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

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter EBOOK PACKAGE COMPLETE 2019 English
• VerfasserIn: Stoneman, Richard,
• Place / Publishing House: Princeton, NJ : : Princeton University Press, , [2019]; ©2019
• Year of Publication: 2019
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (548 p.)

An exploration of how the Greeks reacted to and interacted with India from the third to first centuries BCEWhen 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.Relying on an impressively wide variety of sources from the Indian subcontinent, The Greek Experience of India is a masterful account of the encounters between two remarkable civilizations.

Table of 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