April 9, 2020 31
What Did India Learn from the Greeks?
James Romm
The Greek Experience of India:
From Alexander to the Indo-Greeks
by Richard Stoneman.
Princeton University Press,
525 pp., $39.95
“They Came, They Saw, but India
Conquered,” wrote the historian A. K.
Narain in 1957, characterizing the ef-
fects of the Greek penetration into
“India” (the ancient name included
what is today Pakistan and sometimes
easternmost Afghanistan). He referred
not only to Alexander the Great’s in-
vasion of the Indus Valley in 327 BC—
the first large-scale encounter between
Greek and Indic civilizations—
but also to the era that followed,
when Hellenic rump kingdoms
ruled by strongmen rose and fell
in northwest India and Bactria,
its neighbor to the west. The pres-
ence in the region of these Hel-
lenic states, and their occasional
forays further east, created a
zone of Greco- Indian contact,
influence, and exchange, as well
as occasional conflict, stretching
from Central Asia to the Ganges.
Narain was one of the first In-
dian historians to write about the
“Indo-Greeks,” the term he ap-
plied to the Hellenes who cam-
paigned or settled in this part
of the world. As revealed by his
insistence that “India conquered”
them, the inquiry into this age of
contact has been complicated by
issues of race, religion, national-
ism, and, for Indian writers espe-
cially, the parallels (perceived or
real) between Greek invaders and
British imperialists. “The noun
Indo-Greek... carries within it
a restless tension,” the Hellenist
Frank Holt recently commented
in an address to a New Delhi aca-
demic conference. “That little hyphen
stretches between Indo and Greek like
the tightened rope in a tug-of-war be-
tween two great civilizations. It invites
us to join a team at either end... to pull
for a winning side.” Partisans in this
struggle have sometimes taken wildly
extreme positions or have reduced the
discussion of Indo-Greek contact to
polemical questions of which culture
has first claim on a given advance or in
which direction influences flowed.
Richard Stoneman, an independent
scholar and editor who has made a
career- long study of Alexander the
Great and the legends about him, takes
a sensibly moderate approach to such
questions in The Greek Experience of
India, when he even attempts to answer
them. His book contains numerous
“who influenced whom” case studies
but casts a much wider net, wider even
than its title indicates, for he is also
interested in the Indian experience of
the Greeks, which is much harder to
recover. Drawing on a vast array of re-
search, he has compiled a magisterial
overview of “the Indo-Greek era,” be-
ginning with Alexander’s crossing of the
Hindu Kush mountain range in 327 BC^
and ending with the severing of contact
about three centuries later. His goal is
admirably broad-minded: to “peel back
these curtains” of distortion that stood
between India and its Greek visitors, “to
recover their observations and to test
them against what we can know from
an Indian point of view” (my emphasis).
Conscious that he has his own cur-
tains to peel back, as an Englishman
who grew up in the 1960s—a time when
a school chum sat with him listening to
Ravi Shankar play sitar and, after fif-
teen minutes, leaned over to ask, “Has
he finished tuning up yet?”—Stone-
man has steeped himself in Indian lit-
erature, both ancient and modern, and
spent considerable time exploring the
subcontinent. He makes a concerted
effort, in this impressive volume, not
to play tug-of-war over “Indo-Greek,”
even while confronting some of theharder questions surrounding that con-
tentious hyphen.No one fully understands why Al-
exander took his army eastward into
India in the spring of 327 BC after
reaching the Hindu Kush, a plausible
eastern boundary for his conquests.
Ancient sources romanticized the
trip as an instance of his pothos, or
“yearning,” to explore the unknown,
or to surpass the travels of his mythic
ancestor Heracles. More likely, a gen-
erous invitation had turned his head.
A man named Ambhi—whom the
Greeks called Taxiles after Taxila, the
Punjabi town he ruled—had sent lav-
ish gifts to Alexander that year, along
with an offer to feed and support his
50,000 troops. Ambhi wanted a deci-
sive victory over his eastern neighbor,
whom the Greeks called Porus, and
saw Alexander’s military strength as
his main chance. So despite opposition
from some among his ranks, Alexan-
der hauled his huge army, encumbered
by pack animals and siege equipment,
through the Hindu Kush passes, then
down into the Land of the Five Rivers.
