The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s7.122

c10.s7.122

Having now dated Pliny’s third stage I can turn to the pepper trade,⁶ for the export of pepper from India on any scale certainly began in the period of Greek rule. It has been thought that Indian pepper in small quantities—packets passed from one people to another—may have found its way to Greece and been used as a medical drug as early as the fifth century B.C., but I am not clear about this. Certainly in the fourth century there was something called pepper to be bought in Athens;⁷ but the ‘pepper’ with which the epicures of the fourth and third centuries stuffed their sucking pigs is specifically called ‘Libyan’,⁸ which means that it came from Carthage, and as Indian pepper would hardly have gone from Phoenicia to Carthage and then back to Athens, it was undoubtedly the so-called African pepper; it can only have come in very limited quantities, as it is only known as a luxury for gourmets. Alexander’s expedition found out nothing about Indian pepper, for Theophrastus, who regularly reflects the botanical results of that expedition, only knew pepper as a medical drug and only included it among some medical odds and ends in the very last chapter of his History of Plants;¹ he knew nothing about its growth or its country. Certainly Indian pepper did not come to Egypt on any scale in the third and second centuries B.C., or there must have been some hint of it by now in the papyri; and there was no longer a Carthage to send it after 146 B.C. Then comes a casual notice in Plutarch,² which shows that in the year 88 B.C. Aristion, at the moment tyrant in Athens, had so much pepper in his house that he could use *two quarts* of it for an extremely base practical joke. That fixes the beginning of the substantial export of Indian pepper not later than *c.* 100 B.C., and it might be a good deal earlier, for though Eudoxus brought back no pepper on his voyage of *c.* 120, that does not actually prove that export had not yet started; still, somewhere between 120 and 88 B.C. is the most likely date. The probable beginning of the pepper trade then is not far from the probable beginning of the use of the monsoons, but I think this is only coincidence, for pepper seemingly did not as yet go to Egypt; it went to Seleuceia and overland to Syria, and the Romans first made its acquaintance after they had annexed Northern Syria in 64 B.C., and for a time thought it came from Syria or Arabia.³