My reaction to practically all of that post was 'yes, that's sensible, I agree with you there' - so I hope you'll excuse me only commenting on small parts.
I'm also not sure if Hellenization achieved much more in those areas than elsewhere insofar as it remained confined to urban areas. Part of the problem I suspect is that I'm not as familiar with the Seleucids than I am with the Roman side of things.
I don't think we should assume that Hellenisation (as if it were a deliberate policy of Alexander's state, with clear goals in mind) was designed to make all of the people in the conquered lands indistinguishable from Greeks. Being a by-product of the ruling class, all that we can say beyond doubt is that it was 'designed' (consciously or not) as a means of increasing their control. To do that, it only really needed to spread to the cities, as actual state oversight in rural areas - especially in parts of the world like the Egyptian desert or Afghanistan, where it's weak even today - was practically non-existent. So in order to set himself up as the most powerful ruler he could reasonably expect to be, a ruler only had to control the cities and he could rule in peace, collect his taxes and raise his armies without many rural people noticing a particularly big change. It's certainly significant that I can't think of a single Greek monarchy that was overthrown by anything other than a foreign invasion.
That's all interesting. Don't get me wrong. But think of it this way: the Hephthalites lasted two hundred years and the Duranni (and more broadly, I think, Pashtuns) seem to claim them as ancestors. I have no idea how accurate this belief is but it does speak to the influence of the Hephthalites.
Or the insignificance of people claiming Macedonians as ancestors, but I take your point.
I'm not sure if it's true to call them civilians though. It sort of worked like this: Baktria Greeks were obliged to render military service. So people moving to Baktria did so knowing that they would have to serve. (I guess that's not all that different from elsewhere in the Greek world but it's important to keep in mind that the distinction between soldier and civilian wasn't all that stark for male Greeks).
That was true in all parts of the ancient world, though - the distinction I was trying to draw was between men who were posted abroad and settled down and people who decided to move abroad from their homes in the motherland. Soldiering as a profession only really came in with the Romans.
I'm also not altogether sure if land was what drew Greeks to Baktria because the new Greek ruled territories were immense and must have had lots of surplus land in aggregate. I think the promise of incentives and perks seems to be a rather more realistic rationale for migration. I would tend therefore to think that the model for Baktrian settlement (and I guess the Seleucids) is more Spanish America than American Frontier.
They certainly did create colonies of military veterans to hasten the process. What might have been attractive about Bactria (rather than, say, Egypt or Babylonia) was its remoteness and relative emptiness - after all, there was hardly a
shortage of land in the east while American settlers were travelling west. If you wanted, for whatever reason, a fresh start away from the governments of the world with which you were familiar, there probably wasn't a better place.
Britain was something of an outlier in that because pretty much everywhere else Latin killed off local languages. Greek did supplant local languages but I think that the most in-roads were made in Asia Minor. Elsewhere? Not so much luck.
The comparison isn't a great one because practically all of the peoples conquered in the west were illiterate or used writing only in extremely limited contexts - the Celtic druids used Greek letters, but they were targeted particularly early on for extermination. It's a lot easier to destroy a language when it doesn't leave anything behind in the first place; if you wanted to interact with the state's bureaucracy at any level in the west, you had to learn Latin because that was the only way of reading or writing anything, or communicating with a Roman official. In the east, where people could read and write Greek and the Romans could speak it, that wasn't the case, so there was not the same pressing need. You also had more migration in the west towards the end of the empire, bringing in totally new languages. Celtic survived in Wales and Brittany, of course, and Basque predates Latin. It's quite likely that related languages were spoken in much of northern Spain until after the fall of Rome, and no doubt there were other small languages which remained in the empire's territory until the Medieval period. Italy, certainly, had so many different dialects (on the day of unification something like 2% of Italians spoke 'standard Italian') that it's not unreasonable to suggest that they would have been practically different languages even at the end of the empire.
