INDIAN SHIPPING
in the Periplus, it was Greek merchants from Egypt who brought wine, brass, lead, glass, etc., for sale to Muziris and Bakare, and who purchased from these ports pepper, betel, ivory, pearls, and fine muslins.[1] These Greek traders sailed from Egypt in the month of July and arrived at Muziris in forty days. They stayed on the Malabar coast for about three months and commenced their return voyage from Muziris in December or January.
The activity of this Occidental trade of India breached its height during the earlier days of the Roman Empire, especially the period from Augustus to Nero, the period of Rome's Asiatic conquests which made her a world power controlling the trade routes between the East and the West. Then a great demand arose on the part of the wealthy Romans for the luxuries of the East, which shocked the more sober-minded citizens of Rome. Thus we find Pliny[2] (about a.d. 77) lamenting and condemning the wasteful extravagance of the richer classes and their reckless expenditure on perfumes, unguents, and personal ornaments, saying that there was "no year in which India did not drain the Roman Empire of a hundred million sesterces,"[3] sending in return
- ↑ The Tamils Eighteen Hundred Years Ago, ch. iii.
- ↑ Natural History, xii, 18.
- ↑ £1,000,000, of which £600,000 went to Arabia and £400,000 to India; see Mommsen's Provinces of the Roman Empire, vol. ii., pp. 299-300.
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