ABSTRACT
After Julius Caesar came to power in 44 BCE the Roman Republic, quickly became the Roman Empire. The outcome of the famous Battle of Actium on 2 September 31 BCE, the final war of the Roman Republic, constituted an important milestone in the transition of the Republic into the status of an ‘Empire’. The annexation of Egypt in 30 BCE to the Empire opened up the avenues for increased commercial relations of the Roman Empire with South Asia in general and India in particular. The ongoing trade in spices available on the western coast of India was augmented by leaps and bounds. The fact that Romans used to come to India for trade fleeing from the poverty they experienced in their country even before the dawn of the Christian era was acknowledged even by a well-known Roman poet like Quintus Horatius Flaccus (65 BCE27 BCE).1 Barbaricum (Barbarikon, a port near Karachi) and Barygaza (Broach) on the north-western coast of India and Naura, Tyndis, Muziris, Nelcynda and Becare on the Malabar Coast were some of the ports with which traders from the Roman Empire had vibrant commercial relations. As Pliny the Elder (c. 23-79 CE) qualifies, Muziris was the premier emporium of India (Primum emporium Indiae).2 It was a haven of vessels from various parts of the world, as
1‘Impiger extremos currit mercator ad Indos Per mare pauperiem fugiens’. The diligent merchant with a view to fleeing from poverty, travels through sea to remote India’, Horace, Ep. 1.1.45
2 Pliny ref.W.H.S. Jones (tr. & ed.), Pliny’s Natural History, London, 1969, p. 101. ‘They sail thence with the wind Hippalus in forty days to First Emporium of India, Muziris. Besides, the station for ships at a distance from the shore
reported by the author of Periplus of the Erythraean Sea in the first century CE.3
