Heroes and Philosophers?

Greek Personal Names and their Bearers in Hellenistic Bactria Rachel Mairs, University of Reading Names and Identities In the late fourth century BCE, Alexander the Great established garrisons to secure his conquered territories in Central Asia and north-western India. Historical sources give us some insight into the diverse points of origin, from within the Greek world, of the soldiers who held these garrisons Arrians Expedition of Alexander and Quintus Curtius Rufus Histories of Alexander the Great often carefully differentiate the various Greek and Macedonian units from one another - and it is possible that the new settler communites bore their own particular intra-Greek ethnic character. It has previously been remarked, for example, that among the small number of names attested in inscriptions from the Graeco-Bactrian city of Ai Khanoum are several typical of northern Greece and the Balkans.1 Recent discoveries and recent publications of old discoveries have added to the corpus of Greek personal names known from inscriptions and documentary texts from Bactria and India. These include both kings and private individuals, and cover the full chronological span from the expedition of Alexander, to the last Greek-named kings in northern India around the turn of the common era. In Table 1, I list these names, with details of the documents in which they have been found, their dates, and any additional information on their bearers.2 Graeco-Bactrian and IndoGreek chronology is a contentious subject, and for convenience I use the regnal dates proposed in Osmund Bopearachchis catalogue of the Graeco-Bactrian and Indo-Greek coins in the collection of the Cabinet des Mdailles of the Bibliothque Nationale in Paris.3 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1 Louis Robert, "De Delphes lOxus: Inscriptions grecques nouvelles de la Bactriane," Comptesrendus de l'Acadmie des inscriptions et belles-lettres, vol. (1968): 416-457. Discussed further below. The diverse origins of the Greek settlers of the east are also noted in passing by Laurianne Martinez-Sve, "Les Grecs en Orient : portraits croiss," in Portraits de migrants, Portraits de colons. I, ed. Pierre Rouillard (Paris: de Boccard, 2009), 129-140.
2

For an earlier study, see K. Karttunen, India and the Hellenistic World (Helsinki: Finnish Oriental Society, 1997), 306-309, Graeco-Bactrian & Indo-Greek Onomastics: A Survey, who also gives versions of royal names in Indian orthography, where these are known. Inscriptions and other documents are cited by reference to their appearance in Filippo Canali De Rossi, Iscrizioni dello Estremo Oriente Greco: Un Repertorio (Bonn: Dr. Rudolf Habelt, 2004). The new publication Georges Rougemont, Inscriptions grecques d'Iran et d'Asie centrale (London: School of Oriental and African Studies, 2012), which includes several more recently recorded inscriptions, is likely to supersede this. Osmund Bopearachchi, Monnaies grco-bactriennes et indo-grecques: Catalogue raisonn (Paris: Bibliothque nationale, 1991). For a more detailed outline of the history of the Hellenistic Far East, the reader may consult, inter alia, Omar Coloru, Da Alessandro a Menandro: il regno greco di Battriana (Pisa/Roma: Fabrizio Serra editore, 2009); Franois Widemann, Les successeurs d'Alexandre en Asie centrale et leur hritage culturel. Essai. [Seconde dition, revue et corrige] (Paris: Riveneuve, 2009); Frank L. Holt, Alexander the Great and Bactria: The Formation of a Greek Frontier in Central Asia (Leiden; New York: E. J. Brill, 1988); Frank L. Holt, Thundering Zeus: The Making of Hellenistic Bactria (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); and Frank Lee Holt, Lost World of the Golden King: In Search of Ancient Afghanistan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). References to archaeological publications on the region are

