Ancient Greece–Ancient India relations

For the Ancient Greeks, “India" (Greek: Ινδία) meant only the upper Indus till the time of Alexander the Great. Afterwards, “India" meant most of the northern half of the Indian subcontinent (including present-day India and Pakistan) to the Greeks. The Greeks referred to the Indians as "Indói" (Greek: Ἰνδοί), literally meaning "the people of the Indus River". Indians called the Greeks Yonas and “Yavanas” from Ionians.

A

Much of the narrative heritage of India and Greece goes back to shared ancestral narratives told in early IE times – to ‘protonarratives’. (…) the Greek tradition quite often fuses or amalgamates traditions that were separate in the protonarrative and remain separate in the Sanskrit.
- N. Allen (2015) 2015: “Cyavana helps Aśvins, Prometheus helps humans: a myth about sacrifice”, Comparative Mythology 1, Harvard, Cambridge. quoted in Elst, Koenraad (2018). Still no trace of an Aryan invasion: A collection on Indo-European origins.

In parts of their careers, Arjuna and Odysseus show similarities so numerous and detailed that they must be cognate figures, sharing an origin in the proto-hero of an oral proto-narrative.
- N. Allen, 1998, quoted in: Elst K. in Udayanath Sahoo (editor), Shobha Rani Dash (editor) - Great Indian Epics, International Perspectives-Routledge (2021) 55-6

E

Lord Mountstuart Elphinstone (1779-1859) in comparing the ancient Greeks with the ancient Hindus, says: "Their (Hindus) general learning was more considerable; and in the knowledge of the being and nature of God, they were already in possession of a light which was but faintly perceived even by the loftiest intellects in the best days of Athens."
- Lord Mountstuart Elphinstone (1779-1859). The History Of India Vol I By The Hon Mountstu Art Elphinstone 1843 by The Hon Mountstuart Elphinstone [1]

H

Journeys to India and indebtedness to Brahminical wisdom are now ascribed to numerous founders and leaders in Greek thought, such as Plato, Democritus, Pherecydes of Cyrus and, quite often, Pythagoras. We hear that Pythagoras studied astronomy andastrology with the Chaldeans, and psychological as well as soteriological doctrines with the Indian gymnosophists.
- Halbfass, Wilhelm. India and Europe: an Essay in Understanding. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988.
- quoted in : Bhaskar Kamble, The Imperishable Seed: How Hindu Mathematics Changed the World and why this History was Erased, Garuda Prakashan Private Limited, 2022 ISBN 9798885750189

The mythology, as well as the cosmogony of the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans, were borrowed from the doctrines of the Brahmins.
- John Holwell, quoted in Marshall, P. J. 1970. The British Discovery of Hinduism in the Eighteenth Century. Camhridge: Cambridge University Press. Quoted from Bryant, E. F. (2001). The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture : the Indo-Aryan migration debate. Oxford University Press. chapter 1.

K

There are reports by writers of the Hellenistic and Roman periods that Greeks had visited India in much earlier times... In fact Plutarch, Diodoros Sikeliotes and Diogenes Laertios manage between them to send just about every Greek sage into the East (including Pythagoras and Democritos, but notably not Socrates and Aristotle).
- Kazanas, N. (2015). Vedic and IndoEuropean studies. Aditya Prakashan. , chapter: Archaic Greece and the Veda, also in : Annals of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Vol. 82, No. 1/4 (2001), pp. 1-42

L

Plato, through the Pythagoreans and also the Orphics, was subjected to the influence of Hindu thought but he may not have been aware of it as coming from India.
- Lomperis T 1984, Hindu influence on Greek Philosophy, Calcutta; quoted in Kak S. 2000 ‘Indic Ideas in the Graeco-Roman World’ in Indian Historical Review in press. quoted from Kazanas, N. (2015). Vedic and IndoEuropean studies. Aditya Prakashan. , chapter Archaic Greece and the Veda, also in : Annals of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Vol. 82, No. 1/4 (2001), pp. 1-42

M

It will no longer remain to be doubted that the priests of Egypt and the sages of Greece have drawn directly from the original well of India; that only Brahmanism can provide those fragments of their teaching which have come down to us with the clarity which they do not possess.
- Friedrich Majer, as quoted in Wilhelm Halbfass, India and Europe: An Essay in Philosophical Understanding, Motilal Banarasidass Publishers Pvt. Limited, Delhi, 1990. Also quoted in Ram Swarup (2000). On Hinduism: Reviews and reflections. Ch. 4.

