The Natural History of India

Abstract

This chapter details the flora and fauna that interested the Greeks in Alexander's entourage as they entered India. They had read the books on India by Scylax and Ctesias, perhaps with due skepticism, but they waited with curiosity to see how the reality would match up to the limited information with which they were equipped. Ctesias spent seventeen years at the Persian court as a doctor, which undoubtedly gave him an interest in diet and food plants, and wrote two books based on the gossip he picked up there: the Persica and the Indica. Both have been much criticized from antiquity onwards. The first is often at odds with Herodotus and with is known of Persian history; the second is explicitly based on conversations with merchants and diplomats visiting Persia from India.