This edited volume results from a 2021 conference that aims to explore “the mutual perceptions of India by the Greeks and of Greece by the Indians” (p. 9). As several recent publications show, the topic has increasingly attracted scholars from both sides of the disciplinary spectrum (Classics and Indology).[1] At the same time, specialists in Central Asian history, Sinologists, and even Īrānists have emphasized the crucial role of spaces such as Gandḥārā in the attempt to write a connected history of Afro-Eurasia over the longue durée.[2] Nevertheless, a challenging evidentiary base, as well as linguistic, disciplinary, and intellectual boundaries, still prevent the “Indian and Greek worlds” to gain a stable foothold in research agendas and teaching curricula: for this reason alone, every new publication engaging with the subject is a valuable and welcome contribution. This is especially true when its subject of inquiry is approached, as Mondes grec et indien seeks to do, transdisciplinarily, bringing together perspectives from philology, archaeology, and numismatics.
The book begins with a relatively short introduction (pp. 9-11) summarizing the content of the six following contributions (pp. 13-225). A bilingual English and French abstract section (pp. 227-231) wraps up the volume. The lack of an index is to be regretted, as it would have helped readers unfamiliar with the space and its history navigate the flurry of personal and place names of which the book is rich.
The first essay, by Guillaume Ducoeur, addresses a staple of the scholarship on Alexander’s Indian campaign and its aftermath, namely the social, intellectual, and religious background of the Indian sage Kalanos. Given the source material, the approach is—and cannot be other than—distinctively text-centered. Ducoeur skillfully compares the Greek accounts of Alexander’s encounter and relationship with Kalanos with various normative religious texts from the Indian tradition. Against a long-established scholarly consensus, he demonstrates the man’s adherence to “the brahmanic current of ritualistic ascetics close to the milieu of the adherents of pañcāgnitapas” (p. 227: an ascetic ritual involving fire with possible antecedents in the Vedic tradition). While the argument is convincingly crafted and defended through a remarkable display of erudition, its methodological premises are less so. The author does not sufficiently address the problem of whether and to which degree the only evidence available on Kalanos (Alexander’s historians) is ultimately engaging in the process of othering and in the literary creation of a stereotypical portrait of Indian traditions, rather than even occasionally faithfully recording Indian realia.[3]
An issue with the (broader) intellectual context underpinning the available sources on (early) Graeco-Indian relationships can also be detected in the second contribution to the volume, Claire Muckensturm-Poulle’s investigation of the—alleged—historicity of and mythmaking processes behind Alexander’s famous altars on the Hydaspes and their transformation into an Eastern counterpart of Herakles’ pillars at the outskirts of the Western Mediterranean. Attested in different versions from Diodoros and Arrian to Philostratos and the Alexander Romance, the way the story is presented, the author argues, changes according to the literary genre and the authorial agendas of the sources. Hence, while historians and biographers focus on Alexander the Conqueror (and thus leave Herakles out of the picture), Strabo’s focus is more on “the spatial features as an end in itself” (p. 56). In Philostratos and the Romance, by contrast, the altars only serve the purpose of a lieu de mémoire, a stage on which to compare the general and the philosopher to praise the latter (in the Life of Apollonios) and, in the Romance, as a foil against which to reflect on the symbolic meaning of world-conquest, in the author’s mind a metaphor for the experience of divinely-inspired truths (p. 57). Completely lost in such a narrative is the imperial background of the account.[4] Indeed, several studies have demonstrated that stories involving monuments located at socially constructed borderlands are characteristic of the “official language” of universal Empires since at least the Assyrians.[5] Against such a backdrop, extant Greek narratives seem to have adopted and, to some extent, repurposed, some sort of “officially sanctioned” version of the campaign developed by Alexander’s court to address the newly minted élite of the Makedonian Empire according to cultural-specific discourses on successful conquest and divinely-sanctioned rulership. Given the astonishing longevity of these tropes’ legacy, these essential insights deserve to be better integrated into the study of kingship (and the narratives thereof) in the East during the Hellenistic period and beyond.