Greek lore had led Alexander’s
men to expect all kinds of monsters
and wonders in India, but in Taxila
they found something more surpris-
ing: a “university town” where mystics,
sages, and scholars grouped themselvesaround gurus and teachers. Greek in-
tellectuals accompanying Alexander’s
army—and by some reports Alexan-
der himself—took a strong interest
in these devotees, especially a group
they called Gymnosophists (“naked
philosophers”), because some went
unclothed as a form of ascetic prac-
tice (“possibly Jains and/or ƖjƯvikas,”
Stoneman suggests). Alexander sent
one of his officers, Onesicritus—signif-
icantly, a follower of the famous Cynic
ascetic Diogenes of Sinope—to investi-
gate a Gymnosophist gathering; there
a sect leader, speaking through an in-
terpreter, explained the group’s doc-trines and way of life. This was the first
attested meeting between Greek and
Indian thinkers, though much has been
made of indirect routes, impossible to
trace, by which their ideas might have
come into contact before this. (Some
have supposed that Plato, who died
two decades before Alexander’s entry
into India, developed his ideas about
reincarnation of souls out of Buddhist
teachings, but Stoneman’s thorough in-
quiry helps put this notion to rest.)
Throughout his career, Stoneman has
written extensively about this encoun-
ter and the long literary and artistic tra-
dition it spawned. The Indian sage who
gave the exegesis, identified in Greek
accounts as Mandanis or Dandamis, be-
came a Gymnosophist advocate in the
fierce diatribes and fictional dialogues
of late-antique and early- medieval Al-
exander lore, be rating Greeks and Ro-
mans, and later early Christians, for
materialism and ambition. Manuscript
illustrators returned again and again to
the theme of the Greco-Indian colloquy,
often substituting Alexander himself for
Onesicritus. The ethical code attributed
to Mandanis may even have influenced
the guidelines for monastic life drawn
up by early Christians.
Because this encounter in Taxila has
had such an extensive afterlife, it’s note-
worthy that Stoneman here revises his
views about it. In earlier writings, he
surmised that Onesicritus had merelyput his own Cynic beliefs into the mouth
of a pious Indian; now, he believes that
“a good deal of what [Onesicritus] re-
ported is genuine Indian material.”
The challenge to Western values that
Mandanis came to embody thus had
an authentic Eastern source. This shift
of opinion, interestingly enough, came
after Stoneman’s own encounter with
Gymnosophists, modern-day digam-
bara sadhus of the Jain faith, “naked
ascetics... in the same tradition as
those whom Alexander encountered.”
Onesicritus was not the only Greek
sage in Alexander’s train who met with
religious devotees in the Punjab. Pyr-
rho of Elis also accompanied
the expedition and, according
to one report at least, sought out
the company of Gymnosophists.
After Alexander’s death in 323
BC, Pyrrho returned to Greece
and became a teacher of the doc-
trines that collectively bear his
name, Pyrrhonism, also referred
to as Skepticism. Pyrrho’s radical
mistrust of sense perception and
rejection of all dogmatism and
claims to knowledge have often
been traced to Indian teachings,
especially the tetralemma, or
fourfold negation, of early Bud-
dhism, according to which any
proposition can be true, false,
both, or neither.
The connection has remained
controversial, however: Richard
Bett dismissed it two decades ago
in his book-length study of Pyr-
rho, on the grounds that Buddhist
ideas could not have been ad-
equately conveyed to the Greeks
through interpreters. Thomas
McEvilley, whose grandly titled
The Shape of Ancient Thought
(2002) made an extensive survey
of the intersections between In-
dian and Greek philosophical schools,
declared that “there is nothing in Pyr-
rhonism which requires the hypothesis
of foreign input.” Stoneman is more
supportive of a Buddhist origin for
Pyrrhonism, and even speculates that
Pyrrho’s solitary, wandering way of life
after he left India—including a curi-
ous habit of murmuring to himself—
came about in imitation of Buddhist
ways. Noting that Pyrrho explained his
murmurs as a way of “training to be
good,” Stoneman writes, “This looks
suspiciously like a description of a man
engaged in meditation, murmuring a
mantra.”Along with the renunciants of north-
west India, Alexander’s army also
(according to Plutarch) encountered
a more worldly individual, whom the
Greeks came to call Sandrocottus. This
was Candragupta, who was a youth at
the time of the Macedonian invasion
but soon became the founder of the
Mauryan Empire, the first centralized
state to unite the Indus and Ganges val-
leys. Little is known of how he accom-
plished this consolidation and what he
learned, if anything, from the Macedo-
nians, who had done something simi-
lar in Greece before their invasion of
Asia. Stoneman treads cautiously here,
barely mentioning the possibility that
India learned from the Greeks how toThe Battle of the Hydaspes, in what is now Punjab, between the troops of Alexander the Great and the
Indian king Porus, 326 BC; illustration from the Faits du Grand Alexandre, circa 1470Science^ History^Images/Alamy