The Greeks in Bactria and India c9.s2.4

c9.s2.4

Greek decadence in Asia has usually been assumed off-hand as an inevitable result of intermarriage between the Greek and the Asiatic, and it may be well to look at this question of mixed marriages. When we talk of the unfortunate consequences of mixed marriages as they affect the children we are usually thinking of the mating of the European with some totally different stock, for example the negro. Such a thing did not, and could not, come within the purview of the Greeks of the Middle East: intermarriage between Greeks and the Asiatic peoples there had much more resemblance to intermarriage between members of two European peoples to-day, though the analogy goes a little too far. But, even so, long-continued intermarriage on any scale would have resulted in the absorption by Greeks of non-Greek ideas and outlook. With Greek settlements scattered throughout Asia, there must always have been occasional mixed marriages, marriages of inclination; but that is unimportant when one is considering the race generally, and the question is, how much intermarriage was there? The answer once given was that it must from the first have been, if not universal, at any rate widespread, the evidence adduced being Alexander’s settlers and a couple of sentences in two speeches in Livy purported to be made by Roman generals to their troops before action.¹ I need not linger over this, for no one to-day would quote those particular speeches as evidence for anything: they are Livy’s own dramatisation of what he thought would be useful arguments to put into the mouths of Roman consuls engaged in screwing up their men’s morale; and in fact Livy himself in a more serious speech, that of the Rhodians before the Senate in 190, has recorded a precisely opposite view (p. 37 n. 2). Alexander’s settlers in the East certainly married native women;² but by 301 their numbers had been greatly reduced by Peithon’s massacre (p. 72) and by the long wars of the Successors, and the settlement of Asia as we know it was essentially Seleucid. To-day, I suppose, the evidence adduced would more probably be the inscriptions from Doura,¹ which reveal some mixed families and also, beside the Greek names, a welter of non-Greek names in the city, drawn from half the languages and religions in Asia. That these inscriptions give a picture of a city in decay is true enough; but they belong to the first and second centuries A.D., and the picture they give is of a Parthian rather than of a Greek city. Doura had once, no doubt, been a Greek polis. But the Doura we know was not exactly a Greek city under Parthian rule, like Susa or Seleuceia; the Parthians had occupied and rebuilt it² as a frontier post towards Rome, and much of Greek civic and family life alike had broken down in the process. It may be doubted whether Doura is much evidence for anything but itself, though it affords certain material which will be noticed later (pp. 37 sq.); but with what happened at that late time this book is not really concerned, and for the Hellenistic period we must look for other indications.