A History of Sanskrit Literature c24.s5.7

c24.s5.7

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.