The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s7.159

c10.s7.159

There is a statement in the rhetorician Dio Chrysostom that Indians possessed and used a translation of Homer into their own language.⁶ It has no chance whatever of being true,⁷ for nowhere in the Hellenistic world has there been found any translation of any piece of Greek literature into any language except (at the end) Latin; and now that it appears that some Greeks probably knew the Mahābhārata (pp. 380 sq.), the suggestion⁸ that Dio really meant the Indian epic has gained greatly in probability. The interest of Dio's statement is that it has been used as the basis of a theory that the Indian Dohā metre grew out of the Greek hexameter¹ (though a translation would probably not have exhibited the hexameter). The Dohā metre, which is dactylic in structure, belongs to the group of literary languages called Apabrança² which are neither Sanscrit nor Pali, and the earliest remains of this group are said to be the language of the Abhīras (p. 171), who in Menander’s reign were in his satrapy of Abiria on the Indus; but more recently the connection of the Dohā metre with the hexameter has been denied on the ground that it can easily be explained from Indian sources.³ I do not presume to discuss the matter, but if anyone should again desire to connect the two metres he could base his theory on something more to the point than Dio; for the Abhīras were Menander’s subjects and Greek hexameters were being written in Menander’s kingdom (pp. 248 sq.).