The Greeks in Bactria and India c9.s2.221

c9.s2.221

I must conclude by asking a question which every reader will ask sooner or later: where did all the Greeks come from? At present there is no answer; certain points alone can be indicated. The old cities of Asia Minor were probably more populous than used to be believed,¹ and they certainly played a large part in the settlement. The long Seleucid peace in the interior must have enabled a rapid growth of population, especially if, as is possible, there was for a time little or no infanticide; for though one regards infanticide as the general rule in antiquity,² it always depended on the food supply, and in the vast empire of the Seleucids, with many provinces sparsely populated, food can hardly have been a problem. Also, as has been seen, there were cases of new cities themselves planting colonies, which shows that the Greek population *did* grow rapidly. But this is not enough; neither is it enough to say that people like Thracians, who hellenised easily, would probably be reckoned with Greeks.³ We cannot get away from the supposition that for a generation before and a generation after 300 B.C. there must have been a much greater Greek population available for settlement than we had any idea of; a recent examination of mercenary service⁴ points, I think, on other lines, to the same conclusion. It may even turn out that the Macedonia of the Antigonids was never more than a shadow of the Macedonia of Alexander, and that war and emigration had bled that country too severely for it ever to recover.⁵ One does not envy the man who shall undertake the revision of current notions of the population of the Hellenistic Greek world; but it is beginning to seem inevitable that such a revision will have to be made.⁶ It is a sound rule in ancient history to take the lowest figure that will do the work; but it must do the work.