My concern here will be with Greek names. The vast majority of the names attested in written sources from the Hellenistic Far East are Greek, and this must, at least in part, be a product of the fact that Greek was the dominant written language of the period. Indeed, there are very few scaps of writing in anything other than Greek. Iranian names do, however, occur in some Greek sources from Bactria, such as the economic documents from the Treasury at Ai Khanoum.4 These names, too, have their patterns. In Bactria, local theophoric names of the deified river Oxus are especially common, and I have suggested elsewhere that some Greek names of the region, in particular those relating to the sun god Helios, may have acted as translations of equivalent names honouring Iranian gods.5 Non-Greek names were not the exclusive preserve of non-Greeks, and the intersections of identities with naming practices are complex. The mothers of the second generation of Bactrian Greeks will not have been Greek, since few if any Greek women accompanied the expedition of Alexander to the east. After the first part of the third century, all of the Greek-named individuals whom we encounter in written material from the region are likely to have been of mixed descent. This is not to ascribe them a mixed identity,6 but to caution that there were other sources from which communities which identified themselves as Greek may have drawn their names than Greece. It has recently been suggested, for example, that captive women from other regions of Asia than Bactria may have formed a significant component of the late fourth century garrison settlements.7 In Arachosia, at Old Kandahar, we also find two Indian names in a Greek inscription, to which I will return in my conclusion.8 Names do not necessarily indicate an individuals point of origin, still less the identity which they themselves claimed. What I would like to do is to look, in a much more restricted way, at the possible origin of specific naming traditions in Hellenistic Bactria and India, within the Greek world. As I will discuss, the tools and resources exist to explore this question in considerable depth, but require careful and thorough statistical analysis, and I offer here only some preliminary observations on the material. My second point of enquiry relates more directly to the relationship between naming practices and identity, and explores whether the Greeks of Bactria and India chose to celebrate specific aspects of their Greek cultural identity in naming their children. Greek Names as Evidence for Geographical Origin !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! collected in Rachel Mairs, The Archaeology of the Hellenistic Far East: A Survey. Bactria, Central Asia and the Indo-Iranian Borderlands, c. 300 BC AD 100 (Oxford: BAR, 2011).
4

Frantz Grenet, "Lonomastique iranienne A Khanoum," Bulletin de Correspondance Hellnique, vol. 107 (1983): 373-381. Rachel Mairs, "The Hellenistic Far East: From the Oikoumene to the Community," in Shifting Social Imaginaries in the Hellenistic Period: Narratives, Practices, and Images, ed. Eftychia Stavrianopoulou (Leiden: Brill, 2012), . Argued against in Rachel Mairs, "The Places in Between: Model and Metaphor in the Archaeology of Hellenistic Arachosia," in From Pella to Gandhara: Hybridisation and Identity in the Art and Architecture of the Hellenistic East, ed. Anna Kouremenos, Sujatha Chandrasekaran and Roberto Rossi (Oxford: BAR, 2011), 177-189. Stanley M. Burstein, "Whence the Women?: The Origin of the Bactrian Greeks," Ancient West & East, vol. 11 (2012): 97-104. Georges-Jean Pinault, "Remarques sur les noms propres d'origine indienne dans la stle de Sphytos," in Afghanistan: Ancien carrefour entre l'est et l'ouest, ed. Osmund Bopearachchi and Marie-Franoise Boussac (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), 137-142.

Ancient historians make frequent reference to the intra-Greek identities and origins of Alexanders generals and troops. These include the forces left by Alexander in the east, some of whom formed the nuclei of later Greek colonial settlements in the region. As might be expected, many of these were from Alexanders homeland, Macedonia, and other more northerly regions of the Greek world, such as Thessaly and Thrace. In 327 BCE, for example, Alexander deputed his officer Philip son of Machatas to establish yet another Alexandria on the Indus, along with a contingent of Thracians (Arrian, Anabasis 6.15). In accounts of the various conferences held after Alexanders death, in 323 BCE, to negotiate the partition of his empire, we find further details of the backgrounds of the new Greek occupiers of the Bactria and the east. At the conference at Triparadeisos on 321 BCE, two Cypriot Greeks, Stasanor of Soloi and Stasandros, were given Bactria-Sogdiana and AreiaDrangiana respectively. A Macedonian named Philip was transferred from Bactria-Sogdiana to Parthia-Hyrcania (Arrian, Events after Alexander 35). Less direct information is, unfortunately, available on the backgrounds of the general settler population than of those appointed to govern them. Personal names therefore offer a potentially valuable source of information on them. But how reliable an indicator are Greek personal names of geographical origin? The Lexicon of Greek Personal Names (LGPN), a project which has run under the aegis of the British Academy since 1973, provides the necessary data-sets to address questions of this sort, and confirm or deny some longstanding scholarly hunches: The idea that Greek personal names could provide evidence about where people come from is no longer a hypothesis based on impressions about frequency; the Lexicon has made it a testable fact.9 Six LGPN volumes have appeared to date, documenting each occurrence of a given personal name: I: The Aegean Islands, Cyprus, Cyrenaica (total number of persons: 66,489); II, revised edition IIa: Attica (62,361); IIIa: The Peloponnese, Western Greece, Sicily, Magna Graecia (43,261); IIIb: Central Greece, from the Megarid to Thessaly (43,456); IV: Macedonia, Thrace, Northern Shores of the Black Sea (33,724); Va: Coastal Asia Minor, Pontos to Ionia (51,293). There is also an online database which provides limited search functions, restricted to giving the total number of occurrences of a particular name across each individual volume in the series (www.lgpn.ox.ac.uk). In terms of my particular research question whether or not Greek naming patterns in Bactria suggest points of origin specifically in northern Greece and Macedonia high relative percentages in LGPN IIIb and IV are of particular significance. There are certain limitations and constraints which must be borne in mind when using the LGPN as a resource in exploring the probable origin of the bearers of Greek personal names in Hellenistic Bactria: 1. The coverage of the projects publications to date is restricted to the regions listed above; 2. Few, if any, names occur exclusively in one region: we can therefore only state that the bearer of a name is more likely to have originated from one region than another; 3. The chronological scope of the LGPN is the period from the earliest Greek written records down to, approximately, the sixth century A.D. As far as possible, one should consider the distribution of names in the Hellenistic period or earlier, although there are cases such as the city of Ai Khanoum, abandoned in around the 140s BCE where only material of the third or early second centuries or earlier is truly relevant; 4. The total number of names and individuals is not constant across regions. A names rarity or frequency needs to be assessed by reference to relative percentages of names in each volume, not to absolute numbers. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 9 Simon Hornblower and Elaine Matthews, Greek Personal Names: Their Value as Evidence (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 2000), 10.

