The Greeks in Bactria and India c9.s2.48

c9.s2.48

So far, save for the Babylonian Berossus, no actual literary production in the Greek Middle East has been met with; and this corresponds to what happened in Syria, where native Greek literature only started with Meleager and Philodemus in the anarchy of the last Seleucids, while its effective period belongs entirely to the time when Syria was a province of the Roman empire.¹ But once the Middle East had become Parthian, a process completed when in 141 B.C. Seleuceia accepted the rule of Mithridates I, things began to change; it must be supposed that the loss of their political background called out in these Greeks a more strenuous assertion of their Greekhood, a matter quite irreconcilable with any belief in their decadence or orientalisation. Migration to the West seems to have ceased; perhaps Syria under the last Seleucids and Greece and Asia Minor under the Roman Republic were not so attractive to literary men as they had been. So far we have had names from two cities only besides Seleuceia, Antioch-Nisibis and Babylon; a number of others now come into the picture—Susa, Artemita, Antioch in Mesene (Charax Spasinu), Seleuceia on the Persian Gulf, very likely Carrhae; and it must be emphasised once more that we only possess chance fragments from a lost tradition. The process began, in the generation that saw the Parthian conquest, when Diogenes' pupil Archedemus returned from Athens to Babylonia—the tradition says to Babylon, but it must mean Diogenes' home city, Seleuceia—and established there a Stoic school ‘with succession’,² that is, a parallel in the East to the schools at Athens and Rhodes (if the latter yet existed) in the West; how long the succession lasted is unknown, but Plutarch’s few jejune words conceal what must have been one of the most important events in the history of the Greek East. A generation later a rhetorician, Amphicrates, visited Seleuceia, and the people begged him to stay and set up a school of rhetoric there;³ the impertinence of the unimportant man’s reply, ‘A dish will not hold a dolphin’, is not bettered by it being a quotation from Euripides,⁴ but what is known of Amphicrates’ style, the Asianic style at its worst,⁵ may suggest that Seleuceia did not lose much. But though this story presupposes that in the second century B.C. there was no school of rhetoric at Seleuceia, it seems certain, from the correct Greek and good style of Greek scribes down to a late period (and perhaps one should add from the emergence of Greek historians, p. 44), that under Parthian rule proper training in grammar and rhetoric could be obtained in some of the Greek cities.¹