Intercourse between India and the Western World from the Earliest Times to the Fall of Rome c13.3.1

c13.3.1

It has already been shewn that the intercourse between India and Greece, before the days of Alexander, was of an indirect nature. Indian goods reached the Mediterranean from Persian or Phoenician caravans; the Indian traders themselves never went further than Babylon or the mouth of the Red Sea. Greece had no direct communication with India. What she knew of India, she had learnt from Greeks in Persian employ, like Ktesias or Skylax. Of the great civilization of ancient India, its philosophy and religion, Greece knew—and cared—nothing. The Greeks were singularly indifferent to the literature or civilization of their contemporaries. They looked on them all as “barbarians,” and treated them with equal contempt. It is extraordinary how little they found out about even their near neighbours, the Persians. Hence we may dismiss at once the theory that the Pythagorean philosophy, for instance, owes anything to India. It is curious, however, to notice how many points of resemblance there are between the mystical philosophy of the Orphic and Pythagorean schools, and Indian beliefs¹. First and foremost, there is the doctrine of Metempsychosis (παλιγγενεσία). But this was a tenet neither of the earliest Greeks nor of the original Aryans of the Panjāb. Practically no traces of it are found in the Vedas, or in the poems of Homer. The Vedic hero, like the Homeric hero, goes to dwell in the Elysium of Yama, the proto-man, and returns no more to earth².