greece, the final frontier? 151
that, as Sylvain Lévy remarked, looks like a translation of kya, the
clan-name of the Buddha, (perhaps rightly) understood as “Scythian”.^96
Scythianós was a merchant by profession, trading between Egypt and
India. In this way he got hold of Egyptian and Indian texts on what
St. Epiphanius of Judea (ca. 315–403 AD) calls “magic practices”.^97
When Scythianós started preaching, nobody paid attention to him, so
that one day he got so frustrated that he jumped to his death from the
upper storey of a house while trying to impress the onlookers by ying,
a fatal feat later repeated by Terébinthos.^98 Levitation is precisely one
of the siddhis or supernatural faculties of Indian yogic tradition which
Buddhism shares with Hinduism. The tenth-century Byzantinian lexicon
Souda averes that Scythianós, who is here confused with Mani ( ),
was of Brahman descent.^99
Mani apparently also borrowed many things from the Syrian gnostic
philosopher Bardesanes. In 218 AD, Bardesanes had conversations with
Indians somewhere in the eastern Mediterranean, and he later wrote a
book on India that is unfortunately lost. Citations preserved with other
authors show that Bardesanes was well informed about the Brakhmanes
and the Samanaîoi.^100 Unlike the Brakhmânes, he rightly points out
that the Samanaîoi do not claim common ethnic af liation, but are
composed of all Indian communities. Again, there is every reason to
claim that the latter category includes all kinds of ascetics and not
speci cally the Buddhists.^101
Basilides, a Hellenised Egyptian from the rst half of the second
century, was a gnostic and a Christian, though he was later considered
heretical. Other scholars have stressed his Greek antecedents, like Neo-
Pythagoreanism, Plato and Philo.^102 J. Kennedy nevertheless regarded his
philosophy as Buddhistic to the core, with some S khya elements.^103 I
give here some of the elements that have been singled out by Kennedy,
and occasionally other writers, to underpin the hypothesis that Basilides
(^96) Lévi 1891, p. 212.
(^97) Epiphanius, Adversus octoginta haereses 66.1.8–66.2.7.
(^98) Epiphanius, Adversus octoginta haereses, 66.2.8; 66.3.13–14.
(^99) Souda, s.v. .
(^100) Porphyrius Malchus, De Abstinentia 4.17.1, 3; Hieronymus, Adversus Iovinianum
2.14.
(^101) Sedlar 1980, pp. 170–175.
(^102) Mansel 1875, pp. 144–165, in particular 158, 162.
(^103) Kennedy 1902.