32 The New York Review
forge itself into a nation-state. He does,
however, suggest that Eudamus, one
of the officers Alexander appointed
to hold the Punjab when he departed
in 325 BC, may have been crucially in-
volved in the rise of Candragupta, and
that when Eudamus himself headed
westward in 319, he left a power vac-
uum that Candragupta hastened to fill.
By 305, when India next confronted a
Macedonian attacker, its unity gave it
the strength to resist. Seleucus, one of
Alexander’s successors, was forced to
abandon his designs on India, and Can-
dragupta won a guarantee of autonomy
in exchange for a corps of trained war
elephants.
With the rise of the Mauryas, Stone-
man’s focus moves eastward from
Taxila to Pataliputra on the Ganges,
the dynasty’s capital city. Already for-
tified and improved by earlier rulers,
Pataliputra became a metropolis under
the Mauryas, with a population of per-
haps 400,000 and the earliest known
examples of Indian stone buildings.
Seleucus sent a Greek ambassador,
Megas thenes, to the city around 303
BC, and his written account, the Indica,
fixed an attractive and, in some ways,
familiar version of India in the Western
mind, “the sort of India that the Helle-
nistic and Roman worlds found it com-
fortable to imagine.”
The Indica survives only in frag-
ments, but it clearly portrayed Patali-
putra as a highly organized city, with
sixty-four gates in its stout walls and a
huge royal staff, including an all-female
bodyguard squadron. A caste system
(with seven levels) ensured that every-
one kept to their tasks and station, but
chattel slavery was unknown. This was a
far different picture than that of an ear-
lier Indica, a fantastical account by the
Greek physician Ctesias, which spoke
of dog-headed Indians who barked at
one another and copulated in public.
Already perceived as pious and wise
thanks to Mandanis, the Indian now
also became sophisticated in Greek
eyes, a bourgeois who enjoyed imperial
prosperity and urban pleasure.
From their hub at Pataliputra, the
Mauryas reached out westward to
a Greek world they were now more
aware of. Bindusara, the son of Can-
dragupta, reportedly asked Antiochus,
the ruler of a Hellenic kingdom in West
Asia, to send him figs, wine, and a
“sophist”; Antiochus declined the last
request, explaining that Greeks did
not traffic in philosophers. (The same
restriction apparently did not apply to
Greek women, prized by Indian nobles
of this era as imported handmaids.) A
more determined approach was made
by Bindusara’s son, Ashoka, who sent
messengers to Antiochus (or perhaps
his son of the same name) and to four
other Hellenistic kings, urging them
to follow the dharma that he himself
had adopted when, early in his reign,
he became a committed Buddhist. It’s
not known how these messengers were
received, but India did win a few Greek
converts. A stone pillar standing today
near the town of Besnagar, in central
India, bears an inscription in Prakrit
proclaiming that Heliodorus, the envoy
of a Greek king, erected it in honor of
Vishnu.
Ashoka’s missions to the West are
known today from his famous rock
edicts, stone steles inscribed in both
Brahmi and Karoshti scripts—forms of
writing, and a medium of communica-
tion, that first appeared in India at this
time. Royal proclamation by rock slab
looks like a tradition learned from the
Achaemenid Persians, who had ruled
northwest India, in the late sixth and
fifth centuries BC. But the emergence
of writing itself in India, seemingly
just subsequent to Alexander’s incur-
sion, has been a matter of great inter-
est to both Hellenists and Indologists.
The Greeks thought they had learned
to write from Phoenicians who landed
on their shores; could the Indians have
learned to do so from the Greeks?
Stoneman reviews the evidence dis-
passionately, pointing out the problems
of dating the start of literacy, but also
noting that Panini’s Sanskrit grammar,
the first Indian text to mention writ-
ing, refers to it as yavana lipi, “Ionian
[i.e., Greek] script.” He reaches no
conclusions, though at one point herevealingly refers to writing as a “new
technology of the invaders.” A similar
thesis surrounding the emergence of
drama in India, also linked by some
(beginning with Plutarch) to Greek in-
fluence, gets a decisive rebuttal: Stone-
man presents “a variety of evidence
locating dramatic performance and
dance in the centuries before the ar-
rival of the Greeks.” (In this he concurs
with Jawaharlal Nehru, who in his 1946
book, The Discovery of India, insisted
on the independent origin of Indian
theater.)No account of the Greek view of India
can ignore the elephant, since that
beast quickly came to stand, in the Hel-
lenic mind, for lands beyond the Hindu
Kush (the African species was as yet
little known). Aristotle was fascinated
by the Indian elephant and described it
in such detail that some have supposed,
fancifully, that Alexander, his former
student, had sent him one. Alexander’s
army had difficulty with elephant-
equipped armies in India, since its
cavalry horses would not charge the
unfamiliar creatures. New tactics had
to be devised, later mythologized by
the anonymous Greek author of the
Alexander Romance (a patchwork text
that evolved in the first three centuries
AD). In that fictional biography, metal
statues are cast to look like Macedo-
nian soldiers, then heated red-hot,
so that enemy elephants scorch their
trunks when attempting to seize them.