‘These coincidences of thought,’ says A.N. Marlow who documents many more, ‘each small in itself, amount to quite a formidable total. As to the…way by which Indian influence reached Greece, I have no new solution to offer and fall back with others on Persia as the intermediary. The problem is, however, that the influences can be seen centuries earlier’
- A.N. Marlow in: Nick Collins - How Maritime Trade and the Indian Subcontinent Shaped the World (2022)

Everything is narrow in the Occident. Greece is small — I stifle. Judea is dry — I pant. Let me look a little towards lofty Asia, towards the deep Orient. There I find my immense poem, vast as India’s seas, blessed and made golden by the sun, a book of divine harmony in which nothing jars. There reigns a lovable peace, and even in the midst of battle, an infinite softness, an unbounded fraternity extending to all that lives, a bottomless and shoreless ocean of love, piety, clemency. I have found what I was looking for: the bible of kindness. Great poem, receive me!… Let me plunge into it! It is the sea of milk.
- Jules Michelet, quoted in India’s Impact on French Thought and Literature: Eighteenth to Twentieth Century by Michel Danino (Published in Critical Practice, X:2, June 2003, pp. 46-56)

P

The West spoke fairly enough, talking of honor, the sanctity of the given word, and of promises; of freedom and enlightenment. It vaunted its poets, its philosophers, Its scientists, Its classical inheritance from that beautiful, far off Greece, whose greatest philosophers, it forgot to mention, had been inspired through Egypt and Persia, by India.
- Michael Pym, The Power of India, quoted in S. Londhe, A Tribute to Hinduism (2008)

R

So, in practice, Western history has used two standards of evidence for transmission: one ultra-lax standard of evidence for transmission from "Greeks", and another ultra-strict standard for transmission to the West. For cases of alleged transmission from the Greeks, mere speculations—a speculative chronology combined with speculative attribution—are regarded as ample evidence of transmission. In the other direction, similarity with a real earlier work, by a real author, together with a clear channel of transmission, do not prove anything, for there is always the possibility of repeated miracles by which any number of people in the West may independently reinvent things just when they could be transmitted.
- C. K. Raju, Cultural Foundations of Mathematics, Vol. 10, Pt. 4: The Nature of Mathematical Proof and the Transmission of the Calculus from India to Europe (India: Pearson Longman, 2007)

In the many centuries, since Toledo, that Western historians have been talking of transmission from the Greeks, who ever produced a Sanskrit manuscript of Ptolemy? Who ever proved that Aryabhata had seen such a Sanskrit manuscript? Yet every Western reference work on the subject asserts that Indian astronomy is transmitted from the Greeks. ... So, it is not so much that the standards of evidence have changed, but that there are (even as of today) two simultaneous standards of evidence for transmission. One for transmission to the West, and another for purported transmission from the West. Not only is the judge biased, the very rules of evidence are biased!... So, similarity and precedence do not always establish transmission. Whether or not they establish transmission depends upon the direction of transfer. Thus, in practice, there are two standards of evidence for transmission: an ultra-lax standard for transmission from Greeks, and an ultra-strict standard for transmission to the West.
- C. K. Raju, Cultural Foundations of Mathematics, Vol. 10, Pt. 4: The Nature of Mathematical Proof and the Transmission of the Calculus from India to Europe (India: Pearson Longman, 2007)

A hundred facts testify to how great an extent the East was mingled with Hellenic thought during the second century of our era.
- Romain Rolland The Life Of Vivekananda And The Universal Gospel by Rolland Romain

S

There is no language in the world, even Greek, which has the clarity and the philosophical precision of Sanskrit. India is not only at the origin of everything, she is superior in everything, intellectually, religiously or politically and even the Greek heritage seems pale in comparison.
- Friedrich Schlegel,source: Arise, O India, François Gautier. Quoted from Gewali, Salil (2013). Great Minds on India. New Delhi: Penguin Random House.

Even the loftiest philosophy of the Europeans, the idealism of reason, as it is set forth by Greek philosophers, appears, in comparison with the abundant light and vigour of Oriental idealism, like a feeble Promethean spark in the full flood of heavenly glory of the noonday sun—faltering and feeble, and ever ready to be extinguished.
- Friedrich Schlegel, Indian Language, Literature, and Philosophy, p. 471, quoted in Max Müller, Three Lectures on the Vedanta Philosophy (1894), p. 11

We find among the Indians the vestiges of the most remote antiquity... We know that all peoples came there to draw the elements of their knowledge... India, in her splendour, gave religions and laws to all the other peoples; Egypt and Greece owed to her both their fables and their wisdom.
- Pierre Sonnerat: Voyage aux Indes orientales et a la Chine, Paris, 1782. Quoted in A Look at India From the Views of Other Scholars, by Stephen Knapp [2]

V

The Greek sought political liberty. The Hindu has always sought spiritual liberty. Both are one-sided.
- Swami Vivekananda, "Hindu and greek", Complete Works, vol. 6

