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A History of Sanskrit Literature c24.s5: 5. The Romance in Greece and India

A History of Sanskrit Literature c24.s5

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English

5. The Romance in Greece and India

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It is natural that efforts should have been made to prove the derivation from Greece of the Indian romance, as it appears seemingly full-fledged in the works of Subandhu, Bāṇa, and even in some degree Daṇḍin. Peterson's³ argument for Greek influence, strictly limited in scope, was based in part on the indubitable fact of Greek influence on astronomy and astrology, and in part on the new spirit which he discerned in the romances, which clothed with flesh and blood the dry bones of the simple tale with its rapid but monotonous stream of adventures. He quoted, however, in support of his view merely passages illustrating the affection of Achilles Tatius in his tale of Kleitophon and Leukippe for minute descriptions of the beauty of the beloved, the effect of love upon man, and the love which other things have for each other, citing the story of the affection of the male palm for the female palm, which is given fruition by the grafting of a shoot into the heart of the male. To this Reich⁴ has added merely a list of similarities; thus we find both in Indian and in Greek romance the conception of love at first sight, of lovers revealed to each other in a dream, the swift change of fortune from good to evil and then back to prosperity, adventure and shipwreck at sea, heroes as well as heroines of wonderful beauty, free use of detailed description both of love and of nature. All these things may be admitted, but clearly they do not prove borrowing, though they render it possible. The tale of the loves of the palms, it is clear, suggests Syria rather than either Greece or India; it is decidedly different from the Indian wedlock of the mango and the jasmine recorded in the Kāv Yas.

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³ *Kādambarī*, pp. 98 ff.

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⁴ DLZ. 1915, pp. 553 ff., 594 ff.

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More definite evidence is adduced by Rohde¹, and by Weber² who holds that we find the *motif* of the *Vāsavadattā*—which, it must be remembered, has no known antecedent in India—in a tale recounted by Athenaios on the authority of Chares of Mytilene, an official of Alexander the Great. This tale of Zariadres and Odatis contains the *motifs* of lovers who see each other in a dream, and are finally united through the intervention of the maiden’s marriage ceremonial in which she enjoys the right of choice. But even if we compare the awakening of Vāsavadattā at her lover’s embrace to the story of Pygmalion and Galatea, and find parallels in the Greek romance for armies which war for the possession of a maiden, we have the fact that the tale admittedly in the Greek version is not Greek, and in point of fact in Firdausī we learn that the daughter of the emperor of Rome sees her lover Gushtasp in a dream and herself claims him as husband. The choice of a husband in this way by a princess is an early Indian practice, and the Persian tale may easily have come from India in the first place.

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¹ *Griech. Roman*², pp. 47 ff.

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² IS. xviii. 456 ff.

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A different aspect was given to the hypothesis by F. Lacôte,³ when he claimed that Guṇāḍhya himself was under Greek influence, thus departing from Peterson’s contrast between the predecessors of the romances and these works. But his opinion later⁴ changed, and he adduced evidence in favour of the borrowing of the Greek romance from India. Of his evidence, part may be at once dismissed as being irrelevant to the question of origin, as it concerns merely incidents and might therefore be borrowed without the romance as a whole being adopted by Greece from India. In any case, however, these details seem inadequate to prove their case; the plant which cures wounds in three days has been compared to the *vraṇasaṁrohaṇī* plant of India, but it belongs to the most primitive period of Greek as well as Indian medicine. The unwinking eyes and feet that touch not the ground which mark out the gods from men is Indian, but the latter detail at least is recognized by the artists of the Roman Empire, and Kalasiris shows that the *Iliad*⁵ was believed to be the authority for both the assertions.

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³ *Essai sur Guṇāḍhya*, pp. 284–6.

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⁴ *Mélanges Lévi*, pp. 272 ff. See Keith, JRAS. 1915, pp. 784 ff.

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⁵ N. 71 f.; A. 200, which prove that in gait (cf. Vergil: et vera incessu patuit dea) and eyes gods revealed their divinity.

