Arrian, reporting Nearchus
Indica 18–43 — the voyage of Nearchus
Ἰνδική · Written in the 130s CE, about a voyage of 325 BCE. Arrian is copying out a log kept by a man who was there four and a half centuries earlier.
Alexander's admiral takes a fleet from the mouth of the Indus to the head of the Persian Gulf and writes down what happened. Anchorages, distances, whether there was water — and a stretch of coast where the fleet beats the sea with its oars and sounds trumpets to frighten off whales.
How to read this page — what a person checked, and what the model wrote
The notes beside this text are here so you can read it straight through without stopping to look things up: what the passage assumes you already know, who is named without introduction, when the author is joking, what a social rule cost to break, and where the translator quietly tidied something up.
A language model wrote them, and no specialist has reviewed them. That makes them a companion rather than an authority — useful the way a well-read friend is useful, and wrong now and then in the same way. If you are writing something with a bibliography, cite the translation, named at the foot of this page, and let a note point you at what to check.
The division of labour on this page:
- Checked by a person: the translation, unaltered from the printed book; the source text, from the edition named below; every map dot for a named place, verified by hand against a gazetteer; every quotation, supplied from a hand-built list.
- The model's work: every note, headnote, gloss and piece of background; scene-location pins, which are its judgement and say so; any claim about tone, register or intent — those are arguments rather than facts, and you are free to disagree with them.
Quotations are the one thing the model is never allowed to propose — it may only explain one it has been handed from a hand-verified list, which is why you will see few of them. Spotting an allusion is the most valuable thing a commentary does and the easiest thing to invent convincingly, so that restraint is deliberate and is not going to change.
Spotted something wrong? Tell me — a reader who catches an error is the fastest way this gets better.
John Watson McCrindle, The Commerce and Navigation of the Erythræan Sea (Calcutta: Thacker, Spink, 1879). McCrindle was Principal of the Government College at Patna and spent his career translating every Greek and Latin text bearing on ancient India — this volume is the second instalment of that series. His interest is geographical rather than literary: he wants to know which modern headland each ancient name is, and he transliterates Greek names strictly (Nearkhos, Phoinikians, Erythræan) rather than Latinising them, which makes his page look stranger than it is. His English is plain Victorian prose, neither elevated nor colloquial, and he does not dramatise. Where the Greek is technical about seamanship he is usually accurate and occasionally guesses; he tells you when he is guessing, in notes that are not part of the text served here.