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The Greek Experience of India

By Richard Stoneman

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2019 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-15403-9

Contents

List of Illustrations, xi,
Preface and Acknowledgements, xv,
Abbreviations and Conventions, xvii,
Prologue: The Moon at Noon, 1,
PART I. FIRST IMPRESSIONS,
1 Writing a Book about India, 5,
2 Alexander in India, 36,
3 Heracles and Dionysus, 80,
4 The Natural History of India, 99,
PART II. MEGASTHENES' DESCRIPTION OF INDIA,
5 Introducing Megasthenes, 129,
6 Megasthenes' Book, 177,
7 Geography and Ancient History, 186,
8 Culture and Society, 198,
9 The Question of Utopia, 238,
10 Megasthenes on the Natural World, 254,
PART III. INTERACTIONS,
11 The Indian Philosophers and the Greeks, 289,
12 Two Hundred Years of Debate: Greek and Indian Thought, 332,
13 The Trojan Elephant: Two Hundred Years of Co-existence from the Death of Alexander to the Death of Menander, 323 to 135 BCE, 375,
14 Bending the Bow: K???a, Arjuna, Rama, , Odysseus, 405,
15 Greeks and the Art of India, 427,
16 Apollonius o
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It’s one of the most famous questions in the history of comedy, raised in The Life of Brian (1979) at a meeting of the People’s Front of Judea: ‘What have the Romans ever done for us?’ A little shy and hesitant at first, members of the group begin to speak up. The aqueduct? Sanitation? Education...?

What if you asked the Romans what Asia had ever done for them? Pliny the Elder (23 – 79 CE) would gladly have put a figure on it for you: 50 million sesterces’ worth of trade every year, he once claimed.

Sadly, from Pliny’s point of view, that was the figure for money leaving the Roman Empire and heading to India. Merchants had begun travelling to the subcontinent in large numbers a few decades before, during the reign of Emperor Augustus (27 BCE – 14 CE). Some went over land, others travelled on ocean-going ships departing from Red Sea ports.

Armed with companies of archers - protection against pirates - along with new-found knowledge of the seasonal monsoon winds, they set sail for a handful of ports on India’s western coast. Everything from Spanish olive oil and

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Indica (Megasthenes)

Lost account of Mauryan India by Greek writer Megasthenes

Indika (Greek: Ἰνδικά; Latin: Indica) is an account of Mauryan India by the Greek writer Megasthenes (died c. 290 BCE). The original work is now lost, but its fragments have survived in later Greek and Latin works. The earliest of these works are those by Diodorus Siculus, Strabo (Geographica), Pliny, and Arrian (Indica).[1][2]

Reconstruction

Megasthenes' Indica can be reconstructed using the portions preserved by later writers as direct quotations or paraphrase. The parts that belonged to the original text can be identified from the later works based on similar content, vocabulary and phrasing, even when the content has not been explicitly attributed to Megasthenes. Felix Jacoby's Fragmente der griechischen Historiker contains 36 pages of content traced to Megasthenes.

E. A. Schwanbeck traced several fragments to Megasthenes, and based on his collection, John Watson McCrindle published a reconstructed version of Indica in 1887. However, this reconstr

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