Person · Indo-Greek king
Menander I (Milinda)
The greatest of the Indo-Greek kings, reigning from about 165 to 130 BCE from Sāgala — Sialkot — over a realm that reached from the Kabul valley across the Punjab. His silver and bronze issues are the most numerous of any Indo-Greek ruler and stayed in circulation for centuries after him, which is why his coins turn up as far east as the Ganga. In the Pali Milindapañha he appears as Milinda, questioning the monk Nāgasena about the self and being answered into conversion.
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Confidence
- Mixed / layered
Worth knowing
Plutarch records that when he died his ashes were divided among the cities of his kingdom and enshrined in monuments — a distribution made for the Buddha and for almost nobody else, performed for a Greek king.
Whether Menander formally became a Buddhist is not established: the Milindapañha is a doctrinal dialogue composed later, though the Plutarch notice of his relic division is independent of it.
Connections (4)
- Imperial administration ofSagala / Sialkot
Menander ruled from Sāgala, the Sialkot of today, from about 165 to 130 BCE, over a realm reaching from the Kabul valley across the Punjab — the largest the Indo-Greeks held. His silver and bronze coinage is the most abundant of any of those kings and stayed in circulation for centuries, which is why his issues turn up as far east as the Ganga plain and were still being imitated long after the dynasty ended. The city had already been stormed by Alexander as Sangala a century and a half before he made it his capital.
- PatronageTakshashilā / Taxila
The Milindapañha stages Menander in debate with the monk Nāgasena, questioning him about whether there is a self, and has the king convinced and converted; it is set in Sāgala but belongs to the same Buddhist intellectual world as Taxila, which was the north-west's teaching centre and under Indo-Greek control for much of his reign. Plutarch adds a detail from outside the Buddhist tradition: when Menander died his ashes were divided among the cities of his kingdom and enshrined, which is a distribution made for the Buddha and for almost nobody else.
- Contemporary capital withGandhāra
Menander's reign is the Indo-Greek moment that Gandharan art is usually traced back through. The region's sculpture is a century or more later and Kushan-patronised, but the Hellenistic vocabulary it works in — the drapery, the volume, the classical profile, the Corinthian pilaster — entered the north-west with the Greek kingdoms of Bactria and the Punjab, of which his was the most substantial. His coins carry Greek on one face and Kharoshthi on the other, which is the same bilingual arrangement the art makes visually.
- PrecursorAi-Khanoum
The Indo-Greek kings of the Punjab came out of Greek Bactria, and Ai-Khanoum is what Greek Bactria looked like. A city on the Oxus with a gymnasium, a theatre and the Delphic maxims cut in stone, it was the northern half of the world that produced Menander — who ruled from Sāgala over the Punjab a century or so later, struck bilingual coins in Greek and Kharoshthi, and appears in a Pali text arguing Buddhist doctrine. The institutions at Ai-Khanoum are the background that makes the Milindapañha's premise plausible.
Sources
Wikipedia, “Menander I”. Milindapañha, trans. T. W. Rhys Davids; Plutarch, Moralia (Praecepta gerendae reipublicae); Osmund Bopearachchi, Monnaies gréco-bactriennes et indo-grecques.
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