Osmund Bopearachchi’s paper explores the emergence of Viṣṇu images in (the Northwest of) the Subcontinent based on material culture (sculpture) and numismatic evidence. Cross-comparing a comprehensive set of the deity’s representations from both Graeco-Baktrian and Indo-Greek coins and specimens of Gandḥārān art, the author makes the strong case for locating the emergence of a coherent “Vaiṣṇava imagery” earlier than previously thought, around the 3rd century BCE. As the author rightfully stresses, the evidence discussed in the paper should compel art historians to more substantially engage with the numismatic data, as they provide an invaluable, frequently the only, source to investigate aspects of cultural and religious history in what he calls “the space of innovation” (p. 72) of Gandḥārā and the neighboring regions in the Hellenistic and Kuṣāṇa period.[6]
Literary sources again are given center stage in the volume’s most extended essay by Kyong-Kon Kim, devoted to two Chinese versions (called Naxian biqiu jing, the Sūtra of the bhikṣu Naxian) of the famous Milindapañha, the account of a purported dialogue between the monk Nāgasena and the great king Menander I (Milan in the text). The paper presents a synoptic translation of the Chinese texts’ critical passages and the extant Pāli version. The stated goal is, on the one hand, to comb similarities and differences in the three accounts to come close(r) to a possible Urtext behind them; on the other hand, “to identify the historical evidence concerning the relatively unknown life of this royal figure” (Milan/Menander). Perhaps predictably, the attempt proves unsuccessful, as the Naxian biqiu jing, like his Pāli model, only uses extremely vague historical snippets to develop a speculum principis aimed at establishing the moral and intellectual superiority of Nāgasena/Naxiang and the spiritual doctrine he advocates for. Of perhaps more interest is Kim’s conclusion that the difference from the underlying model detected in the Naxian biqiu jing can be explained by the text’s historical and intellectual context (the Eastern Jin dynasty of the 4th and early 5th century CE). As Buddhism still strove for political recognition at court, the author of the Naxian biqiu jing carefully purged his work of any element from the original that could have been perceived as critical of those in power, as well as of the more exclusivist attitude of the text towards Buddhism at the expenses of Taoism and Confucianism. This is, in other terms, a valuable contribution to the reception of (aspects of) Indo-Greek intellectual history.
The same can be said of Thierry Grandjean’s study of a passage in Himerios’ 18th discourse: “The Dionysiac Bath of Indians in the Melas River of Cappadocia”. In the paper, Grandjean addresses an obscure aetiological myth recounted by Himerios to explain the origin of the river Melas’ name in the context of a welcoming address presented to his student Basileios of Kaisareia, close to the river’s course. Erudite representations of Indian history, ethnography, and traditions (such as skin color, ritual practices like bathing, and their alleged Dionysiac cult) come together in the speech with real-life events of a Roman metropole frequented by students for whose attentions, and fees, intellectuals like Himerios were competing. Alluding to baptism by reference to the Indian ritual cleansing in the Melas following Dionysos’ voyage from the East, Himerios skillfully presents the benefit of his rhetorical training to a Christian student such as Basileios as a way of purifying one’s soul in the same way as the Indians (like the Ethiopians presented as dark-skinned since Herodotos) would have whitened their skin, hence giving the river Melas its name. Whether historically attested Indian traditions, such as the ritual bath in the Ganga, were known to Himerios and through which channels remains somewhat under-discussed in the paper. Instead, Grandjean shows the enduring fascination exerted by India and its people over well-read imperial élites such as Himerios. Besides a rhetorical tour de force, his welcoming speech to Basileios can profitably be investigated as an(other) example of the intellectual construction of a paradigmatic Other.
Finally, Zemaryalai Tarzi’s paper presents a previously unpublished set of Kuṣāṇa-period reliquaries likely manufactured in the Kābul region (Mašrequi). The essay provides a detailed stylistic analysis of the object and a comparison with other exemplars from the wider Gandḥārā region to show “the persistence of the Hellenistic [artistic?] heritage in the art of Central Asia”. The exceptional craft of the Mašrequi reliquaries and the fact that no significant study of them had yet been provided makes Tarzi’s contribution undoubtedly substantial. Nevertheless, methodological issues in its approach are worth stressing, the most important of which is the lack of a consistent definition of what “Hellenistic heritage” is supposed to mean. The study of material culture from Central Asia and India in pre-Islamic antiquity is undergoing a theoretical revolution. New approaches, such as globalization theory, radically question how scholars approach the social meaning ancient individuals attributed to objects and cultural categories.[7] Against such a background, it would be imperative to spell out the intellectual framework underpinning one’s approach to a given archaeological dataset before drawing wide-ranging (art)historical conclusions.
