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Updated: June 1, 2025
South of Sogdiana, divided from it by the Middle and Upper Oxus, was Bactria, the country of the Bakhtars or Bactrians. The territory of this people reached southward to the foot of the Paropamisus, adjoining Chorasmia and Aria on the west, and on the south Sattagydia and Gandaria.
While the youths of Achaia made no scruples of allowing their oil-anointed torsos to shine under the sun in the stadium, and while the Spartan virgins danced ungarmented before the altar of Diana, those of Persepolis, Ebactana, and Bactria, attaching more importance to chastity of the body than to chastity of mind, considered those liberties allowed to the pleasure of the eyes by Greek manner as impure and highly reprehensible, and held no woman virtuous who permitted men to obtain a glimpse of more than the tip of her foot in walking, as it slightly deranged the discreet folds of a long tunic.
In these, he says, were obelisks with inscriptions on them, setting forth the riches, power, and empire of these kings, as far as Scythia, Bactria, India, and Ionia, their great revenues, and their immense armies, consisting of one million of men. In Egypt, the honors paid to the dead partook of the nature of a religious homage.
Too remote for all scholars even to agree that it existed; set by those who do believe in it at about 1100 B.C. we hear of a "Powerful empire in Bactria" which is up towards Afghanistan; I take it that it was from this the Persian tradition came last down to, and through, the period of the Achaemenidae.
Here, on the near approach of the enemy, he was murdered by Bessus, satrap of Bactria, because he refused to fly farther.
The triumphal inscriptions of Pompeius himself enumerated 12 millions of people as subjugated and 1538 cities and strongholds as conquered it seemed as if quantity was to make up for quality and made the circle of his victories extend from the Maeotic Sea to the Caspian and from the latter to the Red Sea, when his eyes had never seen any one of the three; nay farther, if he did not exactly say so, he at any late induced the public to suppose that the annexation of Syria, which in truth was no heroic deed, had added the whole east as far as Bactria and India to the Roman empire so dim was the mist of distance, amidst which according to his statements the boundary-line of his eastern conquests was lost.
Had she, indeed, noticed Gyges at the time of her meeting with him near Bactria, and preserved some memory of the young captain in one of those secret recesses of the heart where even the most virtuous women always have something buried? Was the desire to avenge her modesty goaded by some other unacknowledged desire?
Soon after passing the Gates he learned that Darius had been seized and loaded with chains by his own satrap Bessus, who entertained the design of establishing himself in Bactria as an independent sovereign. This intelligence stimulated Alexander to make still further haste with part of his cavalry and a chosen body of foot.
Who this extraordinary personage was, and when he lived, it is not easy to determine. Some suppose that he did not live at all. It is most probable that he lived in Bactria from 1000 to 1500 B.C.; but all about him is involved in hopeless obscurity.
Thina is also mentioned as a city, in the interior of a country immediately under the north, at a certain point where the sea terminates; from this city both the raw material and manufactured silks are brought by land through Bactria to Baragaza, or else down the Ganges, and thence by sea to Limurike: the routes we have already described.
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