Studies in Indian Art c12.s9.22

c12.s9.22

With the establishment of the Kuṣāṇa empire comprising both Mathura and Kabul under one banner, the import of raisin wine on account of increased intercourse with the north-west appears to have received greater impetus. In the early centuries of the Christian era the importation of Yavana wines is also referred to in the literature of the Tamil land (ibid. p. 463). Even in the far south where commerce with the Roman empire flourished, the importation of these wines from across the seas was a common feature of trade in this period (ibid. p. 463). It is said that during the last years of the Roman Republic Italy had become such a wine country that the relation between wine and corn was reversed; wine was exported and corn imported. Cato was of opinion that of all kinds of culture that of the grapes was the most profitable. The cultivation of the vine in the Roman provinces threatened to choke the cultivation of grain to such a degree that the emperor Domitian in an excess of anxiety, ordered that half and more than half of all the vine-yards outside Italy should be destroyed. (Watt's *Dictionary*, p. 267). The Kuṣāṇa and Roman empires came within six hundred miles of each other. Italy was at this time famed as the favourite land of Bacchus and the evidence of the Kuṣāṇa art in India amply bears out the popularity of Kubera worship as the Indian counter-part of Bacchus. We find a number of Bacchanalian groups discovered from Mathura (*A.S.R.*, 1922-23, R.P. Chanda, ‘The Mathura school of sculpture’, p. 167, and pl. XXXVIII, b.). The one form Palikhera (C. 2) preserved in the Mathura Museum actually shows a grape cluster held in the hand of the female attendant standing beside the wife of Kubera. It must have been at this time that the artists adopted the vine motif as a decorative element of their work.¹