The Classical Doctrine of Indian Medicine: Its Origins and its Greek Parallels c14.2

c14.2

IT IS CURRENTLY admitted that it is because of the expedition of Alexander to India that India has been put in communication with the Hellenic world. It is quite natural to state that only when the Greek armies entered India and for the first time occupied the basin of the Indus did the Greeks and the Indians start really knowing each other. It suffices to compare the data on India possessed by the Greeks before Alexander, for example at the time of Herodotus, in the middle of the Vth Century B.C. with the data acquired by them during this expedition (an idea of the same can be had by the numerous fragments of Nearchos, of Aristobulos, of Onesicritos or of Megasthenes) to appreciate the immense progress that the direct contact had realised in the knowledge of India in the West. It is also clear that this progress has had no immediate consequences because the direct contact was very soon broken by the expulsion, after the death of Alexander, of the Prefects he had left in India and by the reconquest of the Indus basin by Candragupta.¹ To convince oneself about the same, one has only to note that during the centuries that followed, the majority of Greek and Latin authors who have written on India have borrowed their information from the contemporaries of Alexander and Seleucos. And, in this matter, one should not limit oneself only to noting the facts gathered from what we possess of Greek and Latin writings because the evidence of Strabo gives us the guarantee that even in those writings that have not reached us, but which were available to him when he wrote his *Geography*, about the beginning of the Christian era, little had been added to the data of the epoch of Alexander. Strabo, in fact, strongly deplores that this state of affairs does not enable him to draw a satisfactory picture of India (XV, 1, 23).