The Iranians did not succumb to the charm of Greek gods. Syncretism was no more than verbal. Herakles was popular among the Greeks, and the Iranians began to represent their hero Verethraghna with Herakles' attributes, just as the Buddhists borrowed the type of Apollo for images of the Buddha. Similarly, the two law systems remained separate. The Greeks of Susa published their acts of manumission on the walls of the temple of Nanaia, but these documents were written in Greek and according to Greek legal ideas. Law went with the language of the deed. Under the Parthian kings in Kurdistan, a transaction between two Iranian parties, written in Greek in 44-5 A.D. follows the Greek law. A transaction of 53-4 A.D., concerning the same vineyard, but recorded in Parthian Aramaic, is formulated according to a law system which is not Greek.1 We may guess that under the Seleucids, the countryside of Iran continued to live according to its own traditional and customary law, including the administration of justice, in civil litigations at least. Greek art was much appreciated by the Iranian aristocracy, which even accepted male nudity in sculpture, but the potters of Hellenistic Marv did not follow Greek models. A vogue of Greek eroticism led to fabrication of terracotta figurines of naked women, but the mode disappeared in the Parthian age. On the other hand, the image of the Great Mother of the gods on a silver plaque from a Greek colony on the Oxus, though " orientalized ", owes nothing to the Iranian tradition. Yet, Greek and native craftsmen often worked together on the same project and often exchanged technological experience and artistic motifs. For instance, antefixes of Oriental style are used on the monument of Kineas, the founder of a Greek city on the Oxus, and the disposition of Persian palaces reappears in buildings of the same city. How, then, may we explain the "hellenization" of the East? As a matter of fact, the modern idea of hellenization is anachronistic. It has two sources: first, pro-Macedonian propaganda in Greece before Alexander assured the listeners that the "barbarians" would be only too happy to exchange their Oriental despotism for Greek management, and the experience of modern colonization. But as we have already observed the empire of the Seleucids was no "colonial" power.
Seleucid Empire and Heritage of Greek Polis in Persia
