Anabasis: Demetrius Soter, the Saviour King of Bactria and the Indo-Greeks: A Novel of Hellenistic Afghanistan and India

by Geoffrey Storey

This is a story about a largely forgotten people living out their lives geographically isolated from their par-ent culture, separated by thousands of miles from the lands whence their ancestors had come. These people were the successors of Alexander the Great and his followers, at the furthermost tip of his Empire, in the north of mod-ern Afghanistan, then called Bactria, and the vast lands surrounding it. Their early centuries are well documented, their exploits known.The tides of time were to later overwhelm and isolate them from the rest of the Hellenistic world of which they felt a part, allowing us only glimpses of them. They were nominally Greek or Macedonian by descent. The settlers were not completely cut off from the Hellenistic world bordering the Mediterranean, but they had perforce begun to adapt to the world around them, a world largely ruled before Alexander by a warlike Iranian aristocracy. They were at the hub of transcontinental trade routes, men and caravans crossed the seas, mountains, and deserts. They read the latest plays from Greece, had their own authors, playwrights, and poets.Yet as with Hellenistic dynasts everywhere, their rulers had vast ambitions, and had divided them politically from the successor Seleucid Empire and from the other Hellenistic Empires and states that Alexander had once ruled or dominated. Once separated from the greater Hellenistic polity, with steppe nomads poised to further di-vide them from Mesopotamia, our sources begin to fall silent. They were on their own now.Bactria was a land of many contrasts, high snowy peaks, rushing mountain streams and broad rivers running through fertile valleys, lush forests, with broad stretches of grasslands and steppe to the north, while to the south lay barren hills, deserts of sand and rock. These deserts were not simply waste lands however. Strong wide rivers often cut through them, with green fertile land on either side. As to the North, with its dry steppe lands, its inhabi-tants had long been masters of irrigation.This was a rich country, with good lands for farming and stock raising, teeming with wildlife and filled with precious minerals easily mined. It was also a harsh land, one of contrasts between high cold mountain valley pas-tures and the river oases in the southern deserts, between cultured city life and the herdsmen of the steppe.It was in this beautiful alien land that a relatively few Greeks and Macedonians settled, not always by choice. Here they built their cities in imitation of the cities back home, here they built their lives.They had been ruling and living in this land for six generations when this story opens. They had lost none of the adventurous spirit that had led their ancestors to Bactria, for they knew, had always known, that beyond the Hindu Kush lay an even richer world, a world that seemed ripe to fall into their lap. Lands perhaps greater than even Alexander had conquered. They were Hellenes, and they would carry the standard of Hellenism and its all embracing culture to the ends of the earth, if they could. Demetrius son of Euthedemus was the greatest of these men. Demetrius, surnamed both Soter or Saviour, and Aniketos, the Invincible, undertook an incredible Anabasis, an advance to the ends of the earth, backed only by the resources of what had been an insignificant outer province of Empire, a military expedition that beggars the imagination.The grete Emetrius, the kyng of Inde,..Cam ridynge lyk the god of armes, Mars..His crispe heer lyk rynges was yronne,And that was yellow, and glytered as the sonne.His nose was heigh, his eyen bright citryn,His lippes rounde, his colour was sangwyn;A fewe farakenes in his face ysprynd,...His voys was as a trompe thonderynge.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1982937882
• ISBN13: 9781982937881
• Release Date: June 2018
• Publisher: Independently published
• Length: 344 Pages
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.8" x 6.0"