The Colas c12.75

c12.75

The feeble beginnings of the trade between the Roman Empire and India, confined at first to articles of luxury, may be traced to the reign of Augustus, if not to an earlier time. Trade with the East was one of the chief factors that brought about the extension and consolidation of the Roman Empire in that direction, and the Arabian expedition of Aelius Gallus, though not a complete success, secured good harbours in the south of Arabia for the Roman traders on their way from Egypt to India. In the reign of Augustus, despite the 'embassies' to him from the Pāṇḍya country, this commerce was by no means extensive or economically important; the notices of some contemporary writers, whose imagination was struck by such trade, has led modern scholars, on the whole, to exaggerate its significance. But it soon assumed new and unexpected proportions, and ceased to be the negligible branch of Roman trade that it was in the beginning. The growth proceeded steadily through the times of the Julii and Claudii, and though there was a lively trade by land, the maritime commerce of Egypt with Arabia, and through Arabia with India, was the most considerable branch of the commerce with the East. So long as the trade was confined to luxuries and carried on through Arab intermediaries, the Romans paid for it mostly in gold and silver, and the oft-quoted statement of the elder Pliny that not a year passed without the Empire paying out a hundred million sesterces (about £ 1,087,500) to India, China and Arabia⁸² has, most likely, reference to this early phase. After Augustus, the trade with India grew naturally in the favourable atmosphere of a great Empire. 'The discovery of the monsoons by Hipparchus of Alexandria in the late Ptolemaic or early Roman times, as well as the natural tendency of a growing trade to become more than a trade in luxuries and a merely passive trade on one side, led to the establishment of a direct route by sea between Egypt and India. The main centre of traffic was now Alexandria. The Arabian harbours lost their importance. ... The new route was fully established at the date of the Periplus, that is, under Domitian. The trade with India gradually developed into a regular exchange of goods of different kinds between Egypt on the one side and Arabia and India on the other. One of the most important articles which came from India was cotton,⁸³ another probably was silk. Both of these products were worked up in the factories of Alexandria, which sent in exchange glass, metal ware, and probably linen.'⁸⁴ Nothing can prove better the increasing volume and regularity of the Indian trade of the Roman Empire than the contrast between the meagre description of the direct trade route to India given by the author of the *Periplus* and the elaborate precision of Ptolemy’s descriptions in the first half of the second century A.D. Ptolemy’s account shows that the Roman trade now reached beyond India to Indo-China and Sumatra, and that the trade with India and China was highly developed and quite regular. Relatively few Roman merchants visited the lands of the Far-East themselves; Southern India obviously acted as intermediary in the trade between China and the West. The carrying trade between the Malaya Peninsula and Sumatra in the East and the Malabar coast in the West was largely in the hands of the Tamils.⁸⁵ The direct trade between Rome and Southern India declined and died out in the period of military anarchy in the Roman Empire of the third century. ‘Practically no coins of the third century have been found in India. Business relations were not resumed till order and a stable gold currency had been re-established in the Byzantine period,’⁸⁶ and then mostly through intermediaries.