An additional resource, of more limited utility in the present case, is the Prosopographia Ptolemaica (ProsPtol), a prosopography of individuals, of all ethnicities, attested in material from Hellenistic Egypt, a longstanding project now continued as Trismegistos People (TM). Its online functionality is more developed than that of the LGPN, and allows searches by name, ethnic, date and other search queries, as well as links to the full text of documents in which the individual appears (http://prosptol.arts.kuleuven.ac.be/ and www.trismegistos.org/ref/index.php). 10 The material from Hellenistic Egypt, it goes without saying, can only really be comparative. What it does enable us to do is to look at a better documented Hellenistic-period Greek colonial population, one where we sometimes find an individual explicitly described as, for example, Amyntas, son of Menelaos, Macedonian (PSI 4.389, l. 9, 243 BC; TM Person ID 18690). I am aware of dissecting the corpus with blunt tools, and do not claim to be a statistician. For this reason, I offer here only some preliminary observations, and hope to prepare a more detailed study at a future date. The question of whether the use of particular Greek names in Bactria and the east might tell us something about the points of origin of their bearers (or their bearers ancestors) was raised by the epigrapher Louis Robert in one of the first publications on the newly-discovered Greek inscriptions from Ai Khanoum.11 Robert further suggested that these names might point to northern Greece. The Kineas in whose sanctuary the remarkable inscription of Delphic maxims was found bears a name which has particular associations with Thessaly, in northern-central Greece. A Kineas, for example, was king of the Thessalians in the late fifth century BCE, mentioned by Herodotus (Histories 5.63.3). The orator Demosthenes attacked a Thessalian named Kineas for siding with Philip II of Macedon against his own countrys interests (On the Crown 295). Another notable Thessalian Kineas was the minister sent by king Pyrrhus of Epirus to sue for peace with Rome after the Battle of Heraclea in 280 BCE (Plutarch, Life of Pyrrhus 14). In a basalt stele in the Cairo Museum, dated to 267 BCE, we find one Kineas son of Alketos, named as a Thessalian, who served as a priest of the deified Alexander the Great (SEG XXVII 1114). But, as Robert cautions, the name Kineas is not especially rare, and there are many examples from places other than Thessaly. The Lexicon of Greek Personal Names reveals that it was indeed popular in Thessaly and neighbouring regions (38% of forty attestations), but also in Attica (40%). The further studies which the publication of the LGPN have made possible indicate that the Thessalian onomastic repertoire was not essentially different from elsewhere in Greece, but that some names are more frequent.12 In the absence of supporting evidence, the fact that a man was named Kineas does not suffice to prove that he came from Thessaly. As it happens, we do know that Thessalians formed the largest unit in Alexanders army, and were present in Bactria although many of them were sent home when the expedition reached the Oxus.13 The circumstantial evidence that Kineas of Ai Khanoum was a Thessalian is fairly good, but not decisive. What of some of the other names listed in Table 1? Molossos is at first glance highly significant. The Molossians were a Greek tribe settled in Epirus, to the west of Macedonia and Thessaly. The name, nonetheless, has a much more widespread distribution. Of the twenty-five !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 10 Csaba La'da, Foreign Ethnics in Hellenistic Egypt (Leuven: Peeters, 2002) further lists instances where an individual is given a specific ethnic indicator in the sources.
11 12

Robert 431-432.

