The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c26.241

v1.c26.241

For many centuries the India known to the West was India as portrayed by the historians of Alexander's expedition and by Megasthenes. Although from the third century onwards there was a certain amount of intercourse between the Mediterranean world and India, although Greek kings ruled in the Punjab and Alexander's colonies were still represented by little bodies of men Greek in speech, although there must occasionally have been seafaring men in the Greek ports who had seen the coasts of India, or merchants who had made their way over the Hindu Kush, the Greek and Latin learned world was content to go on transcribing the books written generations before. These had become classical and shut out further reference to reality. The original books themselves perished, but their statements continued to be copied from writer to writer. Some of the later Greek and Latin works which treated of India are known to us to-day only by their titles or by a few fragments—the works of Apollodorus of Artemita (latter half of second century or first century B.C.), the works of the great geographer Eratosthenes (276–195 B.C.) and of the voluminous compiler, Alexander Polyhistor (105 till after 40 B.C.). But a great deal of the original books is incorporated in writings which we do still possess, especially in the geographical work of Strabo (about 63 B.C.–19 A.D.), the historical work of Diodorus (in Egypt about 60 B.C., still alive 36 B.C.), the encyclopaedic work of Pliny (published about 75 A.D.), the tract of Arrian about India (middle of second century A.D.), and the zoological work of Aelian (end of second century A.D.). Even Pliny had probably never had the work of Megasthenes in his hands, but drew from it only at second or third hand through Seneca and Varro. In the third century A.D., when Philostratus in his romance brings Apollonius of Tyana to India, it is still out of the old traditional materials that what purports to be local colour all comes.