Meetings with the ‘Naked Philosophers’ as a Case Study for the Greco-Indian Relations in the Time of Alexander
Meetings with the ‘Naked Philosophers’ as a Case Study for the Greco-Indian Relations in the Time of Alexander

Summary/Abstract: The meetings with Indian gymnosophists (γυμνοσοφισταί) or ‘naked philosophers’ are one of the most popular motifs from the stories of Alexander the Great. The accounts of these meetings are preserved in Strabo, Plutarch, Arrian, Diogenes Laertius, and some later sources. These descriptions have been repeatedly analysed by previous scholars. However, most researchers focused on the problems of cultural differences and overlooked the issue of intercultural relations. They have often considered these descriptions in a dichotomous perspective. Therefore, the aim of this study is reconsideration of these accounts in the broader context of relations between the Greeks and the Indians with particular emphasis on the following issues: the communication problems, which occurred between the Greeks and the Indians, the relation between the asceticism in India and the Cynic philosophy in Greece, the relation between the Buddhist and early Indian sceptical thought and Greek philosophy. Because the study of these problems can lead to a biased search for influences, way of looking at them proposed in this paper is the so-called middle ground.

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