The Classical Doctrine of Indian Medicine: Its Origins and its Greek Parallels c14.35

c14.35

Herodotos himself fortuitously gives us the proof that under the Achaemenians Greeks and Indians could meet and know the ideas of each other. He describes (III, 38) how Darius, one day, asked the Greeks, his subjects, if they could force themselves to nourish themselves on the dead bodies of their relations. The reply was, as was to be expected, that they would never do it. Thereupon Darius confronted the Indians called Kalatiai³, who had the custom of eating their relations. They showed as much indignation as the Greeks when Darius asked them about the amount of money which could persuade them to burn the dead bodies of their relations. An interpreter, Herodotos specifies, was explaining to the Greeks all that was being said on both sides. Such conferences and conversations with the help of interpreters evidently facilitated the exchange of ideas. Therefore it is not only the voyagers like Skylax who could have learnt something about India and could have carried Hellenic notions of the same. The Greek doctors of Susa could have found themselves in a position to communicate with the Indians, of whom many, at that time, were more cultured than the Kalatiai cannibals. And, in a more general way, to enable the intellectual contacts among the peoples of the Persian empire to be more efficacious, it was sufficient to have suggestions and points of general information to pass from one country to another. It was not in the least necessary that the corpus of entire doctrines had to be carried and taught with a popular repercussion so that the memory of the same could not have failed to reach us.