According to the geographer Strabo, the first European to attempt to establish serious commercial contacts with India was a certain Eudoxus of Cyzicus, an entrepreneurial Greek who made the acquaintance of an Indian shipwrecked somewhere on the shores of the Red Sea. Around 120 BC Eudoxus was in Alexandria when the regime’s coast guards brought a half-dead Indian sailor to the court of Ptolemy Euergetes II. Most likely the castaway came from the Dravidian south of the continent, or possibly even Ceylon, since by this stage an interpreter for one of the northern languages could have been found without too much difficulty. Before long the enigmatic arrival acquired a sufficient command of Greek to interest Eudoxus in the possibility of going to India himself.
Armed with first-hand knowledge of Indian waters, Eudoxus made two trips to India to buy spices and other Eastern luxuries, returning on each occasion with a rich haul of exotica, much to the delight of the king, who promptly requisitioned the lot. Frustrated, and anticipating an idea that would captivate the geographers of medieval Europe, Eudoxus attempted to circumvent the problem by circumnavigating Africa. On the first attempt he made it no further than modern Morocco, where his crew mutinied and he was forced to turn back. Undeterred, he set out a second time, taking with him seeds to sow crops and some dancing girls to keep his crew amenable. Having sailed west beyond the straits of Gibraltar neither Eudoxus nor the dancing girls were ever heard of again, but he deserves at least a mention in any history of navigation, for his is the first name in a tradition that culminates with Vasco da Gama.*
Whereas history records Eudoxus as a flamboyant failure, Rome’s approach to the problem of reaching India and its riches was, characteristically, a good deal more effective. Following the defeat and suicide of Cleopatra, the last of the Greco-Egyptian dynasty of the Ptolemies, the emperor Augustus annexed Egypt to the empire in 30 BC, thereby granting Roman merchants direct access to the Red Sea. Flushed with the spoils of empire, and with an emergent class of the Roman mega-rich demanding new and more exotic luxuries, Roman merchants now had the incentive, the opportunity and the means to establish themselves as a serious presence in Indian Ocean trade.
They wasted no time, and spared no means. Within a decade of Egypt’s conquest a bustling traffic was underway. New ports were constructed on the Red Sea shore, and wells were dug along the caravan routes crossing the desert from the Nile to the coast. Most likely the impulse for this expansion came from competition with Eastern powers already established in the trade, among them the commercial empire of the Nabataeans, an Arabian people that had grown rich on the ancient caravan traffic from Arabia and beyond – the splendid ruins of Petra are the most visible reminder of their wealth. Further south, the Romans faced competition from the trading powers of the Hadhramaut, successors to the trade and caravan routes once travelled, if the Bible is to be believed, by the Queen of Sheba. No sooner had Egypt been subjugated than an army under the command of the prefect of Egypt was dispatched to sack ports along the Arabian coasts. The likely incentive for the expedition was much the same as the one that had earlier spurred Eudoxus, and that would remain a perennial catalyst of the spice trade for the best part of another two millennia: the desire to circumvent – in this case, to rub out – the middleman. This obscure expedition was apparently the first war launched by a European power for the sake of the lucrative Eastern traffic, but it would not be the last.
With the way to India now wide open to Roman shipping, East and West began to develop a clearer image of one another than had ever been possible. Roman emperors regularly received Indian ambassadors. Augustus apparently exhibited a tiger in 13 or 11 BC For their part, the Indians were evidently reasonably familiar with Rome, and impressed by what they saw. At Ara, in north-eastern India, there is an inscription of King Kanishka in which he refers to himself as ‘Caesar’. Contacts were deepening, yet from the distance of Rome India still appeared as a hazy mix of fact and fantasy, as in Apuleius’ (c. AD 124–C.170) description:
The Indians are a people of great population and vast territories situated far to our east, by Ocean’s ebb, where the stars first rise at the ends of the earth, beyond the learned Egyptians and the superstitious Jews, Nabataean merchants and flowing-robed Parthians, past the Ituraeans* with their meagre crops and the Arabs rich in perfumes – wherefore I do not so much wonder at the Indians’ mountains of ivory, harvests of pepper, stockpiles of cinnamon, tempered iron, mines of silver and smelted streams of gold; nor at the Ganges, the greatest of all rivers and the king of the waters of the Dawn, running in a hundred streams …
The merchants who went there knew better, but it was not in their interest to be too forthcoming about what they saw – one reason, perhaps, why aside from the unadorned listing of ports and products in the Periplus no first-hand account is extant. Surviving Indian sources describe the foreigners’ trading stations and warehouses as ‘residences of limitless wealth’. There are references to Western converts to Buddhism and Greek mercenaries in the employ of Indian rulers. An Indian poet writes of his ruler’s taste for Greek wine. Greek carpenters built a palace for an Indian king. At Muziris, the principal entrepôt on the coast, the Romans erected a temple to the emperor Augustus: an act of pious patriotism, perhaps, or a reminder of the long arm of the metropole. Its ruins lie somewhere under the modern town of Cranganore, on the banks of a river sprung from a maze of backwaters, by which the pepper arrived, via porter, buffalo and barge, from harvest further inland. Ancient Tamil poets describe Muziris as a scene of heaving activity: a town that ‘offers toddy as if it were water to those who come to pour there the goods from the mountains and those from the sea, to those who bring ashore in the lagoon boats the “gifts” of gold brought by the ships, and to those who crowd the port in the turmoil created by the sacks of pepper piled up in the houses’. To visit Malabar today it is easy to imagine that the scene that greeted the Romans cannot have changed much since antiquity. In the spice quarters of Malabar the tourist still sees the same scenes of pulsating energy: haggling merchants and a harbour crowded with boats from the backwaters, unloading their cargo of spices. The occasional buffalo pushes its way through the crowd while porters scurry to and from the warehouses, bent double under sacks of cardamom and pepper.
With the right timing the return leg was a sleepier affair than the outward journey. Once the spices had been bought and loaded onto the ships nothing remained for the Romans but to wait for the monsoon winds to shift in their favour and, sailors being sailors, to knock back the toddy like water. With the gentle north-easterlies of the winter monsoon in their sails, Rome’s spice fleets retraced their route eastward across the ocean, then north up the Red Sea. The cargoes were unloaded on the Egyptian coast, then transferred onto caravans that angled back across the desert to the Nile. During the course of one such crossing a returnee from the Indian voyage carved graffiti that may still be read on the walls of the Wadi Menih: ‘C. Numidius Eros made this in the 38th year of Caesar’s [Augustus’s] rule, returning from India in the month of Pamenoth.’ In modern terms the year was 2 BC in the month of February or March, precisely the time when the fleets were expected back on the winds of the winter monsoon.
Having made landfall in Egypt, the sailors were back among the familiar sights and sounds of the Roman world. When the caravans reached the Nile, their cargo was loaded onto barges and freighted downstream to Alexandria, the chief port of the delta, where the spices were transferred onto a bulk freighter. The