DEAR SON, WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH YOU? 93
of it. Greek understandings of India-and by extension, early modern
Europe's understandings of India-bear the imprint of the Alexandrian
conquests. Within this discursive terrain, India is a place of marvel and
wonder, where Alexander encounters supranatural and marvelous
sights.
The earlier histories-such as the fifth-century-BCE treatise on
India by Ctesias of Cnidus and Megasthenes's fourth-century-BCE
Jndica-emphasized the marvels of India. Ctesias was reported to have
been a physician with the court of Artaxerxes Mnemon of Persia, while
Megasthenes traveled to India with Alexander. Their texts, compiled
in later works, provide geographical details peppered with, fabulous
reports of a land populated with animals of great size (ants, &corpions,
and crabs), of people without head~ and with eyes on their shoulders,
of men who have faces like dogs, and of other men who have no nos-
trils and a single eye in their foreb.ead.^23 Megasthenes's marvels of India
were reproduced and augmented in Pliny's Historia Natμralis, finished
in 77 CE, and in Solinus's Collectanea Rerum Memorabilium (Collec-
tion of Remarkable Facts), written in the third century. India, in these
accounts, has preeminence as a land of great wealth and wonder. In
Greek thought, these bizarre, extraordinary, and marvelous stories
characterized India as frontier at the edge of the known world. In spite
of the fact that some, like Strabo (b. 63 BCE), questioned the validity of
these tales, such stories continued to dominate the Roman imagina-
tion regarding India.^24
Within that tradition is also a tradition of advice literature, in-
cluding letters exchanged between Alexander and Aristotle. These
letters circulated in Greek, Arabic, and Persian as the Epistola Alex-
andri ad Aristotlem, or the Rasa'il. The Letter gives an account of
Alexander's travels and tribulations in India during his pursuit of Po-
rus's army. It depicts an India that simultaneously holds great wealth
("the walls were also golden, sheathed with gold plates the thickness
of a finger") and great wisdom, challenging Alexander to possess both.^25
The Letter, 'Presented by the collective Pseudo-Callisthenes (ca. 200
CE), formed the bulk of the compilations such as Secretum Secretorum
and the Arabic Kitab Sirr al-Asrar (ca. 940). These are advice manuals
focused on Alexander's conquest of India and the Aristotle's role as his
philosopher-advisor.^26