Alexander also adopted the elephantas a weapon in his own army. A coin
minted in Egypt shortly after his death
shows him wearing an elephant scalp as
a helmet, in place of the iconic lionskin
headdress of Heracles; Stoneman might
have said more than he does about this
coin, later imitated by Demetrius Ani-
cetus, a warrior-king who reinvaded
India after the Maurya state had col-
lapsed. Since coins were the ancient
world’s means of mass communication,
this potent image, with its complex lay-
ers of significance, had a wider diffu-
sion in the Greek world than any other
linked to India.
The seizure by Demetrius of a
Bactro- Indian rump state around 185
BC marked the beginning of what one
I ndian inscr iption refers to as the Yava -
narajya, the two-century “era of Greek
rule.” Whereas Alexander’s army hadsacked, slaughtered, and quickly de-
parted, the Greek warlords who now
occupied the Punjab and surrounding
regions seemed determined to stay and
to expand their holdings. Taxila once
again became a Hellenic town (as seen
today in the nearby archaeological site
of Sirkap), and Greek arms advanced
as far east as Pataliputra, perhaps under
Menander I, the greatest of the Indo-
Greek kings. In Indian literature, Ya-
vanas became increasingly reviled; the
Mahabharata speaks of them as Yona s
and derives the term from the yoni of
the cows from which they were born.
But Menander was a different story.
Under a slightly altered name, he be-
came the truth-seeking hero of the
Milindapanha, or Questions of Mil-
inda, a Pali text still regarded as ca-
nonical by some modern Buddhists.
In this dialogic work, Menander, aka
Milinda, poses doctrinal questions to
a wise monk, Nagasena, at first seek-
ing to trip up his interlocutor but later
gratefully absorbing his lessons. Thus
did India conquer, as Narain claimed,
by ideas if not by force of arms. Histori-
cally, Menander was indeed a convert
to Buddhism; a relief sculpture found
in a stupa at Bharhut, representing a
Hellenic king whose sword is adorned
with Buddhist symbols, may well be an
Indian portrait of him.Stoneman reserves until near the end
of his study the topic of visual arts,
perhaps because of the difficulties he
encounters there. Like the mediumof writing, neither stone sculpture nor
narrative painting can be shown to have
existed in India before the Alexander
era, but both began to flourish around
that time. In sculpture, even before the
emergence of the so-called Gandharan
style—widely regarded as a fusion of
Indic and Greek elements—elaborate
stone friezes had appeared on temple
complexes at Mathura and Sanchi in
north-central India. At around the
same time, a set of man-made caves at
Ajanta, further south, were covered in
elaborate, naturalistic wall and ceiling
paintings depicting episodes from the
life of the Buddha. All three sites are
far removed from the region occupied
by Yava na s, but their techniques are so
advanced and so lacking in antecedents
that Greek influence has often been
discussed.
These art forms stand at the very
center of the issues that provoke the
tug-of-war over the Indo-Greek hy-
phen. As Stoneman makes clear in a
series of well-chosen quotes, the Victo-
rians who “discovered” India were also
great admirers of classical Greece, and
in their eyes, Indian art stood higher
in value the more it could be Helle-
nized. In one statement exemplifying
this bias, Henry Cole, who surveyed
northwest Indian architecture for the
British government in the late 1800s,
wrote that the “exceptional excellence”
of a set of bas-reliefs suggests “that
Greek masons, or possibly design-
ers, may have been called in to assist.”
Stoneman is careful not to fall into
such Hellenocentric thinking, but he’s
also aware of more recent biases tend-
ing the opposite way. “The dominant
mode in scholarship on Indian art is to
be ‘Greek-blind,’” he asserts.
This crucial section of Stoneman’s
study proceeds methodically and
reaches cautious conclusions, but in
general supports the thesis of Greek
influence. Stoneman notes that among
the musicians depicted on the eastern
frieze of the Sanchi temple, one plays a
double-reeded aulos that seems unmis-
takably Greek; in Mathura, female fig-
ures wear girdles tied in the distinctive
Heracles knot used in Greek wedding
garments. Sculptural depictions of the
lion—at this time, a West Asian beast—
borrow motifs from Greek or perhaps
Persian exemplars. “Any assessment is
bound to be subjective,” Stoneman con-
cludes, but the evidence he himself has
adduced appears to have objective force.
In the case of painting, he sallies forth
more boldly, pointing out links between
the Ajanta murals and those found in
Macedonian tombs of the same era,
presumably painted by Greeks. “To
my eye the paintings at Ajanta could
have been made by a Greek (Macedo-
nian) observing intently the Indian life
around him,” Stoneman ventures. “At
present it seems impossible to do more
than speculate.”
“India is the inner state of every
man,” reads one of the epigrams with
which Stoneman prefaces his first chap-
ter (there are more, and many delight-
ful ones, under each chapter heading).
Both the sentiment and the source—
the writer Bill Aitken, a Scotsman who
emigrated to India as a young man and
lives there still, decades later—are re-
vealing of the spirit that guides this
intriguing and valuable book. It seems
Stoneman has been able to find India in
the ancient Greek soul because, after
decades as a committed Hellenist, he
has found it in his own. QAlexander the Great meeting Gymnosophists (naked philosophers) in India;
illustration from a fourteenth-century manuscript of the Alexander RomanceHellenic^ Institute,Venice