India Through the Ages: A Popular and Picturesque History of HindustanSteel, Flora Annie Webster
History
India Through the Ages: A Popular and Picturesque History of Hindustan
Steel, Flora Annie Webster
India -- History
Justin the historian gives a few personal details of this Eukratides.
How he and three hundred held a fort for five months against Demetrios
and sixty thousand; and how he was killed in cold blood by his son and
colleague, who drove his chariot wheels over his father's dead body
and refused it burial. A poor return for trust, and honour, and
devoted love! It is satisfactory to know that the monstrous crime
brought its own punishment The dead hero's hold once gone, the
successes he had gained drifted from the murderer's hands, and
thereinafter ensued one of those confused welters of conflicting
names, powers, principalities, which send us back to our outlook on
the case of coins. Menander's name rises out of the obscure in B.C.
155, when he attempted to follow Alexander's footsteps. With a large
army he marched on India, and crossing the Beâs, which had defied his
predecessor, actually threatened the capital of Pâlipûtra itself. At
that time, however, the sovereignty of Magadha lay with a strong man;
the man who, ousting the degenerate Mauryas, had shown himself to have
the qualities of both a soldier and general. So the Greek king had to
beat a hasty retreat, thus ending the last attempt of Europe upon
India until Vasco de Gama's, in A.D. 1502.
About this time two nomad tribes from the wide Roof-of-the-World began
a march southward, which, like a flood, was eventually to sweep
everything before it. The first were the Sâkas, who, driven from
behind by the following tribe, the Yuehchi, overwhelmed Bactria,
forced their way into the Punjâb, and penetrated as far south as
Mathura, while another section founded a Sika dynasty at Kathiawâr.
They seem to have owned allegiance to the Arsakian or Parthian kings
of Persia, and bore the Persian title of satrap.
Thus, from the pell-mell of petty princelings and wild, nomadic
chieftains another name springs to notice. On the coins it runs:
"_Maues basileus basileon_."
This king of kings, as he proudly calls himself, was Maues, the first,
or nearly the first, of an Indo-Parthian dynasty replacing the
Indo-Greek and Indo-Bactrian ones. As our eye runs over the coins--the
only relics of dead kings--it is arrested by the name of Gondophares.
Now who was Gondophares? The question clamours vainly for answer,
until a faint recollection of the early fathers brings Origen and the
Acts of St Thomas back to memory. Yes! Gondophares was the King of
India in the days when
"the twelve Apostles, having divided the countries of the world
amongst themselves by lot, India fell to the share of Judas, surnamed
Thomas or the Twin, who showed unwillingness to start on his mission."
Poor St Thomas! It was a far cry, but Habbân, the Indian merchant,
conveyed his saintly purchase (for the Lord sold the unwilling
missioner to him in a vision for twenty pieces of silver) to King
Gundephar in safety. And the king bade the apostle, who was an
architect, build him a palace in six months.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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