Questions of King Milinda Part 01

Author(s): T W Rhys Davids
Publisher: Oxford

Page 21

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THE QUESTIONS OF KING MILINDA.
preliminary story, in which the reader's interest in them is aroused by anticipation. And the ability of this part of the work is very great. For in spite of the facts that all the praise lavished therein upon both Milinda and Nagasena is in reality only praise of the book itself, and that the reader knows this very well, yet he will find it almost impossible to escape from the influence of the eloquent words in which importance and dignity are lent to the occasion of their meeting; and of the charm and skill with which the whole fiction is maintained.
The question then arises whether the personages were any more real than the conversations. Milinda is supposed to be the Menander, who appears in the list of the Greek kings of Baktria, since he is described in the book as being a king of the Yonakas reigning at Sagala (the Euthydemia of the Greeks), and there is no other name in the list which comes so near to Milinda. This identification of the two names is certainly correct. For whether it was our author who deliberately made the change in adapting the Greek name to the Indian dialect in which he wrote, or whether the change is due to a natural phonetic decay, the same causes will have been of influence. Indra or Inda is a not uncommon termination of Indian names, and meaning king is so appropriate to a king, that a foreign king's name ending in -ander would almost inevitably come to end in -inda. Then the sequence of the liquids of m-n-n would tend in an Indian dialect to be altered in some way by dissimilation, and Mr. Trenckner adduces seven instances in Pali of 1 taking the place of n, or n of l, in similar circumstances 1.
There remains only the change of the first E in Menander to I. Now in the Indian part of the inscription, on undoubted coins of Menander, the oldest authorities read Minanda as the king's name?, and though that interpretation has now, on the authority of better specimens, been given up, there is no doubt that Milinda runs more easily
1. Páli Miscellany,' part i, p. 55. . For instance, Wilson in his Ariana Antiqua,' p. 283.
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