The Greeks in Bactria and India c9.s2.73

c9.s2.73

The second historian on our list is more important than Apollodorus, and we shall meet him pretty often in this book. It is certain that he is not identical with Apollodorus; the two have different accounts of the nomad conquest of Bactria,⁵ and while Apollodorus called a certain nomad people Asii, the substantival form, our historian used the (Iranian) adjectival form Asiani (see pp. 284, 292). Neither his name nor his city is known; his very existence has been forgotten, and I have to refer to him throughout by the clumsy appellation of ‘Trogus’ source’, meaning the source used by Trogus Pompeius for Parthia and the Farther East. But he survived in other works besides Trogus, and there is no doubt that he wrote a comprehensive history of the whole of the Greek and Parthian East.¹ I have already mentioned in the Introduction the way in which the fragments of our tradition tend to combine into a whole, like the fragments in the early third century B.C. Now this phenomenon in the West was certainly due to the presence behind the broken fragments of our tradition of a great lost historian, Hieronymus of Cardia, and similarly there must once have been in the East, behind our broken fragments, a definite and a comprehensive historian, who can be no one but ‘Trogus’ source’. For it is, I think, a sound canon of historical method in dealing with ancient history that sources are not to be multiplied beyond necessity; and this is especially true of the Farther East, where one cannot postulate many Greek historians. From ‘Trogus’ source’ then must ultimately come also, but not at first hand, the notices of the Farther East in Plutarch and many scattered items in late Hellenistic writers; and on one point the parallel with the influence of Hieronymus holds close. Hieronymus gave to the world the gazetteer or satrapy-list of Alexander’s empire,² and it can only have been ‘Trogus’ source’ who gave to the world the satrapy list, of which such valuable fragments remain in Claudius Ptolemy (Chap. VI), of the Indian empire as it existed under either Demetrius or Menander; in the case of each historian there is the same doubt whether he reproduced an official document or whether, as a historian might, he made the list himself.