used straight away for the time after Alexander. Certainly, had the Greek colonies in India been active political bodies, we could hardly have failed to find some trace of them, in civic architecture or in inscriptions, by this time. Perhaps we should rather think of them as resembling the Greeks found to-day dispersed over the nearer East with interests mainly commercial, easily assimilating themselves to their environment. A notice derived from Agatharchides (about 140 B.C.) possibly refers to the activity of these Indian Greeks in the sea-borne trade of the Indian Ocean (Müller, Geog. Graeci min. i. p. 191; cf. Diod. iii. 47. 9). As to what India derived from Greece there has been a good deal of erudite debate. That the Indian drama took its origin from the Greek is still maintained by some scholars, though hardly proved. There is no doubt that Indian astronomy shows marked Hellenic features, including actual Greek words borrowed. But by far the most signal borrowing is in the sphere Greek art. of art. The stream of Buddhist art which went out eastwards across Asia had its rise in North-West India, and the remains of architecture and sculpture unearthed in this region enable us to trace its development back to pure Greek types. It remains, of course, a question whether the tradition was transmitted by the Greek dynasties from Bactria or by intercourse with the Roman empire; the latter seems now almost certain; but the fact of the influence is equally striking on either theory. How far to the east the distinctive influence of Greece went is shown by the seal-impressions with Athena and Eros types found by Dr Stein in the buried cities of Khotan (Sand-buried Ruins of Khotan, p. 396), and according to Mr E. B. Havell, there exist “paintings treasured as the most precious relics and rarely shown to Europeans, which closely resemble the Graeco-Buddhist art of India” in some of the oldest temples of Japan (Studio, vol. xxvii. 1903, p. 26).
See A. A. Macdonell, History of Sanskrit Literature (1900) p. 411 f., and the references on p. 452; V. A. Smith, Early History of India (1904); Grünwedel, Buddhist Art in India (Eng. trans., edited by Dr Burgess, 1901); W. W. Tarn, “Notes on Hellenism in Bactria and India” in Journ. of Hell. Studies, xxii. (1902); Foucher, L’Art gréco-bouddhique du Gandhâra (1905).
(ii.) Iran and Babylonia.—The colonizing activity of Alexander and his successors found a large field in Iran where, up till his time, hardly any walled towns seem to have existed. Cities now arose in all its provinces, superseding in many cases native market places and villages, and Greek cities. holding the vantage-points of commerce. Media, Polybius says, was defended by a chain of Greek cities from barbarian incursion (x. 27. 3); in the neighbourhood of Teheran seem to have stood Heraclea and Europus. In Eastern Iran the cities which are its chief places to-day then bore Greek names, and looked upon Alexander or some other Hellenic prince as their founder. Khojend, Herat, Kandahar were Alexandrias, Merv was an Alexandria till it changed that name for Antioch. When the farther provinces broke away under independent Greek kings, a Eucratidēa and a Demetrias attested their glory. Even in a town definitely barbarian like Syrinca in 209 B.C. there was a resident mercantile community of Greeks (Polyb. x. 31). The bulk of Greek historical literature having perished, and in the absence of both archaeological data from Iran, we can only speculate on the inner life of these Greek cities under a strange sky. One precious document is the decree of Antioch in Persis (about 206 B.C.) cited in a recently discovered inscription (Kern, Inschr. v. Magnesia, No. 61; Dittenberger, Orient. gr. Inscr. i. No. 233). This shows us the normal organs of a Greek city, boulē, ecclesia, prytaneis, &c., in full working, with the annual election of magistrates, and ordinary forms of public action. But more than this, it throws a remarkable light upon the solidarity of the Hellenic Dispersion. The citizen body had been increased some generations before by colonists from Magnesia-on-Meander sent at the invitation of Antiochus I. The Magnesians are instigated by pan-hellenic enthusiasm. And we see a brisk diplomatic intercourse between the scattered Greek cities going on. It is especially the local religious festivals which bind them together. Antioch in Persis, of course, sends athletes to the great games of Greece, but in this decree it determines to take part in the new festival being started in honour of Artemis at Magnesia. The loyalty, too, expressed towards the Seleucid king implies a predominant interest in pan-hellenic unity, natural in colonies isolated among barbarians. A list is given (fragmentary) of other Greek cities in Babylonia and beyond from which similar decrees had come.
