ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Toxicological Exchanges from India to Greece (4th c. BCE to 2nd c. CE)

• In Event: The Shared World of Ancient Medicine: A Conceptual Framework for Technical Circulation and Exchange in Eurasia and North Africa

English Abstract

When Alexander III of Macedon reached the Indian subcontinent, he and his soldiers were terrorized by snakes and hounded by the poisoned arrows of Indian archers. Alexander reportedly gathered local Indian physicians in his tent, who cured the snakebites for any afflicted patients, since Greek physicians could not treat these wounds (Arrian, Indika 15.10–12). Another version of this story has Alexander himself envisioning an antidote in his dreams, where a snake carried a particular plant in its mouth (Quintus Curtius, History of Alexander 9.8.20–27). In the centuries that followed, toxicology gripped the Greek imagination, becoming a popular topic for Greek and Roman medical authors, with India, Egypt, Ethiopia, and other foreign lands consistently functioning as a conceptual site where exceptionally poisonous animals lingered. The trade in medical products also increased between the Mediterranean and India, with trade lines via Egypt and Arabia expanding under the Ptolemies and Romans, while Greco-Bactrian and Indo-Greek communities in the north subcontinent facilitate trade routes and knowledge exchange in the areas around the Hindu Kush. By comparing the remedies in Nicander’s Alexipharmaca, Celsus’ De Medicina, and Galen’s On Antidotes to the Indian Ayurvedic tradition, this talk demonstrates how recipes, products, and ideas moved from Indian, Arabian, Persian, Egyptian, Greek, and Roman sources during this period, illustrating the robust and influential medical connections that existed across Eurasia and north-eastern Africa in antiquity. By pointing to the rise in antidote treatments for disease during the Hellenistic and Roman imperial eras, the talk also gestures towards the significant conceptual impact that this intercultural exchange of toxicology had on Greco-Roman medicine more broadly.

Author

• Colin Webster, UC Davis