Jos-Luis Garca Ramn, "Thessalian Personal Names and the Greek Lexicon," in Old and New Worlds in Greek Onomastics, ed. Elaine Matthews (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 2007), 29-67. Rolf Strootman, "Alexander's Thessalian Cavalry," Talanta: Proceedings of the Dutch Archaeological and Historical Society, vol. 42-43 (2010-2011): 51-67.

13

bearers of the name listed in the LGPN we find nine in IIIa (the Peloponnese, Western Greece, Sicily, Magna Graecia) and ten in Va (Coastal Asia Minor), but only five in IIIb (Central Greece) and one in IV (Macedonia). Another superficially northern name, Triballos, from the name of a Thracian tribe, appears in unexpected places, with three of five occurrences in IIa, Attica - but this name is poorly attested in general. Some names are more overtly regional. Amyntas was a Macedonian royal name, held by four kings, and the LGPN data reveals a correspondingly high occurrence in IIIb (27%) and IV (30%), out of a total of 336 instances. Another name held by several Macedonian and Hellenistic royals was Laodike, with 37% of fifty-seven occurrences in Macedonia (IV). In a Greek document from Egypt of c. 30 BCE 14 CE, we find a Laodike daughter of Lysias, a Macedonian woman (BGU IV 1059, l. 3). Likewise, Peukelaos is a name strongly associated with Macedonia, although with a smaller number of attestations and potentially less significant distribution (58% of twelve). 51% out of 1320 occurrences of the name Artemidoros come from coastal Asia Minor (Va), a region where it was the fourth most common name overall. 76% of seventy-four occurrences of Euthydemos come from Attica (IIa). Timodemos appears likewise to be more common in Attica than elsewhere (59% of sixty-four). Some names are too rare for us to draw any real conclusions about the significance or otherwise of their geographical distribution (Thersites, one occurrence each in IV and Va; Photokles, a single occurrence in Va). In summary, it may be seen that none of the Greek names from Hellenistic Bactria and India are exclusively Macedonian or northern Greek, and few are predominantly so. This very crude dissection of the onomastic evidence does not, at present, on its own, provide substantial support one way or the other for the proposition that the majority of the Greek settler population of Bactria came from these regions. It is to be hoped that further and more sophisticated statistical analysis of the corpus may offer richer rewards, in particular by comparison with the historical data on the settlement of the east. The introduction of comparative material from other regions of the Hellenistic world may also be enlightening. Egypt, in particular, offers a far better documented case study region, albeit one in which conditions were somewhat different to those in Bactria. In the third century, the largest proportion of Greek settler in Egypt were of Macedonian origin, followed by those from regions of the Balkans such as Thrace.14 What of the development of the Greek community and its naming practices in the east? Do the names themselves offer any clues as to the priorities of those who gave them? Did naming patterns evolve locally in ways distinct from the rest of Greek world? In the following, concluding, section, I will suggest some areas in which the Greeks of Bactria and India may have asserted their connection to Greek culture and traditions. But there are also ways in which naming practices in addition to the archaeological and documentary evidence more usually considered in this context might indicate ongoing, tangible connections with other regions of the Hellenistic world. The most revealing case is that of the woman named Isidora who was interred in a mausoleum outside the city walls of Ai Khanoum, probably in the first part of the second century BCE.15 The cult of the goddess Isis originated in Egypt, but acquired a greater popularity throughout the Mediterranean world in the Hellenistic period. The Greek name gift of Isis achieved a corresponding popularity. As might be expected, a search in Trismegistos People covering material from Egypt itself - yields a very large number of hits, not just for Isidora (600), but its variant Isidoras (125), and the masculine form Isidoros (2354). These indicate a rather slow growth during the third and second centuries BCE, with a dramatic take-off in the first century BCE and thereafter great enduring popularity into the Roman period. Closer examination shows that the !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 14 Zosia Archibald, John K. Davies and Vincent Gabrielsen, The Economies of Hellenistic Societies. Third to First Centuries BC (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 48; see also Jean Bingen, Hellenistic Egypt: Monarchy, Society, Economy, Culture (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 83-93, on Thracians in Egypt.
15

Canali De Rossi, No. 361.

