Intercourse between India and the Western World from the Earliest Times to the Fall of Rome c12.42

c12.42

Of other writers who refer to India, the earliest is Dio Chrysostom, who lived in the reign of Trajan and died in or after 117 A.D.² He mentions Indians among the cosmopolitan crowds to be found in the bazaars of Alexandria, and he says that they came "by way of trade." They made various assertions about their country, he adds, but they were not men of a very reputable class³. Chrysostom’s information about India, however, is not very accurate or striking. He makes the misleading statement that the poetry of Homer, the woes of Andromache and Priam, and the death of Hector and Achilles, had been translated into the Indian language and modes of expression⁴. Chrysostom has led many people to imagine that Greek dramas were actually performed and understood in India, but this can never have been the case. Probably he was led astray by the accidental resemblances between certain Indian and Greek stories. The plot of the Iliad,—the rape of Helen,—for instance, bears a distant likeness to the rape of Sītā in the Rāmāyaṇa. His assertion is repeated by Aelian¹.