The Greeks in Bactria and India c9.s2.14

c9.s2.14

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