CHAPTER IV

THE RELATIONS OF ANCIENT PEOPLES

It is quite generally believed that relations between Greece and India only began, or at least only acquired significant importance, at the time of the conquests of Alexander Alexander the Great (356–323 BCE), King of Macedon, whose empire reached as far as the Punjab region of India.; for everything that is certainly prior to this date, people therefore speak simply of fortuitous resemblances between the two civilizations, and, for everything that is posterior, or supposed posterior, they naturally speak of Greek influence, as required by the special logic inherent to the "classical prejudice" classical prejudice: the academic bias that assumes Western (Greek and Roman) culture is the primary source of all significant civilization and knowledge.. This is yet another opinion which, like many others, is devoid of any serious foundation, for relations between peoples, even distant ones, were much more frequent in antiquity than is ordinarily imagined. In short, communications were not much more difficult then than they were just one or two centuries ago, and more precisely until the invention of railways and steamships; people undoubtedly traveled less commonly than in our time, less often and especially less quickly, but they traveled in a more profitable way, because they took the time to study the countries they passed through, and sometimes they even traveled precisely for the sake of this study and the intellectual benefits that could be derived from it. Under these conditions, there is no plausible reason to treat as "legend" what is reported to us regarding the travels of the Greek philosophers, especially since these travels explain many things that would otherwise be incomprehensible. The truth is that, long before the earliest times of Greek philosophy, the means of communication must have had a development of which moderns are far from having an accurate idea, and this in a normal and permanent way, quite apart from the migrations of peoples which undoubtedly only ever occurred in a discontinuous and somewhat exceptional manner.

Among other proofs that we could cite in support of what we have just said, we will indicate only one, which specifically concerns the relations of the Mediterranean peoples, and we will do so because it involves a fact that is little known or at least little noticed, to which no one seems to have paid—