A Greek king in India became a character in a Buddhist scripture
In Pali texts he is King Milinda, a sharp debater who cross-examines the monk Nagasena and ends up asking to be accepted as a follower of the Buddha. In Greek he was Menander I Soter, the Saviour, who ruled a large stretch of the northwestern Indian subcontinent and Central Asia in the second century BC.
Their exchanges survive as the Milinda Panha, The Questions of King Milinda, an influential Buddhist work whose question-and-answer style may owe something to Plato's dialogues. It portrays the king as learned in philosophy, music, medicine and astronomy, guarded by 500 Greek soldiers and advised by men with names like Demetrius and Antiochus. Menander was born into a Greek family, possibly near Alexandria of the Caucasus, today's Bagram, and reigned from about 165 or 155 BC until 130 BC.
His conquests impressed ancient writers. Strabo, drawing on Apollodorus of Artemita, credited the Bactrian Greeks, and Menander above all, with subduing more peoples in India than Alexander the Great. From his capital, thought to be Sagala, modern Sialkot, his realm reached from the Kabul River to the Ravi. Indian sources hint at raids deep into the Ganges plain, toward Mathura and perhaps even the Shunga capital Pataliputra, though how those campaigns ended is unknown. Some modern specialists are sceptical; the numismatist Joe Cribb notes that no coins of his turn up east of Taxila, though hoards found near Sialkot and in Haryana complicate that picture.
Coins are in fact his loudest witness. Silver and bronze pieces bearing his image are the most numerous and widespread of any Indo-Greek king, and a Greek merchant's guide written two centuries or more later reported old drachmae with his name still in use at the port of Barygaza. The only inscriptions naming him come from Bajaur.
Accounts of his end split along cultural lines. Buddhist tradition says he gave his throne to his son and became an enlightened monk. Plutarch says he died in an army camp, and that rival cities quarrelled over his remains until they agreed to share the ashes equally and each raise a monument, a funeral strikingly like the Buddha's own. His widow Agathoclea governed for their son Strato I, and fragments of Indo-Greek rule lasted until around 10 AD.
Source: Menander I
