Herodotus on Bactria between Achaemenid Mobility and Alexander’s campaign. Some reflections

both the reasons and the goals of a phenomenon, that of the so-called ‘deportations’ characteristic of the Achaemenid empire. In addition, considerable attention has been devoted in recent years to the ways in which classical authors perceived events such as the dissolution of a community against the backdrop of, for example, military defeats. All this makes possible an analysis of a Herodotus’ passage (IV, 204) which has so far received less consideration than it deserves. On the basis of these premises, two purposes will be pursued in the following pages. First, I aim to show that a study of the fate – as recounted by Herodotus – of a small community of Greeks settled in Libya against the backdrop of the mobility characteristic of the Achaemenid world substantiates the hypothesis that Central Asia (and Bactria in particular) was far less alien to the mental horizon – and in some cases to individual and group experience – than the representation of this region of the empire as a remote periphery at the edge of the world has long suggested. Secondly, a direct consequence of this hypothesis is that, if indeed the presence of a Greek diaspora in Central Asia was less sporadic than usually admitted, the process of (ethno)genesis of the first community of Graeco-Bactrians needs to be reconsidered in the light of a socio-cultural complexity that historiography tends to consider a feature of Hellenistic Bactrian history, whereas the passage from Herodotus’ Histories discussed in these pages suggests that there is an entire prehistory of this phenomenon yet to be explored.