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When Theagenes and Chariklea see each other for the first time, they seem to recognize each other as if they had known each other before; this is not merely a common feeling among modern people, but Plato had a doctrine of recollection which was far more likely to be present to a Greek author than an Indian romance *motif*. In the general purpose of the romances there is absolutely nothing un-Greek. On the contrary, the *Aithiopika* justifies the trials of its hero by the doctrine that he and his beloved had to be brought almost to death in order that the Aithiopians might cease to practice human sacrifice. The fate that elsewhere governs the progress of events is essentially Greek, more Greek than Indian, and it is most significant that nothing is said of the misfortunes which fall on the heroes being due to evil deeds done in past lives. Moreover, it is striking that in all the complex adventures recounted in the Greek romances we do not have Indian scenes or episodes, though there was abundant room for them, and the authors of the romances were largely themselves Orientals, not natives of Greece proper.

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There remains, therefore, the argument from form. Lacôte contends that the Kathā form was original in India, that there alone did it develop, and that it was borrowed by the Greek romances from India. Every part of the proof is defective. The Kathā manner in its simpler forms is the most natural¹ of all, and Lacôte admits that we have it in the *Odyssey*, but he holds that it was not developed in Greece. Of this there is no proof whatever; the dialogues of Plato, which are reported conversations, he admits to be exceptions to his rule, but holds that the manner was confined to philosophy, which borrowed it from the Mimes of Sophron. This is a very implausible assumption, and is further contradicted by the evidence. We know of the love of Greece for tales, the story-tellers of Sybaris and Ephesos were famous, there is the evidence of Apuleius, who refers to his *Metamorphoses* in the words *ut ego tibi sermone isto Milesio varias fabulas conseram*.² It is a perfectly fair deduction to make from this definite statement that the Ephesian tales known to Apuleius—including doubtless Aristeides' *Ephesiaka* which were rendered by Sisenna,¹ already exhibited the form of a framework story with reports of experiences of the actors inserted. In Ovid’s *Metamorphoses* (v) Pallas’s adventures include meeting and hearing tales from the Muses, in whose account of Demeter and Proserpina are inserted two narratives by Arethusa; in xiv in Aeneas’ adventures we have Macareus’ narrative to Achaemenides, in which is inserted a tale by a maiden of Circe’s. We have, therefore, no conceivable need to seek in India for the prototype, especially as chronology is all against the suggestion. We know nothing that we can prove of the actual manner of the *Bṛhatkathā* and its date is utterly uncertain, assuredly not early enough to make dependence even possible,² while as regards the *Vāsavadattā* we know that it is later than any extant Greek romance of the period dealt with by Lacôte. A further insuperable difficulty would be the fact that Lacôte thinks of popular transmission, recognizing that no Greek could understand a real Indian romance in Sanskrit, while such transmission would certainly give only tales, not the elaborate construction which is the one point which could be used to prove derivation.

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¹ It is found early in Egypt, and the emboxing of stories there is very early; Maspero, *Contes populaires de l'Égypte ancienne* (1906), pp. 23 ff.

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² Teuffel-Schwabe, *Rom. Lit.*, § 367; H. Lucas, *Philologus*, 1907, pp. 29 ff.

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¹ Teuffel-Schwabe, § 156.

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² There is Apuleius’ own work (*c.* A. D. 160) and Lukianos’ *Λούκιος ἢ ὄνος*, as well as Petronius’ *Satirae* (Teuffel-Schwabe, § 305), and above all Ovid’s work. The *Arabian Nights* manner, as Tyrrell (*Latin Poetry*, p. 123) says, is not a great success there.