earliest examples of the name in Egypt and elsewhere are to be found more towards the middle of the third century than the beginning. Robert Parkers analysis of the material reveals at first isolated enthusiasts for Isis, with the two earliest examples from outside Egypt a Thasian Isigonos of c. 250 BCE and an Isigenes from Rhamnous in Arrica of c. 325 BCE from problematic readings of inscriptions on stones which have since been lost.16 Isis-names, then, are a phenomenon of Greek naming practices of the period well after Alexanders conquests. For this reason, Isidora is unlikely to have been a family name passed down from one of the original Greek settlers of Bactria, but may rather indicate ongoing connections with or immigration from the Hellenistic Near East and eastern Mediterranean, well into the third and second centuries BCE. Heroes and Philosophers In recent years, new discoveries of Greek inscriptions and documentary texts have increased the repertoire of Greek names known from the Hellenistic Far East, and in particular of non-royal names.17 Onomastic evidence on its own especially from such a limited corpus cannot be used to draw conclusions about the origins of a community as a whole. In the absence of further evidence, we cannot, for example, say that the Kineas buried in his eponymous sanctuary at Ai Khanoum definitely came from Thessaly, only that several prominent bearers of the name came from Thessaly, and that the region is one within the Greek world where the name Kineas was particularly common. In conclusion, I would like to focus on a different topic: that of onomastic trends within the Hellenistic Far East itself. Unlike other regions of the Hellenistic world, it is difficult to identify hereditary patterns in the transmission of names, not just because of the general lack of evidence on the names and lives of the majority of the population, but also because no single royal dynasty held control of any substantial portion of the regions territory for more than a couple of generations. One exception is the inscription of Straton and Triballos, sons of Straton, from the Ai Khanoum gymnasium,18 where the name Straton has clearly been passed from father to son, and perhaps through several generations of the family. Some names were held by more than one king, as indicated in Table 1, but it is often difficult to clarify the relationships of these to each other. In later periods, in particular, we find a wide variety of royal names which occur only once, perhaps indicating the diversity of origins of people now ascending to kingship, and the tenuous grasp they and their families held on power once they had acquired it. Among the individuals whose names are preserved from the settlements of the Hellenistic Far East are a number who share their names with prominent individuals attested in the extant historical accounts of Alexanders campaigns and their aftermath.19 The father of the prominent Successor Lysimachos was a Thessalian named Agathokles, a friend of Philip II of Macedon. Lysimachos in turn named his eldest son Agathokles. The name Amyntas was held by four Macedonian kings and several nobles of the period of Alexander, such as his general Amyntas son of Andromenes. There were officers of Alexander named Menander, Pantaleon, and Philoxenos. The historian !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 16 Robert Parker, "Theophoric Names and Greek Religion," in Greek Personal Names: Their Value as Evidence, ed. Simon Hornblower and Elaine Matthews (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 2000), 53-79., esp. 74.
17

Two newly-published funerary inscriptions from Ai Khanoum, unfortunately, have no personal names preserved: Rougemont 136-137. Canali De Rossi No. 381.

18 19

For further information on each of these, see Waldemar Heckel, Who's Who in the Age of Alexander the Great (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2005).

