On the Antiquity of the Chemical Art | Page 5

of knowledge.
There was constant communication between the Grecian and Persian nations. We learn that it was not uncommon for Grecian generals to take service under the Persian Satraps, tempted by the liberal recompence with which their services were rewarded. About the year 356 B.C. this system of Greeks accepting service under Persian Satraps nearly caused the outbreak of war between Greece and Persia--Chares, a Grecian commander, having assisted with his fleet and men, Artabanus, the Satrap of Propontis, who was then in revolt against the Persian king. But before this, during the great plague which desolated Athens in 430 B.C., and which also extended to Persia, Hippocrates was invited to go to the Persian Court; and it is on record that Ctesias was for seventeen years physician at the Persian Court about 400 B.C., during which period he wrote his history of Persia, and an account of India, which Professor Wilson, in a paper read to the Ashmolean Society of Oxford, has shown to contain notices of the natural productions of the country, "which, although often extravagant and absurd, are, nevertheless, founded on truth."
There were, too, Grecian soldiers employed as paid auxiliaries, and a colony of Greeks who had been taken prisoners of war was founded within a day's journey of Susa.
The great expedition to Persia, and the graphic description of the retreat of the "ten thousand" Greeks, given by Xenophon in his Anabasis, must have been well known to Alexander the Great when he set out on his career of conquest. He overthrew the Persian empire in 331 B.C., having destroyed Tyre and subdued Egypt in the previous year and carried his triumphant progress to the banks of the Indus, and there he "held intercourse with the learned sages of India." On Alexander's death Seleucus succeeded to the throne of Persia in 307 B.C., and not long after he forced his way beyond the Indus, and ultimately as far as the sacred river Ganges. He formed an alliance with the Indian king Sandrocottus (otherwise known as Chandra-gupta), which was maintained for many years, and it is said, also, that he gave his daughter in marriage to the Indian king, and aided him with Grecian auxiliaries in his wars.
He sent an expedition by sea, under the command of Patrocles his admiral, who visited the western shores of India, and a little later he despatched an embassy under Megasthenes and Onesicrates, the former of whom resided for some years at the "great city" of Palibothra (supposed to be Patna).
Not long after Megasthenes was at Palibothra, Ptolemy Philadelphus sent an expedition overland through Persia to India, and later Ptolemy Euergetes, who lived between 145-116 B.C., sent a fleet under Eudoxius on a voyage of discovery to the western shores of India, piloted, as is said, by an Indian sailor who had been shipwrecked, and who had been found in a boat on the Red Sea. Eudoxius reached India safely, and returned to Egypt with a cargo of spices and precious stones.
The proof of very ancient communication between Greece and India is quite clear, both by way of Persia and Egypt, and we find that the Greeks, who were in the habit of calling all other nations barbarians, speak constantly with respect of the gymnosophists--called "Sapientes Indi" by Pliny. We read also of the Greek philosophers constantly travelling eastward in search of knowledge, and on their return setting up new schools of thought. Thales, it is affirmed, travelled in Egypt and Asia during the sixth century B.C., and it is said of him that he returned to Miletus, and transported that vast stock of learning which he had acquired into his own country.
He is generally considered as the first of the Greek philosophers. Strabo says of him that he was the first of the Grecian philosophers who made inquiry into natural causes and the mathematics.
The doctrine of Thales, that water was the first elementary principle, is exactly that of the ancient Hindoos, who held that water was the first element, and the first work of the creative power. This idea was not completely exploded even up till the 18th century. We find Van Helmont affirming that all metals, and even rocks, may be resolved into water; and Lavoisier, so lately as 1770, thought it worth while to communicate an elaborate paper "On the nature of water and the experiments by which it has been attempted to prove the possibility of converting it into earth."
Pythagoras, perhaps the greatest of all Greek philosophers, it is known, travelled very widely, spending no less than twenty-two years in Egypt. He also spent some considerable time at Babylon, and was taught the lore of the Magi.
In the famous satire of Lucian on the philosophic quackery of his day (about 120 A.D.), "The Sale of the Philosophers," we have