Ctesias' "Indica" and Photius

TWENTIETH-CENTURY scholars have on the whole looked with little favour on the Indica of Artaxerxes' physician Ctesias, the first Greek book to be wholly devoted to the exotic land of India.' In general the work is dismissed with a few caustic words ridiculing it for its absurd tales or castigating it for its apparently incoherent organisation. Remarkably little attention, however, has been paid to the question of what we really know of it. After all, this is an account preserved only in the summary made by Photius in the ninth century A.D., and in the excerpts and allusions of a series of other authors.2 Yet judgement is passed on it on the basis of the summaries and excerpts with almost no discussion of the summarisers and the excerptors

Art · Epistemology · Judgement · Literature · Ninth · Classical Antiquity Studies · Classical Philosophy and Thought · Historical, Religious, and Philosophical Studies · History · Philosophy

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