Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Milindapañha is a Buddhist philosophical text dated between 100 BC and 200 AD that records a dialogue between the Indo-Greek king Menander I and the Buddhist monk Nāgasena. Thomas Rhys Davids, who produced the first English translation in 1890, called it "undoubtedly the masterpiece of Indian prose."
Menander I, called Milinda in Pali, was a 2nd century BC Indo-Greek king described in the Milindapañha as the ruler of the city of Sāgala in India. The text portrays him as adopting the Buddhist faith after his discussions with Nāgasena, eventually handing his kingdom to his son and retiring from the world.
The earliest parts of the Milindapañha are dated between 100 BC and 200 AD. The scholar Oskar von Hinüber proposed the original language may have been Gandhari rather than Sanskrit, drawing on an extant Chinese translation and unique conceptual features within the text. The oldest surviving manuscript of the Pali version was copied in 1495 AD.
The Milindapañha is canonical in Burmese Buddhism, where it is included in the Khuddaka Nikāya and was approved by both the Burmese Fifth and Sixth Buddhist Councils. Thai and Sri Lankan Buddhism do not regard it as canonical, despite the surviving Theravāda text being preserved in Sinhalese script.
The Milindapañha is the only Pali text known to have been passed down as incomplete. References within the text itself confirm that significant sections have been lost.
Three full English translations of the Milindapañha have been published: by Thomas William Rhys Davids in 1890 (reprinted by Dover Publications in 1963), by Isaline Blew Horner in 1969 (reprinted by the Pali Text Society in 1990), and by Maria Heim in 2025 through the Murty Classical Library of India. Bhikkhu Analayo has also translated the shorter Chinese counterpart into English, published by Bukkyo Dendo Kyokai.