4 RELATIONS BETWEEN THE PEOPLES OF ANTIQUITY

THERE EXISTS A FAIRLY WIDESPREAD BELIEF that relations between Greece and India did not begin, or rather did not assume appreciable importance, until the time of Alexander's conquests; whatever can unmistakably be assigned to an earlier date is therefore simply put down to casual resemblances between the two civilizations, while anything which arose or is supposed to have arisen later is naturally said to be the result of Greek influence, to meet the requirements of the peculiar logic inherent in the 'classical prejudice'. Here again we encounter an opinion which, like so many others, is devoid of serious foundation, because intercourse between the peoples of antiquity, even when they lived great distances apart, was much more general than is usually supposed. On the whole, communications were then not much more difficult than they were no more than a century or two ago, or, to be exact, until the invention of railways and steamships; travel in earlier times, no doubt, was less frequent and above all less rapid than in our time, but people traveled more profitably because they gave themselves time to study the countries they visited; often journeys were undertaken with the sole purpose of carrying out such studies and for the intellectual benefits to be derived from them. This being the case, there are no plausible reasons for treating the accounts of the travels of Greek philosophers as 'legends', the less so as these travels explain many things which would otherwise remain incomprehensible. The truth is that long before the early days of Greek philosophy, means of communication must have reached a stage of development of which the moderns are far from forming a correct picture, and this state of things was normal and regular, quite apart from migrations of peoples, which doubtless only took place intermittently and under exceptional circumstances.

Among other proofs that could be brought forward in support of what has just been said, we will only mention one that specially concerns the relations of the Mediterranean peoples, and we will do so because it refers to a little-known, or at least little-noticed fact, which never seems to have received the attention it deserves and which, in any case, has always been quite incorrectly interpreted. The fact we are referring to is the adoption around the whole of the Mediterranean basin of a common basic type of coinage, with variations of a secondary nature, serving as local distinguishing marks; although it is not possible to fix its exact date, the adoption of this uniform monetary system must go back to very early times, at least if one is only taking into account the period most commonly regarded as ancient. People have tried to interpret this fact as a simple imitation of Greek coinage, which accidentally found its way into distant countries; this is another example of the exaggerated importance they are always inclined to attribute to the Greeks, and it is also an example of the unfortunate tendency to treat as an accident everything that cannot be explained, as if 'accident' were anything but a word used in order to disguise our ignorance of real causes. What appears certain is that the common monetary type in question, of which the essential characteristic is that it bears a human head on one side and a horse or a chariot on the other, is not more specifically Greek than it is Italic or Carthaginian, or even Gallic or Iberian; its adoption must surely have demanded a more or less explicit agreement between the several Mediterranean peoples, even though the modalities of that agreement must needs escape us. What is true of this monetary type is also true of certain symbols and traditions that are found again and again, unaltered and spread throughout still wider areas; moreover, if no one denies that continuous relations were maintained between the Greek colonies and their parent cities, why should such doubt be felt about relations carried on between the Greeks and other peoples? Besides, even if a convention such as the one mentioned actually never did exist, for reasons that may be of several kinds and that need not be gone into here—being moreover difficult to ascertain definitely—this does not in any way prove that the establishment of more or less regular exchanges was therefore prevented; the means must simply have been different owing to the necessity for adaptation to different circumstances.

In order to gauge the significance of the facts we have indicated, though we have used them only by way of illustration, it must be added that commercial exchanges could never have been carried on continuously without being accompanied sooner or later by exchanges of quite another order, and more especially by intellectual exchanges; in certain instances it may even have happened that economic relations, far from taking first place, as they do with the modern peoples, occupied a position of more or less secondary importance. The tendency to refer everything to the economic standpoint, whether it concerns the internal life of a country or its international relations, is actually quite a modern one; the ancient peoples, even in the West, with the possible exception of the Phoenicians, did not look on things in this light, neither do Easterners even today. Here we will take the opportunity of pointing out again how dangerous it always is to try, by the light of one's own personal point of view, to arrive at an appreciation of human beings whose circumstances and mentality are different, being otherwise situated in time and space, and who therefore certainly never did adopt that point of view and could not have had any possible reason for doing so; nevertheless, this is an error only too frequently committed by the students of antiquity and it is also one, as we said at the beginning, which orientalists never fail to commit.

