And
unless history regards as colonists the many thousands of dead men and
those who settled for ever under the hot sands of Gedrosia, there were
no other, save in the fertile imagination of the Greek historians. The
boasted "invasion of India" was confined to the regions between Karmania
and Attock, east and west; and Beloochistan and the Hindu Kush, south
and north: countries which were all India for the Greek of those days.
His building a fleet on the Hydaspes is a fiction; and his "victorious
march through the fighting armies of India," another. However, it is not
with the "world conqueror" that we have now to deal, but rather with the
supposed accuracy and even casual veracity of his captains and
countrymen, whose hazy reminiscences on the testimony of the classical
writers have now been raised to unimpeachable evidence in everything
that may affect the chronology of early Buddhism and India.
Foremost among the evidence of classical writers, that of Flavius
Arrianus is brought forward against the Buddhist and Chinese
chronologies.
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