Megasthenes
c. 340-c. 282 B.C.
Greek Historian and Diplomat
Megasthenes was neither the first European to travel to India nor the first to write of it. Yet his work attracted considerable attention in ancient times, and exerted an impact on the portrait of India in the writings of Strabo, Arrian, and others.
Some 70 years before Megasthenes, Ctesias of Cnidus (416 B.C.), served as physician in the courts of the Persian emperors Darius II Ochus (r. 432-404 B.C.) and Artaxerxes II Mnemon (r. 404-358 B.C.). Ctesias wrote the Persicha, which covers the histories of Assyria, Babylonia, and Persia in 23 books. Though modern scholars regard the work as unreliable in many particulars, for many years it was the principal Greek source on the area from Mesopotamia to India.
Something crucial happened in the period between Ctesias and Megasthenes: the conquest of the Persian Empire by Alexander the Great (356-323 B.C.), who by 326 B.C. controlled most of the known world from Sicily to western India, which is now Pakistan. After Alexander's death, his general Seleucus (c. 356-281 B.C.) took power over Persia, Mesopotamia, and Syria. Meanwhile, the Greco-Macedonian conquerors lost control of India, where the conquests of Alexander inspired a young monarch named Chandragupta Maurya (r. 324-301 B.C.) to build an empire of his own.
Probably in the last decade of the fourth century B.C., Seleucus sent Megasthenes as his diplomatic representative to the court of Chandragupta Maurya. All that is known of Megasthenes himself is that he came from Ionia, a group of city-states on the western coast of Asia Minor, or modern Turkey. As for his most notable achievement, this was not necessarily his work as Seleucid ambassador to the Mauryan Empire, but the four books of his Indica, which for centuries provided Greeks with their most important eyewitness account of India's history and geography.
The manuscript of the Indica has been lost, but echoes of it live on in the work of other writers, particularly the geographer Strabo (c. 64 B.C.-c. 23 A.D.) and the historian Arrian (d. A.D. 180). For instance, the former, discussing the size of India in his Geography, favored "a more moderate" (and in fact more accurate) estimate made by Megasthenes over observations made by Ctesias or other authorities, including officers in Alexander's army. Strabo went on to reference Megasthenes's reports concerning animal life and social organization among the Hindus.
Much of what Strabo quoted seems valid, but he also included enough fantastic stories—for instance, of gold-mining ants—to suggest the less reliable side of Megasthenes's writing. Arrian, as a military historian, was particularly interested in what Megasthenes had to say about the size, population, and ethnic makeup of India and the Caucasus, a region about which the Seleucid ambassador also wrote. Nonetheless Arrian, who quoted Megasthenes as saying that there were 118 different "tribes" or ethnicities in India, also relayed a number of strange tales—including the tale of the gold-mining ants—that came from Megasthenes.
Though the manuscript of the Indica has long ago disappeared, the many references in Strabo, Arrian, and others make it possible to gain some idea of the original. Thus in the twentieth century the German scholar E. A. Schwanbeck reconstructed a portion of the book from the many surviving fragments.
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