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  • The Greek Experience of India: From Alexander to the Indo-Greeks by Richard Stoneman
  • Ashwini Lakshminarayanan
Richard Stoneman. The Greek Experience of India: From Alexander to the Indo-Greeks. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019. xviii + 525 pp. 58 black-and-white figs. Cloth, $40.

Richard Stoneman in his study of the Greek experience of India successfully surveys the main points of contact and exchange between the two cultures in the Hellenistic period to show that the "encounter (between the Greeks and the Indians) was more than an encounter between people and nature-spirits; that two peoples grew and learned as a result of their familiarity one with another" (2). Such a study of Greeks in the subcontinent is not a new one and in several instances Stoneman also cites William Woodthorpe Tarn's 1938 monograph The Greeks in India and Bactria (Cambridge). Stoneman deviates from Tarn successfully by highlighting the encounter as more than a unilateral exchange of knowledge from the Greeks to the "Indians"; nevertheless, primary importance is given to Alexander's presence in India.

Stoneman does not define the geographical extent of his ancient India, and the work focuses mainly on the Mauryan kingdom founded by Chandragupta Maurya at the time when Seleucus I established himself in Bactria. The text makes several references to parts of Gandhara and Bactria with minimal distinctions to the author's "ancient India," the former located at the frontier of ancient India and the latter an independent kingdom. This is evident when the author identifies Heliodorus, a Greek in Indian society in the 2nd century b.c.e. and writes that "one should not forget Theodorus, a Buddhist meridiarch who left an inscription on a pot found in Swat" (387). (The inscription attests to the existence of Greek personal names in the subcontinent and does not suggest the ethnic identity of the dedicator.) The suggestion of the Swat region along with Ancient India blurs the lines between different political and cultural groups in the region.

The book is organized into three major parts comprising fourteen chapters in total. The first section of the book, aptly named "First Impressions," provides a list of Greek authors, Muslim ethnographers, and British and German historians as a useful starting point to readers. Chapter 2 further outlines Alexander's journey into India via the Indus, his arrival into Taxila, and his encounter with Porus. Chapter 3 engages with the two main deities of the Macedonians during Alexander's reign, Heracles and Dionysus, both identified by Greek authors in northwestern India and surviving (in ways not fully understood) in Gandhara art. According to Stoneman, "it needs to be emphasized that Alexander and his companions were not seeking to explain phenomena of Indian religion, but to find Dionysus in this unfamiliar land" (97). The argument is persuasive in identifying similarities between the two cultures and indeed the author does so by associating the two Greek gods to Krisna (87–8) and Siva (95), but to suggest that "it is possible that Indian artists found the figure of Heracles coalesced neatly with their earlier, not lost, conceptions of one hero or another" is over-simplified (88). The final chapter of this section covers the plants and animals recorded by the Greeks along with their Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, and Pali names. [End Page 133]

The second section, "Megasthenes' description of India," divided into six chapters, is dedicated to Megasthenes' Indica and its interpretation of Mauryan India in comparison with Kautilya's Arthasastra. Chapter 5 introduces Megasthenes' work where the author also "tentatively" proposes a new order of fragments regarding India (183–5). The subsequent chapter outlines the various attempts by modern scholars to identify Dionysus and Heracles mentioned in Arrian, Megasthenes, and Diodorus with mythological figures in the Puranas. Stoneman successfully presents an overview of the Arthasastra's royal administration along with Megasthenes' description of kingship, economic apparatus of the kingdom, and military strategies in chapter 8. This chapter further discusses caste, eating customs, and sexual behavior. Regarding eating, Stoneman provides a short paragraph on eating customs mentioned by the ancient authors. (No comparison is provided based on Indian texts here.) Sexual habits and marriage customs are conflated...

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