The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c26.47

v1.c26.47

Of the companions of Alexander, three men chiefly enriched the Greek conception of India by their writings. One was Nearchus, a Cretan by extraction, whose home was in Macedonia, where he had been a friend in youth of Alexander's. This was the man whom Alexander put in command of the fleet which explored the coast between the Indus and the Persian gulf, and Nearchus later on gave his own account of this expedition to the world. His book also contained a good deal of incidental information about India. He appears from the fragments quoted to have been an honest reporter, who took pains to verify the stories which were told him². Another was Onesicritus from the Greek island of Aegina, who regarded the Cynic philosopher Diogenes as his master, a man with some practical knowledge of sea-craft, since Alexander made him pilot of the royal vessel down the Indus. Onesicritus took part in the expedition of Nearchus, and he too afterwards wrote a book about it and about India. Strabo considered him untruthful, and he has generally a bad reputation with modern scholars, though this unfavourable judgment has been seriously challenged¹. The third was Aristobulus, a Greek probably from the Chalcidic peninsula, who not only accompanied Alexander through India, but was entrusted with certain commissions, perhaps not military ones². Aristobulus wrote his book long afterwards, in extreme old age. His interest was predominantly geographical, not military; yet his book seems to have been adversely affected by the rhetorical fashion and perhaps by the Alexander myth which had already begun to take popular shape at the time when he wrote³. A fourth writer, a contemporary, but not a companion, of Alexander, Clitarchus of Colophon, also contributed to popular notions about India. Clitarchus wrote a history of Alexander of a highly journalistic character, drawing largely, it would seem, upon imagination. The book became the most popular of all the histories of Alexander. Although Clitarchus in his main outlines had to keep to the facts, so many eye-witnesses being still alive, the romance, as distinguished from the history, of Alexander takes its start from him. In the Indian part of his history, for instance, he introduced a delightful story of how the Macedonian army, marching through the jungles, had mistaken a troop of monkeys for a hostile army⁴. Statements about India, from such a source, might get very wide currency without having much basis in reality.