The Greeks in Bactria and India c9.s2.27

c9.s2.27

The sketch of Susa given in the last chapter purposely omitted what, to my thinking, is the most important thing about that city, the existence of Greek poems; one still recalls the thrill of learning that Greek poetry was being written east of the Tigris near the Christian Era. Four poems are now known. Three are metrical epigrams; one celebrates the already mentioned Epiphaneia of Apollo,¹ while the other two,² which are of fair length and praise a certain Zamaspes of Susa, furnish some pretty historical problems; the later of the two is dated, A.D. 1–2. The fourth poem³ is a lyric ode in an intricate metre addressed to Apollo by his Syrian title Mara, and is now thought to have been written not later than the first century B.C.⁴ The poem may be of importance for the history of religion—it has been thought to be an early expression of the later belief that all deities merge in the Sun—but what is material here is that it is an acrostic, the first letter of each line giving the author’s name, ‘Herodorus son of Artemon a Seleuceian on the Eulaeus’. A number of poems are known in the West which give the author’s name in an acrostic in a similar way;⁵ in this respect Herodorus’ ode is one of a class, and that shows once more that a single culture-sphere extended from the Adriatic to the Zagros. In view of the freedom of intercommunication across Asia in the Hellenistic period it would be astonishing had it been otherwise; we may find reason to suppose that in the second century B.C. that culture-sphere extended to Greek India.