Kallisthenes of Olynthos (c. 360-328 BCE), a relative of Alexanders teacher Aristotle, accompanied Alexanders expedition. Laodike was a Seleucid dynastic name, held by the mother of Seleukos I and passed on to many of her descendents. It has been proposed that the mother of the Graeco-Bactrian king Eukratides was one of these.20 This is not to say that Greek naming practices in Bactria and India suggest any desire to create associations with these particular figures, but that these names recur because they were ones popular among Macedonian elites. In the case of our Laodike, and perhaps others, they may also be evidence for ongoing connections and alliances with descent communities elsewhere in the Hellenistic world. It has been noted by several scholars that names from Greek mythology are especially common in the Bactrian Greek onomastic repertoire, indeed apparently more so than in other regions of the Hellenistic world.21 This might be linked to a wider desire to assert connections to Greek cultural traditions: One might ask whether, as time passed, some families among the descendents of the Greek colonists, afraid of seeing their national identity wither, were not tempted, in reaction, to call on famous names which were still spoken and to reclaim for themselves the most venerable Greek tradition.22 This is another hypothesis which we might test against the data, although with a new set of caveats. The game of matching each of our attested individuals from the Hellenistic Far East with an identically-named figure of historical or cultural significance might be played ad nauseam. Even when one narrows the search to figures of the third century BCE or earlier, it seems that one might trawl up an illustrious namesake for an almost suspiciously high percentage of the Greeks whose names we know from Bactria and India. I will first review the evidence, and then return below to consider how plausible any of this really is. We find several names borne by characters in the Iliad and Odyssey, as well as other works recounting the war at Troy and its aftermath, such as the lost Telegony: Diomedes, Polyxenos, Thersites, Palamedes, Mestor, Antimachos, Telephos, Laodike. The story of the Trojan War was known in the Hellenistic Far East, as may be seen from two Gandh!ran reliefs depicting the scene of the wooden horse being brought into Troy.23 The language of the inscription of Sophytos (an individual with a non-Greek name, whom I shall discuss below) also makes it clear that the Homeric epics held the came central position in the Greek literary culture of the region as they did in the west. Queen Kalliope carries the name of the Muse of epic poetry. The Indo-Greek king Zoilos shared his name with a Thracian philosopher and grammarian (c. 400-320 BCE), who had a reputation as a harsh critic of Homer (Vitruvius, De architectura, Preface to Book VII, 8). Greek drama was also read and performed in Bactria. There was a theatre at the city of Ai Khanoum, and a fragmentary Greek dramatic work on parchment was found in the citys treasury.24 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 20 Adrian S. Hollis, "Laodice Mother of Eucratides of Bactria," Zeitschrift fr Papyrologie und Epigraphik, vol. 110 (1996): 161-164.
21

Georges Rougemont, "Hellenism in Central Asia and the North-West of the Indo-Pakistan SubContinent: The Epigraphic Evidence 1," Ancient Civilizations from Scythia to Siberia, vol. 18 (2012): 175-182., 180-181; Osmund Bopearachchi and Paul Bernard, "Deux bracelets grecs avec inscriptions grecques trouvs dans l'Asie centrale hellnise," Journal des Savants, vol. (2002): 238-278. 255-262. Bopearachchi and Bernard 261-262.

22 23

John Allan, "A Tabula Iliaca from Gandhara," Journal of Hellenic Studies, vol. 66 (1946): 21-23. N. A. Khan, "A New Relief from Gandh!ra Depicting the Trojan Horse," East and West, vol. 40 (1990): 315-319. Rougemont, Inscriptions grecques, No. 232.

24

Among our names we also find Menander (an Athenian comic dramatist, c. 341/2-290 BCE), and major characters from two of his works: Khaireas (Aspis) and Nikeratos (Samia). It has long been suggested that one of the individuals mentioned in an inscription from Ai Khanoum might be identified with an actual Greek philosopher, the Peripatetic Klearchos of Soloi, who was active in the late fourth-early third century BCE and known to have had an interest in eastern philosophies.25 Whether or not this was the case, a large number of the attested names were also shared by Greek philosophers of the Hellenistic period or earlier: Plato (the student of Socrates, 424/3 BC348/7 BCE), Kalliphon (of Kroton, a Pythagorean, sixth century BCE; a Peripatetic, second century BCE), Diodoros (of Aspendos, a Pythagorean, fourth century BCE; Kronos, died c. 284 BC), Zenon (of Elea, c. 490-430 BCE; of Kition, the founder of the Stoic school, c. 334-262 BCE; of Tarsus, fourth head of the Stoic school, fl. late third-early second century BCE), Philiskos (of Aigina, a Cynic, fourth century BCE), Theophrastos (successor to Aristotle as head of the Peripatetic school, c. 371-287 BCE), Strato (of Lampsakos, successor to Theophrastos, c. 335-269 BCE), Hippias (of Elis, a sophist, contemporary of Socrates, late fifth century BCE). Euthydemos was the name of a sophist in Platos eponymous dialogue, written around 380 BCE. Diogenes was the name of several philosophers of antiquity, including the Cynic Diogenes of Sinope (c. 412323 BCE), who was famously visited by Alexander the Great (see, for example, Plutarch, Moralia, 717c). Few of these names could really be called rare. A proper assessment of the preference or otherwise of the Greeks of Bactria and India for names of Greek cultural resonance would need to be accompanied by a much wider study of the general prevalence of heroic, literary and philosophical names in the Hellenistic diaspora. Even aside from the occurence of these names, and whether or not these references are true, we do know the value set on Greek intellectual culture by some inhabitants of the Hellenistic Far East. And we find confirmation of this in a rather unexpected place, a Greek inscription set up by a man with a non-Greek name and patronymic at Old Kandahar in Arachosia, some time in the second century BC: Stele of Sophytos: The irresistible force of the trio of Fates destroyed the house of my forefathers, which had flourished greatly for many years. But I, Sophytos son of Naratos, pitiably bereft when quite small of my ancestral livelihood, after I had acquired the virtue of the Archer [Apollo] and the Muses, mixed with noble prudence, then did consider how I might raise up again my family house. Obtaining interest- bearing money from another source, I left home, keen not to return before I possessed wealth, the supreme good. Thus, by travelling to many cities for commerce, I acquired ample riches without reproach. Becoming celebrated, I returned to my homeland after countless years, and showed myself, bringing pleasure to well-wishers. Straightaway I built afresh my paternal home, which was riddled with rot, making it better than before, and also, since the tomb had collapsed to the ground, I constructed another one and, during my lifetime, set upon it by the roadside this loquacious plaque. Thus may the sons and grandsons of myself, who completed this enviable work, possess my house. Acrostich: Through Sophytos the son of Naratos.26 The Greek cultural reference points are overt: Greek gods, Greek education, the Muses, and a literary flavour and choice of vocabulary which demonstrates familiarity on the part of the author with both the epics of Homer, and more current Hellenistic literary styles. Sophytos name, !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 25 An idea first mooted by Robert 443.
26

