The Greeks in Bactria and India c9.s2.9

c9.s2.9

One point is that Greeks, with their dominant civilisation and language, could and did absorb a good deal of foreign blood without losing their Greekhood.³ Cyrene, for example, was a great Greek city—no one will deny the title to the city of Callimachus and Eratosthenes—but all the original Greek settlers had taken Libyan wives, and the Greek women of Cyrene and Barca continued to observe some of the taboos of their Libyan ancestresses.⁴ Miletus was a great Greek city, but it was full of Carian blood. No one calls Themistocles a half-breed, or that great organiser Antiochus I, but both had foreign mothers. The saying that nationality depends chiefly on the mother is at best barely a half-truth. What happened at Cyrene must have happened to Alexander’s settlers, for where the father is of a higher civilisation than the mother the children are apt to follow his language and civilisation; there is a notorious modern instance and that in an isolated community.⁵ In any case the Seleucid settlement, speaking generally, was undoubtedly a settlement of men and women. When late in the third century Miletus issued a request to the Greek world for colonists to resettle Myus, the men who came brought their women and children,¹ and the Seleucid settlement must have been of that nature; this is supported by the Susa inscriptions, in which, though late, every woman's name but one is Greek. No doubt a time was to come when many Greek communities in Asia, outside of Rome's sphere, would take in more foreign blood than they could absorb and would ultimately merge in the Asiatic world about them, but that process, though there must have been many local variations, did not begin till after the Christian Era and belongs essentially to a much later period than the Hellenistic.