Megasthenes’ Book

Abstract

This chapter focuses on Megasthenes' book on India. His book became the primary, and often the only, source for all later imaginings of India, so that even when Rome had been in trading contact with India for two centuries, Pliny was still describing a world essentially as it had been evoked by the Greek author. The observations of the author of the Periplus, and of Agatharchides, have little impact on later writers. Somehow Megasthenes' India was the sort of India that the Hellenistic and Roman worlds found it comfortable to imagine. There was no critical attempt to evaluate what he had written and to compare it against later observations. The case reminds one of the impact of Kipling's India in the Britain of the late imperial years.