a sort of guide to the two great routes across the empire, the one running from Zeugma on the Euphrates by Seleuceia to the Parthian outpost of Merv, the other going south from Merv by Herat to Seistan and thence north-east to Alexandria-Ghazni,⁵ ‘to which Parthian rule extended’. This had been so under Mithridates II, but was not true for Isidore’s own day; the vassal-kingdom of the Surens in Seistan created by Mithridates II had become practically independent on that king’s death in 87 B.C., and Alexandria-Ghazni—perhaps all Arachosia—was in the hands of the Spalirises-Azes Saca (Parsii) dynasty (Chap. VIII), whence Isidore’s ‘White India’. Isidore is, then, reproducing an older document of the reign of Mithridates II, and there can be no doubt what it was, for ‘Stathmoi’ was almost a technical term for a book founded on an official survey; he is reproducing part of an official survey of the Parthian empire made in the great period of Mithridates II, say *c.* 110–100 B.C., after Parthia had acquired Merv (by 115 B.C., p. 281), no doubt in imitation or correction of the Seleucid survey.¹ He has added some instructive notes of his own; but it is the official survey which accounts for his peculiar precision in the use of technical terms—*polis* (city), *kome* (village), *komopolis* (a native town too large for a village but without Greek *polis*-organisation). We shall blunder sadly if we do not distinguish the survey he is commenting on from his own comments made the better part of a century later.