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In point of fact there is no general agreement in the Greek romances as regards form; it would have been strange if there had been, for Greek writers are usually successful in achieving originality. Heliodoros sometimes relates himself the tale, sometimes brings the actors before us in conversation to tell of their doings, just as does Homer; Xenophon is a simple narrator; Achilles Tatius puts his tale into the mouth of Kleitophon, but the latter relates it as if he were an outsider, recording what happened to himself and to the heroine impartially. It is only in Antonius Diogenes that we find anything more complex. There the story opened with a letter from the author to his sister, sending her a copy of a letter from Balagros to Phila, enclosing a note drawn up by one Erasinides of a conversation between Deinias and Kymbas. Deinias’s narrative consists largely of a story told to him by Derkyllis, in which are inserted reports to Derkyllis by Astraios and Mantinias, and again by Astraios to Derkyllis and Mantinias; at the close of Derkyllis' narrative Deinias reports what he heard from Azulis, and the close of Deinias's conversation with Kymbas is followed by the final note of Erasinides. This is complex, no doubt, but a perfectly natural development, just as the Indian Kathā in *Vāsavadattā* is a natural development from simpler forms. The further parallels drawn by Lacôte are invalid; the letter from the author to Faustinus, which seems clearly to have been in an appendix, is only remotely similar to the introductions to the *Vāsavadattā* and Bāṇa's works, while the statements at the head of each book of the work as to stories parallel to the marvels he relates have no real resemblance to the introductory verses prefixed to each chapter of the *Harṣacarita* only, which, it may be added, is not in the slightest degree in form like the work of Antonius. Nor, it must be admitted, is it altogether reasonable to ignore the fact that, while the Greek romances are silent as to India, the existence of Yavanas and their cunning, especially in the fabrication of aerial ships, is referred to in the Kashmirian *Bṛhatkathā*, which knows their skill in architecture, and Budhasvāmin attests the use of Greek beds, suggesting that even the original *Bṛhatkathā* may have known of the Greeks as cunning and skilled craftsmen.¹

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¹ Cf. Lacôte, *op. cit.*, p. 286. The existence of a Greek and Eurasian population in Gandhāra for a couple of centuries at least (Foucher, *L'Art Gréco-Bouddhique du Gandhāra*, ii. 448 ff.) cannot be ignored.

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Denial of any relation of interdependence is also asserted by L. H. Gray,² who calls attention to many parallels, letters between lovers, long-winded lamentations, threats of suicide, the stories within stories, descriptions of nature, detailed personal descriptions, learned allusions and citations of precedents, even strained compounds, and alliterations, parisoi,³ homoioteleuta, and other figures of rhetoric which recall the Sanskrit Anuprāsa and Yamaka. But he insists that the least part of the Sanskrit romance is the thread of the story or the adventures of its characters; all the stress is laid on rhetorical embellishment, minute description of nature, detailed characterization of exploits, and of mental, moral, and physical qualities. In the Greek romance, on the other hand, the essence is the narrative of one improbable adventure after another, fine writing is practically discarded, description and appreciation of nature are essentially neglected. To the latter assertion there is of course admitted an exception in the case of the *Poimenika* of Longus, but that author derives directly from Theokritos, Bion, and Moschos, while the Sanskrit romance owes its love for nature to Indian feeling. The *Daçakumāracarita* with its affinities to the picaresque romance is without real parallel in the Greek romances, though it has affinities to the *Satirae* of Petronius.

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² *Vāsavadattā*, pp. 35 ff. Cf. G. N. Banerjee, *Hellenism in Ancient India*, pp. 258 ff.

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³ Cf. Aristotle, *Rhet.* iii. 10 ff.

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An interesting parallel is drawn by Gray between the manner of Lyly in his *Euphues* and that of Subandhu. They agree in laying all stress on form rather than subject-matter, though Lyly has a didactic end foreign to Subandhu. Lyly employs the device familiar in India of emboxing a story within a story, as in the case of the tale of Callimachus, which itself includes the story of the hermit Cassander. Moreover, his paronomasias, his alliterations, his antitheses, and his learned allusions are in close harmony with the Indian practice. The instance is valuable as a reminder that parallels may arise without borrowing on either side.

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