The Greeks in Bactria and India c9.s2.23

c9.s2.23

Finally, we have the rare blessing of one quite definite and conclusive piece of evidence on this matter. The well-informed writer, a Greek of Carrhae or Seleuceia, who was Plutarch’s main source for the Parthian chapters of his *Life of Crassus* and who wrote between 50 and 36 B.C. (see p. 51), recorded that the Parthian general Surenas had two half-breeds with him;³ these men are not only called by a special name, μιξέλληνες, ‘mixed Greeks’, but are definitely ranked with the ‘barbarians’; and they make *proskynesis* (obeisance) to Crassus, a Persian habit, not a Greek one. The very rare word μιξέλληνες (I have only found three other instances of it) had been used either as an expression of contempt⁴ or to denote some half-breed community who were not reckoned as Greeks and who might possess a special name of their own,⁵ like the Griquas in Cape Colony, who were not reckoned as Afrikanders; and this means that in Mesopotamia, or in some Mesopotamian cities, as late as 50 B.C., those men of mixed blood who were becoming orientalised were not reckoned as Greeks at all but formed a class apart with a special and contemptuous designation. The importance of this fact for the question in hand needs no discussion, and there I may leave it: in the Middle East the Greek of the first century B.C. did not essentially differ from the Greek of the third.