The Greeks in Bactria and India c9.s2.2

c9.s2.2

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.