The Greeks in Bactria and India c9.s2.77

c9.s2.77

Certain facts in our historian’s life can be ascertained. He had travelled widely; he had seen and admired the first Parthian capital, Dara in Apavarktikene,³ and he had spent some considerable time in India. The proof of this is a curious one. Chandragupta the Maurya seized the throne of Magadha soon after Alexander’s death in 323, and if, as usually supposed, his helper Parvataka was Porus, it must have been before 318, by which year Porus had been killed by Eudamus;⁴ about 321, the last year in which Porus is mentioned as alive,⁵ is likely enough.⁶ But Justin, *i.e.* ‘Trogus’ source’, says that Chandragupta got his kingdom at the time when Seleucus was laying the foundations of his future greatness;¹ that is the year 312, the year in which Seleucus returned to Babylon, the starting-point of the Seleucid Era.² Now one Indian sect, the Jains, had a version of their own about Chandragupta’s accession which made the year either 312 or 313 (the tradition varies);³ ‘Trogus’ source’ therefore knew of the Jain dating, and can only have got it from some Greek in India who read Jain literature, unless, as is quite conceivable, he could read Sanscrit and Prakrit for himself (p. 381). For Plutarch’s story about Menander⁴ shows that ‘Trogus’ source’ not only understood what a stupa was (p. 135 n. 3) and not only knew the story of Buddha’s death as told in the Book of the Great Decease, but also knew that stupas were raised to dead Chakravartins (see on this p. 264); he knew therefore a great deal about India and must have lived there for some time; probably to him too goes back the introduction into Western literature of the name of the Pāndus of the Mahābhārata (App. 19). Indeed it seems to me an open question whether he was a Greek of Parthia who had lived for some time in India, or whether he was not rather a Greek of India who, perhaps late in life, settled in one of the Greek cities of Parthia to write his book.