Trans. adapted from Adrian S. Hollis, "Greek Letters in Hellenistic Bactria," in Culture in Pieces: Essays on Ancient Texts in Honour of Peter Parsons, ed. Dirk Obbink and Richard Rutherford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 104-118. The inscription was first published by Paul Bernard, Georges-Jean Pinault and Georges Rougemont, "Deux nouvelles inscriptions grecques de l'Asie Centrale," Journal des Savants, vol. 2004 (2004): 227-356.

however, has been identified as Indian, and to a modern commentator, the contrast between his Greek erudition and apparently non-Greek descent and identity is a striking one. In the absence of any further information about the man, his life, and indeed the contemporary community at Old Kandahar, I would urge a little more caution.27 As with the Greek onomastic repertoire in the east, a name must be contextualised for its origin and significance to be assessed, and where we lack this context we can say little about the significance of any one individual name. Resources such as the Lexicon of Greek Personal Names and Trismegistos People now make it possible to establish where particular personal names occurred within the Greek world, and with what frequency. These may give clues as to whether significant portions of the initial GraecoMacedonian settler community of Bactria and India may have come from specific regions of the Greek world, and furthermore whether in naming practices their descendents continued to espouse Greek regional identities. There are problems with pursuing such lines of enquiry further. In places such as Hellenistic Egypt, we often find individuals in the documentary record given explict ethnic descriptions.28 This is not the case in Bactria, and furthermore there are few cases where an individual is given a patronymic, which might allow us to trace naming patterns within descent lines from the original settler generation. In identifying Macedonian, Thessalian or other northern Greek components in the settler population of Bactria and India under Alexander, it is a matter of weighing up probabilities, and looking for supporting circumstantial evidence. Where I do think we can identify significant patterns in naming choices is in the selection of names with cultural resonance, ones which could celebrate and assert connections to Greek history and culture, and to a wider Greek world. Bibliography Allan, John. "A Tabula Iliaca from Gandhara." Journal of Hellenic Studies 66, (1946): 21-23. Archibald, Zosia, John K. Davies and Vincent Gabrielsen. The Economies of Hellenistic Societies. Third to First Centuries BC. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bernard, Paul, Georges-Jean Pinault and Georges Rougemont. "Deux nouvelles inscriptions grecques de l'Asie Centrale." Journal des Savants 2004, 2 (2004): 227-356. Bingen, Jean. Hellenistic Egypt: Monarchy, Society, Economy, Culture. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Bopearachchi, Osmund. Monnaies grco-bactriennes et indo-grecques: Catalogue raisonn. Paris: Bibliothque nationale. Bopearachchi, Osmund and Paul Bernard. "Deux bracelets grecs avec inscriptions grecques trouvs dans l'Asie centrale hellnise." Journal des Savants (2002): 238-278. Burstein, Stanley M. "Whence the Women?: The Origin of the Bactrian Greeks." Ancient West & East 11, (2012): 97-104. Canali De Rossi, Filippo. Iscrizioni dello Estremo Oriente Greco: Un Repertorio. Bonn: Dr. Rudolf Habelt. Coloru, Omar. Da Alessandro a Menandro: il regno greco di Battriana. Pisa/Roma: Fabrizio Serra editore. Garca Ramn, Jos-Luis. "Thessalian Personal Names and the Greek Lexicon." In Matthews, Elaine, ed., Old and New Worlds in Greek Onomastics. Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 2007. Grenet, Frantz. "Lonomastique iranienne A Khanoum." Bulletin de Correspondance Hellnique 107, (1983): 373-381. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 27 See further Rachel Mairs, "Sopha Grammata: Greek Acrostichs in Inscriptions from Arachosia, Nubia and Libya," in The Muse at Play: Riddles and Wordplay in Greek and Latin Poetry, ed. Jan Kwapisz, David Petrain and Miko"aj Szyma#ski (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012), 279-306.
28

La'da.

