EL ELEFANTE : UN CASO PARADIGMÀTICO EN LA HISTORIA DEL CONTACTO ENTRE LAS CULTURAS DE LA INDIA, GRECIA Y ROMA

The history of the knowledge that the Mediterranean world, first Greece and afterwards Rome, had about India, starts by degrees with the arrival of some evory objects. In the time of Alexander's conquest expedition, after fantastic stories about that remote land, the real Indian things started to come in, and, not less than these stories, the elephant was cause of astonishement for Western people. A study of the attitude of the two cultures regarding the elephant gives us a good comprehension of both cultures' mentality and also of the historic situation in which the cultural contact was experienced.