The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s7.105

c10.s7.105

Pliny’s four stages¹ are stages of the voyage from Egypt to India, the gradual utilisation of the south-west monsoon; no information remains as to the use of the north-east monsoon for the voyage westward, but I shall assume that when ships began to cross open sea on the way to India they soon learnt to cross it on the way back also. As Nearchus was told of, and waited for, the north-east monsoon,² Indians had known of it long before Greeks, though they had only used it for coasting voyages;³ had they learnt to cross the open sea, Greeks in the second century must have copied them. Pliny’s four stages are (1) coasting all the way;⁴ (2) cutting across a bit of open sea from a point in Arabia which he calls Syagros to Demetrias-Patala;⁵ (3) cutting out Demetrias (this is the important matter) by sailing direct from the Arabian coast (and *a fortiori* from the Persian Gulf) to a port he calls Sigerus, somewhere south of Barygaza (and naturally therefore to Barygaza also);⁶ (4) cutting out Arabia altogether and sailing direct from the Somali coast to Muziris and other ports in the extreme south of India.⁷ He gives certain time-indications. The fourth stage was in use when he wrote but had not been in use very long;¹ doubtless the usual date for its commencement, A.D. 40–50, is approximately correct. The second stage was very short, for he says that the next generation, *secuta aetas*, passed to the third; the second then did not last more than thirty years. By contrast, he says that the third stage, after the *secuta aetas* adopted it, lasted a long time, *diu*, and ‘a long time’, as specifically contrasted with a generation, cannot mean less than a century and might mean more; from the way he puts it, he is clearly describing what, to himself, had seemed to be the permanent way of the world till quite recently. Taking then a century for the third stage, which would make it begin *c.* 60–50 B.C., and thirty years for the second stage, we get from Pliny a date of *c.* 90–80 B.C. for the first use of the south-west monsoon (otherwise than for coasting). But we happen to know from other sources that *something* important connected with the Indian Ocean had happened before 78 B.C. and after *c.* 111 B.C., say *c.* 100–80 B.C., and this cannot well be anything but the first use of the south-west monsoon.² The two lines of evidence then agree as well as may be; that means that the third stage cannot have begun later than *c.* 50 B.C. and may have begun *c.* 70 or even a little earlier. It does not seem possible to put the beginning of the second and third stages in the Roman Imperial period.