Overall, each of the contributions collected in Mondes grec et indien is worth reading, as they provide food for thought for many scholars from different academic backgrounds and subfields. Yet the volume lacks a coherent red thread besides the spatial context of “India”.
Authors and Titles
Avant-propos (pp. 9-11), Guillaume Ducoeur, Claire Muckenstürm-Poulle
Alexandre le Grand et les ascètes de Taxila : Calanos était-il un ācārya bouddhiste? (pp. 13-34), Guillaume Ducoeur
Des autels d’Alexandre aux colonnes indiennes d’Héraclès ou comment passer de l’histoire au mythe (pp. 35-59), Claire Muckenstürm-Poulle
Émergence des images de Viṣṇu en Inde d’après les données numismatiques et sculpturales (pp. 61-80), Osmund Bopearachchi
Le roi indo-grec Ménandre d’après les documents chinois Naxian biqiu jing (pp. 81-153), Kyong-Kon Kim
Le bain dionysiaque des Indiens dans le Mélas de Cappadoce (Himérios, Orationes, 18, 2-3) : bizutage estudiantin aux bains et baptême chrétien (pp. 155-182), Thierry Grandjean
Les reliquaires et les reliques de Mašreqi (pp. 183-225), Zemaryalaï Tarzi
Notes
[1] E.g., Olivier Bordeaux, Les Grecs en Inde, Politiques et pratiques monétaires (IIIe s. a. C. – Ier s. p. C.) (Bordeaux : Ausonius, 2018); Richard Stoneman, The Greek Experience of India. From Alexander to the Indo-Greeks (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019); Sushma Jansari, Chandragupta Maurya, the Creation of a National Hero in India (London: UCL Press, 2020).
[2] Cf. Wouter Henkelman, ‘Imperial Signature and Imperial Paradigm: Achaemenid administrative structure and system across and beyond the Iranian plateau’ In “The Administration of the Achaemenid Empire”, edited by B. Jacobs, W. Henkelman, and M. Stolper. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2017, 45-256 and Lauren Morris, ‘Economic Development under the GreekKingdoms of Central Asia to the KushanEmpire: Empire, Migration,and Monasteries’ In “Handbook of Ancient Afro-Eurasian Economies. Volume 2: Local, Regional, and Imperial Economies”, edited by S. von Reden. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2021, 695-744.
[3] Cf. most recently Omar Coloru, “Indians in the Greco-Roman World. A Stereotype of Otherness” In Oriental Mirages. Stereotypes and Identity Creation in the Ancient World”, edited by B. Forsén and A. Lampinen. Stuttgart: Steiner, 2023, 163-196.
[4] Robert Rollinger and Julian Degen, “Alexander the Great, the Indian Ocean, and the Borders of the World” In Achémenet. Ving ans après”, edited by D. Agut-Labordère, R. Boucharlat, F. Joannès, A. Kuhrt, and M. Stolper. Leuven: Peeters, 2021, 321-342.
[5] Julian Degen, Alexander III. Zwischen Ost und West (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2022).
[6] Gunnar R. Dumke, “Grieche sein um jeden Preis? Strategien zur Überwindung gesellschaftlicher Spaltungen im hellenistischen Fernen Osten” In Gesellschaftliche Spaltungen im Zeitalter des Hellenismus (4.-1. Jh. V. Chr.), edited by S. Pfeiffer and G. Weber. Stuttgart: Steiner, 2021, 181-195 vindicates Bopearachchi’s claim.
[7] E. g., Milinda Hoo, Eurasian Localisms. Towards a translocal approach to Hellenism and inbetweenness in central Eurasia, third to first centuries BCE (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2022).