Intercourse between India and the Western World from the Earliest Times to the Fall of Rome c13.3.3

c13.3.3

But a journey to India, except under very unusual circumstances, was at that time almost a physical impossibility¹. And Plato never mentions Indian philosophy, or India at all, in all his writings. Herodotus says nothing of the Indian doctrine of transmigration, and in a single sentence, he casually remarks that "some Indians kill nothing that has life, but live on herbs¹." Egypt, not India, was the source, if any, from which Greece borrowed her early philosophy. Herodotus tells us distinctly that the Egyptians were the first to propound the theory of the transmigration of the soul, after death, through a cycle of other lives²; and in a well-known passage of the *Laws* Plato talks of the Greeks as children compared to the Egyptians in knowledge. In a word, there is not a single reference in Greek literature before 328 B.C. which gives us the slightest reason for supposing that the Greeks knew of the existence of Indian philosophy at all. The Indians, on the other hand, were equally ignorant of the literature and civilization of Greece, and equally indifferent to any system of thought outside India. If they ever heard of the *Yavanas* (Pāṇini mentions them once), it was in a doubtful and vague way, probably because an occasional Greek, like Skylax of Karyanda, in the service of the Persians, visited the Panjāb.