The Making of Roman India by Grant Parker (review)

India as a strange land—vast, wild, mystical—has long excited the western imagination, even after the British colonial downfall. This vision of danger and desire has deep roots. While India was nearly out of reach of those great ancient empire-builders, the Macedonians and the Romans, on the distant fringe of the Mediterranean sphere of contact and commerce, it was very much on their minds. Grant Parker’s The Making of Roman India, like the India of fantasy, is sprawling and full of wisdom, if somewhat untidy. Rather than attempting to reconstruct the historical travels and concrete relations between Rome and South Asia, Parker examines the development of a literary discourse during the Empire, a collection of responses to and representations of that faraway place that were “conceived in terms of power relations in Roman society” (5–7). The scale of the inquiry is breathtaking, encompassing an array of texts in various genres from the Achaemenid background to the Christian reception and beyond, as it were, from Darius I to St. Thomas.

Parker’s book, which grew from his Princeton dissertation through a Michigan fellowship and an early career at Duke, marks the culmination of a series of publications that include his co-edited volume, Ancient India in its Wider World (with Carla Sinopoli [Ann Arbor, Mich. 2008]), and several notable articles (e.g., Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 45.1 [2002]: 40–95; Ars Orientalis 34 [2007]: 19–37; Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 37 [2007]: 1–7). This ongoing project has established Parker as an important scholar of the classical tradition, cultural criticism, and travel literature. In his preface, Parker comments on the personal impact of Momigliano’s Alien Wisdom and dutifully notes the broad influence of Saïd’s Orientalism, while cautioning against the transposition of postcolonial theory to a preindustrial setting (8). He belongs to an energetic generation of classicists who are drawing a new picture of how the Greeks and Romans envisioned the East in literature and art. The Making of Roman India shares common ground with other recent studies of the dynamic construction of identity, and how one culture defines another under its own conditions, such as those by Phiroze Vasunia and Ian Moyer on Egypt (The Gift of the Nile [Berkeley 2001] and Egypt and the Limits of Hellenism [Cambridge 2011]) and by Nathanael Andrade on Syria (Syrian Identity in the Greco-Roman World [Cambridge 2013]). Parker has a distinct advantage because India, unlike Egypt or Syria, was an uncharted region of little historical consequence which intellectuals could shape and re-shape in line with their evolving interests. His study stands out for its remarkable blend of erudition, philological rigor, and creative insight.

The book unfolds as an exploration of Indography through time. Part 1 (11–65) covers the Greek tradition up to the first century b.c.e. in four stages: Greek historiography out of Asia Minor during the Late Archaic to Late Classical periods; the explosion of knowledge emanating from Alexander’s campaign in 327–325 b.c.e.; the diplomatic activities of the Hellenistic kingdoms (particularly Megasthenes chez Chandragupta); and geographical thought. Parker’s handling of disparate, often challenging, sources is always accurate and incisive. His concluding remarks to individual sections can be less than startling: Hecataeus situated India in an ordered, pre-cartographic model of the world (20–21); Ctesias’ taste for marvels set him up for indictments of mendacity (30–33); Eratosthenes tied the subcontinent into his geodetic calculus (52–53). But the readings serve as reliable introductions to many texts that remain hard to access, and here the whole is more than the sum. Parker’s sweeping juxtaposition of a chain of thinkers effectively reveals how they defined India as a finite structure for physical measurement, a problem for veridical historiography, and a prodigiously fecund environment for scientific...