Alessandro Giudice

At the beginning of the sixth century CE, the Egyptian monk Cosmas Indicopleustes accomplished a journey to the principal ports of the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. When he returned to Egypt, he wrote an account of the places he visited, namely the Topographia Christiana...

This paper focuses on the ‘Treaty of the Indus’, i.e., the peace pact between Candragupta Maurya and Seleucus I Nicator at the end of the fourth century BCE. Scholars are divided into those who consider such a treaty a peace pact  sanctioned through dynastic marriage and those who consider it a pact allowing the celebration of intermarriages between Greeks and Indians. This paper defends the first hypothesis according to the Indian sources on dharma and  artha. Dharmaśāstric texts never describe Greeks as foreigners but consider them part of a mixed class (and consequently part of the Brahmanical society). Therefore, no formal treaty allowing Indo-Greek intermarriages was  needed. Furthermore, Kauṭilya’s Arthaśāstra supports peace pacts sanctioned through marriages with foreign kings, as sometimes happened in Ancient Indian history.