The Making of Roman India

Discusses ancient Greek and Roman perceptions of India during a thousand-year period.

Grant Parker (Author)

9780521175364, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 3 March 2011

374 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.1 cm, 0.55 kg

'The great virtue of the book is that it admirably demonstrates how, though Roman India never existed as a political reality, the discourse on India helped define Greek and roman culture and history for over a thousand years.' International Journal of the Classical Tradition

Latin and especially Greek texts of the imperial period contain a wealth of references to 'India'. Professor Parker offers a survey of such texts, read against a wide range of other sources, both archaeological and documentary. He emphasises the social processes whereby the notion of India gained its exotic features, including the role of the Persian empire and of Alexander's expedition. Three kinds of social context receive special attention: the trade in luxury commodities; the political discourse of empire and its limits; and India's status as a place of special knowledge, embodied in 'naked philosophers'. Roman ideas about India ranged from the specific and concrete to the wildly fantastic and the book attempts to account for such variety. It ends by considering the afterlife of such ideas into late antiquity and beyond.

Introduction
Part I. Creation of a Discourse: 1. Achaemenid India and Alexander
Part II. Features of a Discourse: 2. India described
3. India depicted
Part III. Contexts of a Discourse: 4. Commodities
5. Empire
6. Wisdom
Conclusion: intersections of a discourse.

Subject Areas: Classical Greek & Roman archaeology [HDDK], Classical history / classical civilisation [HBLA1], Ancient history: to c 500 CE [HBLA], Asian history [HBJF]