To return to our starting-point: the fact that the earliest of the Greek philosophers lived several centuries before the period of Alexander does not in any way authorize us to conclude that they knew nothing about the Hindu doctrines. To quote one example, atomism, long before it appeared in Greece, was upheld in India by the school of Kanāda and later by Jains and Buddhists; it is possible that it was brought to the West by the Phoenicians, as certain traditions seem to suggest, but on the other hand various authors declare that Democritus, who was one of the first of the Greeks to adopt this doctrine, or at least to formulate it clearly, had traveled in Egypt, Persia, and India. The early Greek philosophers may even have been acquainted not only with the Hindu but also with the Buddhist doctrines, for they certainly did not live earlier than Buddhism. Furthermore, Buddhism soon spread outside India into Asiatic regions lying nearer to Greece, which were therefore more accessible; this circumstance would appear to strengthen the argument, which is quite a tenable one, that borrowings were made chiefly, though not exclusively, from the Buddhist civilization. What is curious in any case is that the points of resemblance that can be established with the doctrines of India are much more striking and numerous in the pre-Socratic age than in subsequent periods. What then becomes of the part played by the conquests of Alexander in the intellectual relations of the two peoples? They do not in fact appear to have introduced any Hindu influences, except that contained in the logic of Aristotle—to which we have already alluded in connection with his syllogism—and also in the metaphysical part of the same philosopher's work, in which it is possible to point to intellectual affinities with India far too close to be purely accidental.

If, with the object of safeguarding the originality of the Greek philosophers at all costs, the objection is put forward that there exists an intellectual fund common to all humanity, it is nonetheless true that the existence of this fund is something too general and vague to provide a satisfactory explanation for likenesses that are both close and clearly-defined: besides, differences of mentality in many cases go much further than is supposed by those who have only known one human type; between Greeks and Hindus especially, these differences were considerable. Such an explanation only holds good when it is a question of two comparable civilizations that have developed in the same direction, though independently of one another, producing conceptions that are fundamentally the same, however unlike they may appear in form; this is the case with the metaphysical doctrines of China and India. But even within these limits, it would perhaps be more convincing to recognize in this concordance the results of an identity of primordial traditions, as one is obliged to do for example in cases where a common use of the same symbols is observable, implying a relationship that may, however, go back to ages far more remote than the beginning of the so-called 'historical' period; but to discuss this question would lead us too far afield.

After Aristotle, the signs of Hindu influence on Greek philosophy become more and more rare, even to the point of disappearing, because that philosophy shut itself up in an increasingly limited and contingent sphere, ever further removed from any real intellectuality, and this sphere was for the most part that of ethics, which is concerned with questions that have always been quite foreign to the Easterners. It was only among the Neoplatonists that Eastern influences were again to make their appearance, and it is there indeed that certain metaphysical ideas, such as that of the Infinite, are to be met with for the first time among the Greeks. Until then, in fact, the Greeks had only possessed the notion of the indefinite, and 'finished' and 'perfect' were synonymous terms for them—a particularly characteristic trait of their mentality; for the Easterners on the contrary it is the Infinite which is identical with Perfection. Such is the gulf that separates a philosophic conception, in the European sense of the word, from a metaphysical idea; but we will have occasion to return to this matter in greater detail later on, and these few remarks must suffice for the moment, since it is not our present intention to make a detailed comparison between the conceptions of India and Greece respectively, a comparison which would moreover encounter many difficulties little dreamed of by those who only view the question superficially.