[2] Apollodotus whose name means "given by Apollo",[3] was not the first to strike bilingual coins outside Bactria, but he was the first king who ruled in India only, and therefore the founder of the proper Indo-Greek kingdom.

It is found mainly in the provinces of Punjab, Sindh and Gujarat, indicating the southern limit of the Indo-Greek expansion in India.

This is also suggested by the Periplus, a 1st-century AD document on trade in the Indian Ocean, which describes the remnants of Greek presence (shrines, barracks, wells, coinage) in the strategic port of Barygaza (Bharuch) in Gujarat.

Alternatively, the Bull, according to Foucher, represents the birth of the Buddha, as it happened during the month of Vaicakha (April–May), known to Buddhists as Vesak, under the zodiacal sign of the Taurus, during the full moon.

[10] The elephant, pendant to the bull, and shown with a girdle on the obverse, also must have a symbolic role, possibly Buddhism, as it was associated with the stupa hill in the earliest coins of Apollodotus.

For these, Apollodotus I clearly used Bactrian celators to strike a realistic portrait of the king as an aged man in the Macedonian Greek hat called kausia, with a reverse of sitting Pallas Athene holding Nike, a common Hellenistic motif introduced by the Diadoch Lysimachus.