Page:History of India Vol 2.djvu/253

 EXTENT OF GREEK INFLUENCE 215 For eighty or ninety years after the death of Alex- ander the strong arm of the Maurya emperors held India for the Indians against all comers, and those mon- archs treated with their Hellenistic neighbours on equal terms. Asoka was much more anxious to communicate the blessings of Buddhist teaching to Antiochos and Ptolemy than to borrow Greek notions from them. Although it appears to be certainly true that Indian plastic and pictorial art, such as it was, drew its in- spiration from Hellenistic Alexandrian models during the Maurya period, the Greek influence merely touched the fringe of Hindu civilization, and was powerless to modify the structure of Indian institutions in any essential respect. For almost a hundred years after the failure of Seleukos Nikator no Greek sovereign presumed to at- tack India. Then Antiochos the Great (dr. 206 B. c.) marched through the hills of the country now called Afghanistan, and went home by Kandahar and Sistan, levying a war indemnity of treasure and elephants upon a local chief. This brief campaign can have had no appreciable effect on the institutions of India, and its occurrence was probably unknown to many of the courts east of the Indus. The subsequent invasions of Demetrios, Eukratides, and Menander, which extended with intervals over a period of about half a century (190-153 B.C.), pene- trated more deeply into the interior of the country; but they, too, were transient raids, and cannot possibly have affected seriously the ancient and deeply rooted