The Greeks in Bactria and India c9.s2.63

c9.s2.63

I come now to the four writers of the Middle East in the Parthian period who are of importance to the modern student, three historians and a geographer. The earliest in time seems to have been the historian Apollodorus of Artemita,³ a Greek city east of the Tigris where the main road eastward from Seleuceia bifurcated, the more important branch going northward by Ecbatana to Bactria and north-western India, the other going southward by Susa to Seistan and the lower Indus. Apollodorus wrote a history of Parthia in at least four books,⁴ which included the story of Greek Bactria down to the nomad conquest and also the Greek conquest of India; how much more it may have included cannot be said, but the story of the Bactrian Greeks seems only to have been incidental to the story of Parthia,⁵ just as a history of England must include a good deal of the history of France. He had evidently travelled widely,⁶ and he was presumably competent, as he was Strabo's regular source for the Farther East in the second century B.C. after Eratosthenes ended; there is much more of him in Strabo than the named fragments,⁷ and his account of the Greek advance to the Ganges and Pātaliputra can now be compared with an early Indian account (App. 4 and Chap. IV). His date must fall between the conquest of Bactria, c. 130 B.C. (Chap. VII), and the death of Mithridates II of Parthia in 87 B.C. The latter terminus is certain from this, that the classical writers we now possess know practically nothing of Parthia between Mithridates II, down to whose reign they had the Greek historians of the East, and the completion of the reconsolidation of the empire by Phraates III in 66 B.C., in whose reign contact with Rome was well established, Parthian history thenceforth running regularly in Roman channels. The Parthian king Sinatruces (77–70 B.C.) is indeed just mentioned from the Roman side when he made contact with Rome,¹ but otherwise this period is a blank,² merely characterised as one of confused civil wars;³ only in modern times have the bare names of the forgotten kings who filled it been recovered from cuneiform documents. There is no reasonable doubt that Apollodorus belonged to the flourishing period of the reign of Mithridates II, somewhere round about 100 B.C., the period that saw the Parthian survey of their empire (p. 55), made of course by Greeks; as two of Strabo’s named citations from Apollodorus deal with distances,⁴ it is conceivable that he himself had something to do with the survey.