Looking East from the Classical World The anecdote exemplifies one aspect of the relationship between the clas-
sical world and the peoples of Asia: imperialist dreams and ambitions, and
actual conquest, whether long-lasting or ephemeral. Along with this went
an ideology of colonialism underpinning a vision of the export of Greek, or
Graeco-Roman, city life and civilisation to distant lands. These goals cause
conceptual, and even moral, problems for us, obliging us to ask whether we
can detach ourselves from a Western imperialist perspective. The difficulty
arises not only from our lack of linguistic and scholarly training in the nu-
merous and varied cultures, languages, and scripts in use in ancient Iran, cen-
tral Asia, and India, but also from the lack in some areas of ‘‘native’’ written
evidence, or the existence only of texts whose date and character is pro-
foundly uncertain. In parts of Asia, the only ‘‘Asian’’ culture or belief system
encountered turns out to have been one constructed by Graeco-Roman ob-
servers. Detaching oneself from a ‘‘classical,’’ or Western, perspective, there-
fore, is more difficult than it might appear at first glance.
This essay will look eastwards from the Mediterranean. It will set out
the broad lines of Graeco-Roman military and political involvement in Asia,
from the Mediterranean through Iran to central Asia and northern India;
point to the surviving traces of Greek culture and language from these re-
gions; and discuss for which possible trade routes to the East we have reliable
contemporary evidence for the Roman imperial period. To say that we do
not have reliable evidence for a supposed trade route is not to claim that no
such route existed. None the less, no adequate contemporary evidence sur-
vives from the classical period to demonstrate the existence of a ‘‘Silk Road’’
crossing central Asia to China.
Beyond the concrete, prosaic issues of wars and states, documents and
traders, lie more complex questions of cultural and religious history, and of
profound mutual influence. The essay does not attempt to explain, for ex-
ample, the influence of Babylonian mythology and astronomy, or of ‘‘Zoro-
aster’’ and ‘‘Iranian dualism.’’ Nor does it explain the origins and spread of
Manichaeism, or of the preaching of Christianity in Asia. But it does ex-
amine the two remarkable Hellenistic inscriptions which represent the only
known expression of Buddhism in classical Greek.
The essay focuses on the six centuries following Alexander’s conquests.
The culture of archaic Greece, from the eighth to the sixth centuries, and
contemporary with the Neo-Assyrian, Babylonian, and Achaemenid Per-
sian empires, emerged in the shadow of the major Near Eastern cultures,
of Anatolia, Phoenicia, Egypt, and Babylonia. Several key developments,
for instance, the derivation of the Greek alphabet from the Phoenician and
the debt of Greek conceptions of the gods to Egypt, were recognized by