2 I 8
181-161 b.c. Menander advanced farther into North-WesternIndia, and his coins are found from Kabul , near which heprobably had his capital, as far as Muttra on the Jumna .The Buddhist successors of Chandra Gupta profoundly modi-fied the religion of Northern India from the east of theGangetic valley; the Greek empire of Seleukos , with its Bactrianand later offshoots, deeply influenced the science and art ofHindustan from the west.
We have already seen how much Brahman astronomy owedto the Greeks, and how the builders’ art in India received itsfirst impulse from the architectural exigencies of Buddhism .The same double influence, of the Greeks on the west and ofthe Buddhists on the east of the Brahmanical Middle Landof Bengal, can be traced in many details. What the Buddhists were to the architecture of Northern India, that the Greekswere to its sculpture. Greek faces and profiles constantlyoccur in ancient Buddhist statuary. They enrich almost allthe larger museums in India , and examples may be seen atSouth Kensington. The purest specimens have been foundin the Punjab , where the Greeks settled in greatest force.In the Lahore collection I saw, among other beautifulpieces, an exquisite little figure of an old blind man feelinghis way with a staff. Its subdued pathos, its fidelity to nature,and its living movement dramatically held for the moment insculptured suspense, are Greek, and nothing but Greek. Itis human misfortune, that has culminated in wanderingpoverty, age, and blindness—the very curse which Sophocles makes the spumed Teiresias throw back upon the doomedking—
1 Blind, having seen ;
Poor, having rolled in wealth ; he with a staff
Feeling his way to a strange land shall go.’
As we proceed eastward from the Punjab , the Greek typebegins to fade. Purity of outline gives place to lusciousnessof form. In the female figures, the artists trust more andmore to swelling breasts and towering chignons, and load theneck with constantly-accumulating jewels. Nevertheless, theGrecian type of countenance long survived in Indian art. Itis perfectly unlike the coarse, conventional ideal of beauty inmodern Hindu sculptures. I have traced this Greek typesouthward as late as the delicate profiles on the so-called SunTemple or 1 Black Pagoda ’ at Kanarak, built in the 12th cen-tury a.d. on the far eastern Orissa shore of the Bay of Bengal.
Not only did the Greek impulse become fainter and fainter