In the middle of the 3rd century B.C. Bactria and Sogdiana broke away from the Seleucid empire; independent Greek kings reigned there till the country was conquered by nomads from Central Asia (Sacae and Yue-chi) a century later. Alexander had settled large masses of Greek kingdoms. Greeks in these regions (Greeks, it would seem, not Macedonians), whose attempts to return home in 325 and 323 had been frustrated, and it may well be that a racial antagonism quickened the revolt against Macedonian rule in 250. The history of these Greek dynasties is for us almost a blank, and for estimating the amount and quality of Hellenism in Bactria during the 180 years or so of Macedonian and Greek rule, we are reduced to building hypotheses upon the scantiest data. Probably nothing important bearing on the subject has been left out of view in W. W. Tarn’s learned discussion (Journ. of Hell. Stud. xxii., 1902, p. 268 f.), and his result is mainly negative, that palpable evidences of an active Hellenism have not been found; he inclines to think that the Greek kingdoms mainly took on the native Iranian colour. The coins, of course, are adduced on the other side, being not only Greek in type and legend, but (in many cases) of a peculiarly fine and vigorous execution; and excellence in one branch of art is thought to imply that other branches flourished in the same milieu. Tarn suggests that they may be a “sport,” a spasmodic outbreak of genius (see Bactria and works there quoted). In these outlying provinces the national Iranian sentiment seems to have been most intense, and it is interesting to see that under Alexander Hellenism appeared as “belligerent civilization,” in the attempt to suppress practices like the exposure of the dying to the dogs (an exaggeration of Zoroastrianism) and, possibly also, abhorrent forms of marriage (Strabo xi. 517; Porphyr. De abstin. 4. 21; Plut. De fort. Al. 5).
The west of Iran slipped from the Seleucids in the course of the 2nd century B.C. to be joined to the Parthian kingdom, or fall under petty native dynasties. Soon after 130 Babylonia too was conquered by the Parthian, and Mesopotamia before 88. Then the reconquest of the nearer East by Oriental dynasties was checked by the advance of Rome. Asia Minor and Syria remained substantial parts of the Roman Empire till the Mahommedan conquests of the 7th century A.D. began a new process of recoil on the part of the Hellenistic power. In Babylonia, also, in Susiana and Mesopotamia, Hellenism had been established in a system of cities for 200 years before the coming of the Parthian. The greatest of all of them stood here—almost on the site of Bagdad—Seleucia on the Tigris. It superseded Babylon as the industrial focus of Babylonia and counted some 600,000 inhabitants (plebs urbana) according to Pliny, N.H. vi. § 122 (cf. Joseph. Arch. xviii. § 372, 374; for coins, probably of Seleucia, with the type of Tychē issued in the years A.D. 43–44 see Wroth, Coins of Parthia, p. xlvi.). The list of other Greek cities known to us in these regions is too long to give here (see Droysen, loc. cit., and E. Schwartz in Kern’s Inschr. v. Magnesia, p. 171 f.). In Mesopotamia, Pliny especially notes how the character of the country was changed when the old village life was broken in upon by new centres of population in the cities of Macedonian foundation (Pliny, N.H. vi. § 117; cf. K. Regling, “Histor. geog. d. mesopot. Parallelograms,” in Lehmann’s Beiträge, i. p. 442 f.).
We do not look in vain for notable names in Hellenistic literature and philosophy produced on an Asiatic soil. Diogenes, the Stoic philosopher (head of the school in 156 B.C.), was a “Babylonian,” i.e. a citizen of Seleucia on the Tigris; so too was Seleucus, the mathematician and Hellenic-Iranian culture. astronomer, being possibly a native Babylonian; Berossus, who wrote a Babylonian history in Greek (before 261 B.C.) was a Hellenized native. Apollodorus, Strabo’s authority
