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

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

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)

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

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)

External links

Encyclopedic article on Ancient Greece–Ancient India relations on Wikipedia