Читать книгу The Hellenistic World - F. Walbank W. - Страница 18

Towards the middle of the third century the inhabitants of a Greek city lying at the site of Ai Khanum beside the river Oxus (mod. Amu Darya) on the northern frontier of Afghanistan (its name is unknown) erected in a shrine in the middle of the city a pillar inscribed with a list of some 140 moral maxims copied from a similar pillar which stood near the shrine of Apollo at Delphi, over 3000 miles away. An adjoining verse inscription reads:

These wise words of famous men of old are consecrated in holy Pytho. Thence Clearchus took them, copying them with care, to set them shining from afar in the sacred enclosure of Cineas (Robert, CRAI (1968), 422 = Austin, 192).

Cineas – his name suggests that he was probably a Thessalian – will have been the city’s founder to whom the shrine was dedicated, and Clearchus has been identified by Robert as the Aristotelian philosopher, Clearchus of Soli, a man with an interest both in Delphi and in the religion and philosophy of the Indian gymnosophists, the Persian magi and the Jewish priests. If this Clearchus was indeeed he, we have here our first indication that he made a journey to the far east and there found distant Greek communities ready to hear him lecture and, at his prompting, to inscribe an authenticated copy of Delphic wisdom in the shrine of the city’s founder. To set up Delphic maxims, often in a gymnasium, was a common practice. Examples are known from Thera (IG, xii 3, 1020) and Miletopolis in Mysia (Syll., 1268). The list at Ai Khanum is fragmentary and in fact only five maxims now survive, but comparable lists elsewhere enabled the French epigraphist, Louis Robert, to reconstitute the whole collection – a striking illustration of how an inscription, of which the greater part is lost, can occasionally be restored with virtual certainty. An interesting feature of the Ai Khanum inscription is that despite the remoteness of this city the lettering is not at all crude or provincial. It is of the highest quality and in the best tradition of the Greek lapicide’s craft, worthy of the kingdom of Bactria, which also produced some of the finest Greek coins of the hellenistic period.

This inscription was discovered in 1966, and nearby, in the gymnasium of Ai Khanum, was another, containing a dedication by two brothers, ‘Triballus and Strato, sons of Strato, to Hermes and Heracles’ (Robert, CRAI (1968), 422), who were the patron gods of the gymnasium. Subsequent excavation has revealed the full plan of the gymnasium itself, which incidentally contained a sundial of a type known, but not hitherto found. There was also a theatre holding 5000 spectators and, dating from about 150, a large administrative centre of palatial proportions, in which were found storing vessels labelled in Greek, a mosaic 5.7 metres square and, most remarkable of all, from what was evidently its library, imprinted on fine earth formed from decomposed wall-bricks, the traces of a still partially legible text from a now perished piece of papyrus, which was evidently a page in a philosophical work which appears to have been written by a member of the Aristotelian school (of which Clearchus himself was a member). These finds confirm the picture of a city in which, despite its later isolation, Greek traditions continued strong right down to the time of its destruction by the nomads of the steppes in the second half of the second century.

But Ai Khanum was not the first site to furnish epigraphical evidence for a strong hellenic presence in Bactria, for only a few years earlier two Greek inscriptions, one with an Aramaic counterpart, had been found at Kandahar (see Schlumberger, CRAI (1964), 126–40). These contained fragments of the moralizing edicts of the Mauryan king Asoka and they too were elegantly carved and in an excellent Greek, which betrayed an intimate knowledge of the vocabulary of Greek philosophy and considerable skill in adapting it to render the thoughts of a Buddhist convert. Anxious to convey his lessons to those living in what now formed part of his dominions, Asoka used Aramaic, the official language of the Persian empire, and of course Greek. More recently a further Greek inscription has been found in Kandahar and more can be expected.

This use of Greek, in the popular cosmopolitan form called the koine, the ‘common tongue’, is characteristic of the whole vast area covered by Alexander’s conquests. It pays no heed to the later frontiers and serves to bind the whole into a single cultural continuum. Its prevalence is the result not merely of political domination, but also of a great movement of colonization which began under Alexander and continued in full spate until about 250, after which it slackened off. Ai Khanum has provided clear evidence of this, for a study of the traces of habitation in a wide area around this city has shown it to be virtually unpopulated under the Achaemenid kings, but with a dense population in hellenistic times.