d India, which
Eudoxus visited, was on the west coast of Africa. Abyssinia was often
called India by the ancients.

In these attempts at maritime discovery, and efforts after a cheaper
means of obtaining the Indian products, the Greek sailors of Euergetes
made a settlement in the island of Dioscorides, now called Socotara,
in the Indian Ocean, forty leagues eastward of the coast of Africa; and
there they met the trading vessels from India and Ceylon. This little
island continued a Greek colony for upwards of seven centuries, and
Greek was the only language spoken there till it fell under the Arabs
in the twilight of history, when all the European possessions in Africa
were overthrown. But the art of navigation was so far unknown that but
little use was made of this voyage; the goods of India, which were all
costly and of small weight, were still for the most part carried across
the desert on camels' backs, and we may remark that at a later period
hardly more than twenty small vessels ever went to India in one year
during the reigns of the Ptolemies, and that it was not till Egypt was a
province of Rome that the trade-winds across the Arabian Sea were found
out by Hippalus, a pilot in the Indian trade. The voyage was little
known in the time of Pliny; even the learned Propertius seems to have
thought that silk was a product of Arabia; and Palmyra and Petra, the
two chief cities in the desert, whose whole wealth rested and whose very
being hung upon their being watering-places for these caravans, were
still wealthy cities in the second century of our era, when the voyage
by the Arabian Sea became for the first time easier and cheaper than the
journeys across the desert.

Euergetes had been a pupil of Aristobolus, a learned Jew, a writer of
the peripatetic sect of philosophers, one who had made his learning
respected by the pagans from his success in cultivating their
philosophy; and also of Aristarchus, the grammarian, the editor
of Homer; and, though the king had given himself up to the lowest
pleasures, yet he held with his crown that love of letters and of
learning which had ennobled his forefathers. He was himself an author,
and wrote, like Ptolemy Soter, his Memorabilia, or an account of what
he had seen most remarkable in his lifetime. We may suppose that his
writings were not of a very high order; they were quoted by Athengeus,
who wrote in the reign of Marcus Aurelius; but we learn little else from
them than the