Menander I

• 1. Introduction

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  Menander I Soter is the only Indo-Greek king whose name survives in a Buddhist scripture as a seeker of wisdom. The text is the Milinda Panha, "The Questions of King Milinda", and in it a Greek monarch in India interrogates a sage named Nagasena about the nature of the world. The same king appears in Greek writing too. The geographer Strabo, quoting Apollodorus of Artemita, reports that more tribes were subdued by these Bactrian Greeks than by Alexander, "by Menander in particular". How did a Greek ruler come to dominate the northwestern Indian subcontinent and then be remembered as a Buddhist convert? Why are his coins the most numerous and widespread of any Indo-Greek king, scattered as far as Britain? And why did two ancient traditions disagree so sharply about how he died?

• 2. An Empire In The Northwest

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  From the Hindu Kush, Menander pushed his rule into Gandhara and perhaps Kashmir, building a realm that reached from the Kabul River in the west to the Ravi River in the east. To the north it touched the Swat River valley; to the south it ran down to Arachosia, the Helmand Province. His capital is supposed to have been Sagala, a prosperous city in northern Punjab, believed to be modern Sialkot in Pakistan. The sources disagree about where he came from. One names a village called Kalasi next to Alexandria of the Caucasus, present-day Bagram in Afghanistan. Another places his birthplace near Sagala itself. Ancient writers could not even agree on what to call him. Gnaeus Pompeius Trogus and Justin called him a king of India. Plutarch named him a king of Bactria, and Strabo grouped him with the Bactrian Greek conquerors. He may have actually ruled Bactria, and may have helped the Seleucid king Demetrius II Nicator during the Seleucid-Parthian Wars. His predecessor in Punjab seems to have been the king Apollodotus I.

• 3. How Far East

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  Saketa, the country of the Panchala, and the Mathuras fall to the Yavanas in the Yuga Purana, a scripture that frames events as prophecy. The wicked and valiant Greeks reach Kusumadhvaja and the thick mud-fortifications of Pataliputra, after which all provinces fall into disorder and a great battle follows, fought with tree-like siege engines. Patanjali, writing in his Mahabhashya around 150 BC, describes a failed campaign of Menander as far as Mathura, an episode later echoed in Kalidasa's drama, the Malavikagnimitram. The Hathigumpha inscription, cut by Kharavela the king of Kalinga, also places the Yavanas at Mathura. Kharavela claims that after sacking Goradhagiri and pressing Rajagriha, the loud report of his valour forced the demoralized Greek army to retreat to Mathura. The numismatist Joe Cribb doubts the grandest version of this reach. He argues there is no coin evidence of Menander east of Taxila, and that Indian references stretching further east most likely point to the later Kushans. Yet hoards complicate his caution. Menander's coins turn up in the Siranwali hoard near Sialkot, in the Sonipat hoard from present-day Haryana, and in the Pachkhura hoard near the Yamuna River in Hamirpur district, Uttar Pradesh.

• 4. The Questions Of King Milinda

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  "Many were the arts and sciences he knew," the Milinda Panha says of King Milinda of the city of Euthymedia, listing the Sankhya, Yoga, Nyaya, and Vaisheshika systems, the four Vedas, the Puranas, astronomy, medicine, the art of war, and poetry, the whole nineteen. The text describes him as constantly accompanied by an elite guard of 500 Greek soldiers, and names two of his counsellors as Demetrius and Antiochus. Its style of staged dialogue may have been influenced by Plato's Dialogues. One exchange reveals his military thinking. Asked whether he scrambles to dig moats and raise ramparts when rival kings rise against him, Menander answers that all of it had been prepared beforehand, and that he had learned warfare in advance, "with the object of warding off future danger". Following his discussions with Nagasena, the text says, Menander asked to be accepted "as a true convert from to-day onwards as long as life shall last". He then handed over his kingdom to his son, abandoned the household life for the houseless state, and attained Arahatship. There is, however, little besides this testament to indicate that Menander actually abdicated.

