Note that merchants were not the only people who travelled between the Roman empire and India. We know, for instance, that it was fashionable for wealthy Roman women to consult Indian astrologers. We also have the story of Demetrius, a student of Greek philosophy, who was wrongly accused of stealing from a temple and arrested in Egypt. After he was exonerated and freed with compensation, he gifted all his property to a friend and sailed to India to study Vedic philosophy.18 In other words, the shipping lines provided the infrastructure for all kinds of people to move back and forth across the
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