The Greek Experience of India : From Alexander to the Indo-Greeks / Richard Stoneman.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Stoneman, Richard, Author.

Series:

Princeton scholarship online.

Princeton scholarship online

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Indo-Greeks.

India--History--324 B.C.-1000 A.D.

India.

India--Civilization--Greek influences.

Genre:

History.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (459 pages)

Place of Publication:

Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, [2019]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

An exploration of how the Greeks reacted to and interacted with India from the third to first centuries BCE. When the Greeks and Macedonians in Alexander's army reached India in 326 BCE, they entered a new and strange world. They knew a few legends and travelers' tales, but their categories of thought were inadequate to encompass what they witnessed. The plants were unrecognizable, their properties unknown. The customs of the people were various and puzzling. While Alexander's conquest was brief, ending with his death in 323 BCE, the Greeks would settle in the Indian region for the next two centuries, forging an era of productive interactions between the two cultures. The Greek Experience of India explores the various ways that the Greeks reacted to and constructed life in India during this fruitful period. From observations about botany and mythology to social customs, Richard Stoneman examines the surviving evidence of those who traveled to India. Most particularly, he offers a full and valuable look at Megasthenes, ambassador of the Seleucid king Seleucus to Chandragupta Maurya, and provides a detailed discussion of Megasthenes's now-fragmentary book Indica. Stoneman considers the art, literature, and philosophy of the Indo-Greek kingdom and how cultural influences crossed in both directions, with the Greeks introducing their writing, coinage, and sculptural and architectural forms, while Greek craftsmen learned to work with new materials such as ivory and stucco and to probe the ideas of Buddhists and other ascetics.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

List of Illustrations

Preface and Acknowledgements

Abbreviations and Conventions

Prologue: The Moon at Noon

Part I. First Impressions

1. Writing a Book about India

2. Alexander in India

3. Heracles and Dionysus

4. The Natural History of India

Part II. Megasthenes' Description of India

5. Introducing Megasthenes

6. Megasthenes' Book

7. Geography and Ancient History

8. Culture and Society

9. The Question of Utopia

10. Megasthenes on the Natural World

Part III. Interactions

11. The Indian Philosophers and the Greeks

12. Two Hundred Years of Debate: Greek and Indian Thought

13. The Trojan Elephant: Two Hundred Years of Co-existence from the Death of Alexander to the Death of Menander, 323 to 135 BCE

14. Bending the Bow: Kṛṣṇa, Arjuna, Rāma, Odysseus

15. Greeks and the Art of India

16. Apollonius of Tyana and Hellenistic Taxila

Appendix: Concordance of the Fragments of Megasthenes

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Also issued in print: 2019.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 06. Apr 2020)

ISBN:

9780691185385

0691185387

OCLC:

1082519118