Two curious nations there have been - sprung of the same race, but placed in different circumstances and environments, working put the problems of life each in its own particular way. I mean the ancient Hindu and the ancient Greek. The Indian Aryan - bounded on the north by the snow-caps of the Himalayas, with fresh-water rivers like rolling oceans surrounding him in the plains, with eternal forests which, to him, seemed to be the end of the world - turned his vision inward; and given the natural instinct, the superfine brain of the Aryan, with this sublime scenery surrounding him, the natural result was that he became introspective. The analysis of his own mind was the great theme of the Indo-Aryan. With the Greek, on the other hand, who arrived at a part of the earth which was more beautiful than sublime, the beautiful islands of the Grecian Archipelago, nature all around him generous yet simple - his mind naturally went outside. It wanted to analyse the external world. And as a result we find that from India have sprung all the analytical sciences, and from Greece all the sciences of generalization. The Hindu mind went on in its own direction and produced the most marvellous results. Even at the present day, the logical capacity of the Hindus, and the tremendous power which the Indian brain still possesses, is beyond compare. ...Today the ancient Greek is meeting the ancient Hindu on the soil of India.
- Swami Vivekananda, "The work before us" (Delivered at the Triplicane Literary Society, Madras), Complete Works, vol. 3 also quoted in Bryant, E. F. (2001). The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture : the Indo-Aryan migration debate. Oxford University Press. chapter 2

Two nations of yore, namely the Greek and the Aryan placed in different environments and circumstances - the former, surrounded by all that was beautiful, sweet, and tempting in nature, with an invigorating climate, and the latter, surrounded on every side by all that was sublime, and born and nurtured in a climate which did not allow of much physical exercise - developed two peculiar and different ideals of civilization. The study of the Greeks was the outer infinite, while that of the Aryans was the inner infinite; one studied the macrocosm, and the other the microcosm. Each had its distinct part to play in the civilisation of the world. Not that one was required to borrow from the other, but if they compared notes both would be the gainers. The Aryans were by nature an analytical race. In the sciences of mathematics and grammar wonderful fruits were gained, and by the analysis of mind the full tree was developed. In Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, and the Egyptian neo-Platonists, we can find traces of Indian thought.
- Swami Vivekananda, "Vedantism", At Khetri on 20th December 1897, Complete Works, vol. 3

The Greeks, in their mythology, were merely disciples of India and of Egypt.
- Voltaire. Quoted in Les Indes Florissantes — Anthologie des voyageurs français (1750-1820), by Guy Deleury (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1991), p. 663. and in India’s Impact on French Thought and Literature: Eighteenth to Twentieth Century by Michel Danino (Published in Critical Practice, X:2, June 2003, pp. 46-56)

Our nations have mutually destroyed each other on that very soil where we went to collect nothing but money, and where the first Greeks travelled for nothing but knowledge.
- Voltaire, in Jain, S., & Jain, M. (2011). The India they saw: Foreign accounts. New Delhi: Ocean Books. vol 4. Introduction

It is very important to note that some 2,500 years ago at the least Pythagoras went from Samos to the Ganges to learn geometry...But he would certainly not have undertaken such a strange journey had the reputation of the Brahmans' science not been been long established in Europe.
- C’est d’abord une remarque très-importante que Pythagore alla de Samos au Gange pour apprendre la géométrie, il y a environ deux mille cinq cents ans au moins, et plus de sept cents ans avant notre ère vulgaire, si récemment adoptée par nous. Or, certainement Pythagore n’aurait pas entrepris un si étrange voyage si la réputation de la science des brachmanes n’avait été dès longtemps établie de proche en proche en Europe, et si plusieurs voyageurs n’avaient déjà enseigné la route.
- Voltaire, Fragments historiques sur l'Inde. Quoted in Gewali, Salil (2013). Great Minds on India. New Delhi: Penguin Random House.

We have already acknowledged that arithmetic, geometry, astronomy were taught among the Brahmans. From time immemorial they have known the precession of the equinoxes and were in their calculation far closer to the real figure than the Greeks who came much later. Mr. Le Gentil (a French astronomer who spent several years in India) has with admiration acknowledged the Brahmans' science, as well as the immensity of time these Indians must have needed to reach a knowledge of which even the Chinese never had any notion, and which was unknown to Egypt and to Chaldea, the teacher of Egypt.
- Voltaire, Fragments historiques sur l'Inde. Quoted in Gewali, Salil (2013). Great Minds on India. New Delhi: Penguin Random House, and in Riding the Indian Tiger, William Nobrega and Ashish Sinha.

W

I like to think that someone will trace how the deepest thinking of India made its way to Greece and from there to the philosophy of our times.
- John Archibald Wheeler, in a foreword to Swami Jitatmananda, Modern Physics and Vedanta (Mumbai: Paras Prints, 1986), quoted in R. Malhotra, Being Different (2018)

Joseph Waligore is equally critical but has no solution except that they did borrow ‘from Indian philosophy but only had limited contact with the Indians and could not penetrate the core of Indian thought’.
- Joseph Waligore in : Nick Collins - How Maritime Trade and the Indian Subcontinent Shaped the World (2022)

External links

Encyclopedic article on Ancient Greece–Ancient India relations on Wikipedia