• 5. Greeks At The Stupa

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  A second-century BC relief from a Buddhist stupa at Bharhut, in eastern Madhya Pradesh, shows a foreign soldier with the curly hair of a Greek and the royal headband with flowing ends of a Greek king. Now held at the Indian Museum in Calcutta, the Bharhut Yavana holds a branch of ivy in his right hand, a symbol of Dionysos. His dress falls in rows of geometrical folds in the Hellenistic style, and on his sword appears the Buddhist symbol of the three jewels, the Triratana. He may be a depiction of Menander himself. A reliquary found in Bajaur, the Shinkot casket, carries a dedicatory inscription dated to "the 14th day of the month of Karttika" in the reign of "Maharaja Minadra", Great King Menander. Bajaur is the only place where inscriptions of Menander have been found. Greek monks appear to have carried the faith outward. The Sri Lankan chronicle the Mahavamsa records that the Yona elder Mahadhammarakkhita came from Alasandra, thought to be Alexandria of the Caucasus, with thirty thousand monks for the founding of the Great Stupa at Anuradhapura. At the Butkara stupa, a coin of Menander was found in the second oldest layer, suggesting he built that addition over the original Maurya-era construction.

• 6. An Immense Corpus

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  Generous findings of coins testify to the prosperity and extent of Menander's empire, with finds reaching as far as Britain. He left behind more silver and bronze than any other Indo-Greek king, and these coins are the main source of his history. His silver, according to Bopearachchi, begins with a rare series of drachma showing Athena on the obverse and her owl on the reverse. Their weight and monograms match those of the earlier king Antimachus II, evidence that Menander succeeded him. On the next series he introduced his own portrait, a custom previously unknown among Indian rulers. The reverse carried his dynastic trademark, the Athena Alkidemos throwing a thunderbolt, an emblem also used by the Antigonid kings of Macedonia. Athena Alkidemos means "Athena, saviour of the people", probably a reference to a statue at Pella, the capital of Macedon. He was the first Indo-Greek ruler to put her on his coins. He also reworked the legends, shifting them from a circular layout so the coins could be read without being rotated, a change every later Indo-Greek king adopted. The legend itself reads ΒΑΣΙΛΕΩΣ ΣΩΤΗΡΟΣ ΜΕΝΑΝΔΡΟΥ, and in Kharoshthi, MAHARAJA TRATARASA MENADRASA.

• 7. Two Deaths, Two Menanders

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  Plutarch held up Menander as an example of benevolent rule, contrasting him with disliked tyrants such as Dionysius. According to his account, Menander died in camp while on a military campaign. The cities then quarrelled over his relics until they agreed to distribute his ashes, each carrying away an equal share and erecting monuments to him, in a manner reminiscent of the funerals of the Buddha. Some modern scholars doubt the story, suspecting Plutarch confused it with the account of the Buddha's death. Numismatic evidence led William Tarn to a third reading. He believed Menander simply died, leaving his wife Agathocleia to rule as regent until his son Strato I could rule in his stead. Strato kept Menander's reverse, Athena hurling a thunderbolt, and the title Soter. His final years may have been troubled. He probably overstruck a coin of Zoilos I, who reigned in Gandhara, hinting at a late civil war. The Milinda Panha lends weight to the idea of a cornered king. Menander likens himself to a caged lion that, though the cage be gold, still faces outside, and adds that were he to leave home for homelessness, "I would not live long, so many are my enemies". His relationship with a second ruler, Menander II Dikaios, "the Just", confused earlier scholars like Cunningham and Tarn, who assumed a single king. Bopearachchi and R.C. Senior later separated them by differences in coin findings, style, and monograms.

• 8. A Lasting Imprint

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  Strato I, Amyntas, Nicias, Peucolaus, Hermaeus, and Hippostratus all later showed themselves or their Greek deities forming the vitarka mudra with the right hand, the gesture that in Buddhism signifies the transmission of the Buddha's teaching. Right after Menander's death, several Indo-Greek rulers began stamping the Pali title "Dharmikasa", "follower of the Dharma", echoing the title Dharmaraja borne by the great Indian Buddhist king Ashoka. Strato I, Zoilos I, Heliocles II, Theophilus, Peucolaus, and Archebius all took it up. Nearly half the kings who followed Menander carried Buddhist symbolism of some kind. His example carried far beyond coinage. A frieze at Sanchi, made during or soon after his reign, shows Buddhist devotees in Greek dress, with short curly hair under headbands, tunics and capes, and the double flute called the aulos. His name endures in unexpected places. The Milind College in Aurangabad, India, takes the Pali form of his name, Milind, and was founded in part by Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, the Dalit Buddhist leader who wrote the constitution of the Republic of India. Even the map remembers him: from at least the 1st century, the "Menander Mons", the Mountains of Menander, named the chain at the eastern edge of the subcontinent, today's Naga Hills and Arakan, as marked on Ptolemy's world map.