The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s7.188

c10.s7.188

To return to the two dramas. Contact, as we have seen, was probable; but contact does not necessarily mean influence. Certain parallels between Greek and Indian plays have been put forward, but nothing convincing in this respect; human minds, working on the same subject, have a tendency to work on parallel lines. I shall not attempt to go beyond the view that we cannot deny the possibility of Greek influence but that there is no evidence;³ perhaps however I can make two points a little more precise than hitherto. On the analogy of the Milindapañha, if there was any Greek influence it would have been a matter of *form* only, of outward shape; the substance is as Indian as it can be. No one, I think, can read a play like Sakuntalā, which in a less sophisticated age than our own took London by storm as it did Goethe, without realising that he is in a totally different world from anything which he has ever met with in Greek literature. And my second point concerns that same substance. The strongest argument of those who have believed in substantial Greek influence has always been that Kālidāsa’s plays contain recognition scenes, and these were the stock-in-trade of the Athenian writer of comedies, Menander. Why Menander should be brought in is obscure to me, for any contact is much more likely to have been with Euripides;⁴ even Philostratus knew that much.⁵ But in any case the argument is easy to disprove. Ancient civilisations, whatever their merits, usually gave far less individual security than we expect to-day, and in any country, not only in Greece or India, recognitions of lost wives or daughters were the most obvious of all the material which lay to the hand of the dramatist. We possess an old Peruvian play (and a very good one) called Apu Ollantay,¹ composed in the reign of the Inca Tupac Yupanqui and written down after the Spanish conquest. That play turns entirely on two recognitions, the first by the imprisoned princess of her lost daughter, and the second, through the child's instrumentality, of the prisoner herself by her husband and her brother the Inca; but the most hardened Diffusionist would scarcely suggest that the author, who had never heard of the Old World or of reading or writing, was borrowing from Menander.