The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s7.131

c10.s7.131

Then came Pliny’s third stage, with direct voyages from Sigerus south of Barygaza (and *a fortiori* from Barygaza also) to the coast of Arabia or the Persian Gulf, cutting out Demetrias altogether—that is the point I have already emphasised; and pepper shortened its journey to the Persian Gulf and Seleuceia by going direct across the sea from one of those two ports. Nobody knows where Sigerus was,⁴ but it must have been somewhere in the neighbourhood of Bombay; the five Yavanas of the Karli cave, and some of the Indians, came from an unknown seaport Dhenukākā (p. 258) which may be the equally unknown Sigerus. Now Pliny’s third stage, as we have seen, began c. 70–50 B.C., and it obviously has some connection with the appearance of these Yavana merchants in the south not long after 50 B.C. What happened seems now tolerably clear. The cutting out of Demetrias threatened the pepper merchants there with ruin; Indragnidatta and his friends left the city, went south to the country behind Bombay, and got on to the new pepper route to the sea; their donations show that they prospered greatly, as their enterprise deserved. Ultimately it was pepper, the ‘passion of the Yavanas’ as a much-quoted Tamil poem calls it,¹ which brought about Pliny’s fourth stage, when ships went direct to the pepper country of Malabar; but I need not describe the enormous dimensions which this trade was to reach, except to notice that the insatiable desire of the Roman world for pepper in the first century A.D. had a later parallel in the desire for pepper which arose in western Europe after Vasco da Gama had opened the sea-route round the Cape and had for the second time in history made Malabar easily accessible to the West.