The Greeks in Bactria and India c9.s2.209

c9.s2.209

I feel no certainty, however, that (putting India aside for the present) the Oriental religions had as much to do with the Greek failure as has sometimes been supposed. One sees the strength of the appeal made by those religions when they invaded the Mediterranean world, but it is only an assumption that they would have exercised the same influence over Greeks who, far from the Mediterranean, were fighting to maintain their Greekhood. Of course these Greeks worshipped Asiatic deities; in a polytheistic society you naturally worshipped the god who knew the way of the land. And of course many of the names of Greek deities met with do not mean Greek deities at all: Artemis usually meant the mother-goddess in one of her numerous forms, Heracles might be the rider-god of the cave shrine at Kerefto,¹ and so on; even in a temple at Persepolis the Persian gods received Greek names.² But Greeks had worshipped an Asiatic mother-goddess for several centuries at Ephesus and Magnesia, and were none the less Greek for that. There are things which should make one a little cautious about believing that Greeks made such a complete surrender to the religions of the East that it tended to orientalise them. For example, there was one Greek deity, Athena, who in the Hellenistic period practically never represented or was equated with anything Asiatic,³ but always remained herself. She had played no great part among the Greeks of the Nearer East, except at Pergamum. But there were found at Seleuceia a large number of sealings made by the signets of the Greek mercantile community; the device on a man's signet probably did express his personal taste or feelings, and much the commonest device was Athena,⁴ which may mean that the owners were holding fast to their own religion.