Intercourse between India and the Western World from the Earliest Times to the Fall of Rome c11.12

c11.12

One of the results of the increased intercourse with India was the appearance of several works bearing more or less directly upon the subject of Indian geography. Of these writers, the earliest is Strabo, an Asiatic Greek who lived in the reign of Augustus. A great traveller, Strabo had visited Armenia, and had accompanied his friend Aelius Gallus up the Nile. He had been to the port of Myos Hormos, and observed the great increase of trade with India ; for he found that about one hundred and twenty merchantmen sailed to India (he does not say in what space of time, but perhaps he means in a single season), whereas scarcely anyone dared to make the direct voyage in the days of the Ptolemies¹. In his own days a few bold sailors even made the mouth of the Ganges. But they were ignorant men, ill-qualified to describe what they had seen. Hence Strabo is driven to rely for his information about India upon previous writers². His leading authority is Eratosthenes, the Alexandrian. He draws also largely upon Megasthenes (whom he unfairly censures), and on Aristobulus, Onesikritus, Nearchus, and other writers who took part in Alexander's campaign. Hence the India he describes is the India, not of his own day, but of the third and fourth centuries B.C. ; and valuable and exhaustive though the *Geography* is, it throws little light upon India at the time of Augustus. Even with regard to the accounts of eye-witnesses, he says, there are many discrepancies, and most of the people who write about India do so from hearsay, having visited only isolated portions of the country. The same remarks apply to the *Indika* of Arrian, written about 150 B.C. A work of quite a different kind is the encyclopaedic *Natural History* of Pliny the Elder, completed in the year 77 A.D. two years before his death in the great eruption at Pompeii. The sixth book of this work contains a valuable description of Ceylon, drawn from the accounts of the official already mentioned (a freedman of Annius Plocamus) wrecked there in the reign of the Emperor Claudius. It also contains, besides dissertations on the geography of India drawn from various sources, a most interesting account of the voyage from Myos Hormos to the Indian coast, as made at the time. Other books contain exhaustive catalogues of Indian animals and minerals, and, above all, an invaluable list of Indian plants and drugs, of the greatest use in studying Indian exports of that nature.