The Greeks in Bactria and India c9.s2.205

c9.s2.205

Many causes can be adduced for the ultimate failure of the Seleucid settlement of Asia, east of the Roman boundary. Some provinces were not adapted for the kind of life Greeks liked to live, and there is a hint of homesickness in the recurring complaint in Strabo that this or that district produced everything needful *except olives*. Very many districts had no access to the sea, and a Greek without the sea was a lost creature. All the rulers knew this. This was why the Seleucids, following out one of Alexander’s ideas, took such trouble to colonise the inner Persian Gulf in spite of the heat; even our all but vanished tradition reveals nine cities or settlements there: in the east Antioch in Persis (Bushire), Seleuceia on the Erythraean Sea, and Antioch-Charax; on the Arabian side Arethusa, Larisa, Chalcis, Artemita; and two whose situation is unknown, Carrhae and Trapezus.² This too may be one reason why, in India, Demetrius was to lead the advance to the sea himself but was to entrust that to the capital, Pātaliputra, to a general. Again, the Greek race was getting old and very civilised, too old and too civilised perhaps for successful colonisation. And though the number of Greeks east of the Euphrates must have been much greater than used to be supposed, there were not enough for ruling so vast a country permanently, while the Seleucid kings for over a century dissipated their strength in a senseless struggle with Egypt, though, to be fair, Ptolemy II was the original aggressor. Yet again, the Greek colonisation began at the wrong end for inland districts: it began with cities and potential cities, as though the whole country had been sea-coast. But a land, at any rate in antiquity, belonged essentially to those who worked the land; conquerors might come and go over their heads, but at the end the children of the soil remained. To make a really permanent settlement the Greeks would have had to go on the land, as did the Angles and Saxons in Britain; that they never did, and once the cities had lost their political background and nexus and had become enclaves in the Parthian empire the end was certain. Some cities made a good fight for their Greekhood and delayed the end for centuries; but it had to come, and the destruction of Seleuceia by the Romans¹ in A.D. 165 may have been a symbol rather than a cause.