Heckel, Waldemar. Who's Who in the Age of Alexander the Great. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell. Hollis, Adrian S. "Laodice Mother of Eucratides of Bactria." Zeitschrift fr Papyrologie und Epigraphik 110, (1996): 161-164. ______. "Greek Letters in Hellenistic Bactria." In Obbink, Dirk and Richard Rutherford, ed., Culture in Pieces: Essays on Ancient Texts in Honour of Peter Parsons. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Holt, Frank L. Alexander the Great and Bactria: The Formation of a Greek Frontier in Central Asia. Leiden; New York: E. J. Brill. ______. Thundering Zeus: The Making of Hellenistic Bactria. Berkeley: University of California Press. Holt, Frank Lee. Lost World of the Golden King: In Search of Ancient Afghanistan. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hornblower, Simon and Elaine Matthews, ed. Greek Personal Names: Their Value as Evidence. Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 2000. Karttunen, K. India and the Hellenistic World. Helsinki: Finnish Oriental Society. Khan, N. A. "A New Relief from Gandh!ra Depicting the Trojan Horse." East and West 40, (1990): 315-319. La'da, Csaba. Foreign Ethnics in Hellenistic Egypt. Leuven: Peeters. Mairs, Rachel. The Archaeology of the Hellenistic Far East: A Survey. Bactria, Central Asia and the Indo-Iranian Borderlands, c. 300 BC AD 100. Oxford: BAR. ______. "The Places in Between: Model and Metaphor in the Archaeology of Hellenistic Arachosia." In Kouremenos, Anna, Sujatha Chandrasekaran and Roberto Rossi, ed., From Pella to Gandhara: Hybridisation and Identity in the Art and Architecture of the Hellenistic East. Oxford: BAR, 2011. ______. "The Hellenistic Far East: From the Oikoumene to the Community." In Stavrianopoulou, Eftychia, ed., Shifting Social Imaginaries in the Hellenistic Period: Narratives, Practices, and Images. Leiden: Brill, 2012. ______. "Sopha Grammata: Greek Acrostichs in Inscriptions from Arachosia, Nubia and Libya." In Kwapisz, Jan, David Petrain and Miko"aj Szyma#ski, ed., The Muse at Play: Riddles and Wordplay in Greek and Latin Poetry. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012. Martinez-Sve, Laurianne. "Les Grecs en Orient : portraits croiss." In Rouillard, Pierre, ed., Portraits de migrants, Portraits de colons. I. Paris: de Boccard, 2009. Parker, Robert. "Theophoric Names and Greek Religion." In Hornblower, Simon and Elaine Matthews, ed., Greek Personal Names: Their Value as Evidence. Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 2000. Pinault, Georges-Jean. "Remarques sur les noms propres d'origine indienne dans la stle de Sphytos." In Bopearachchi, Osmund and Marie-Franoise Boussac, ed., Afghanistan: Ancien carrefour entre l'est et l'ouest. Turnhout: Brepols, 2005. Robert, Louis. "De Delphes lOxus: Inscriptions grecques nouvelles de la Bactriane." Comptesrendus de l'Acadmie des inscriptions et belles-lettres (1968): 416-457. Rougemont, Georges. "Hellenism in Central Asia and the North-West of the Indo-Pakistan SubContinent: The Epigraphic Evidence 1." Ancient Civilizations from Scythia to Siberia 18, (2012): 175-182. ______. Inscriptions grecques d'Iran et d'Asie centrale. London: School of Oriental and African Studies. Strootman, Rolf. "Alexander's Thessalian Cavalry." Talanta: Proceedings of the Dutch Archaeological and Historical Society 42-43, (2010-2011): 51-67. Widemann, Franois. Les successeurs d'Alexandre en Asie centrale et leur hritage culturel. Essai. [Seconde dition, revue et corrige]. Paris: Riveneuve.