Intercourse between India and the Western World from the Earliest Times to the Fall of Rome c11.2.3

c11.2.3

Pliny² says that India, China, and Arabia, absorbed between them one hundred million sesterces per annum. This sum is calculated by Mommsen³ to represent £1,100,000, of which nearly half went to India. The effect of this enormous drain on imperial finance must have been terribly serious. Roman coinage was, like English gold, the chief medium,—almost the sole medium—of international commerce. Indians had no coinage worth speaking of, and preferred to import specie. This was especially true of the south; the Kushān and Śaka monarchs imitated or restruck Roman coins. The well-known story of the Roman revenue collector, shipwrecked on the Ceylon coast and convincing the Sinhalese monarch of the superiority of his country by pointing to the purity, regularity and fine workmanship of her coins, is told by both Pliny¹ and Kosmas Indikopleustes². “ Thus it is,” says the latter, “ that with their money the trade of the world is carried on.” One of the fashionable extravagances of the time was the consumption of huge quantities of spices at funerals. Even as early as the days of Sulla, we hear of two hundred and ten talents’ weight being used at his obsequies. The climax was, of course, reached by Nero, who at the funeral of Poppoea, in 66 A.D., burnt more aromatics on her pyre than Arabia produced in a year³.