ed
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 s