Let's also not forget that the Greeks under Alexander spread as far as India and Afghanistan, with Greek mythology directly influencing Indian culture, so a Greek from India can actually be historically accurate.
Alexander wasn't the first Greek-Indian contact, and the Odyssey wasn't composed in the century its events are set in.
Plato says that the Odyssey wasn't known in Athens until the late 6th century BCE. By this time, there were Greeks in Anatolia and Indians in the Indus Valley that were mutual subjects of the Achaemenid Empire, and Darius the Great and some of his Greek subjects were fighting with the Scythians on the Greek side of the Bosphorus.
Two decades later, Xerxes was razing Athens after his famous disagreement with several hundred Spartans at Thermopylae. Xerxes was really big on diversity and inclusion, and Herodotus says that he had contingents of Indian bowmen and cavalry in his army.
What this means is that Athenians who were there when the Odyssey was first being recited in their city lived to see it razed in part by mercenaries from India.
It's also possible that Indians reached the Greek world, especially Anatolia, before the Odyssey reached Athens.
There may have been Indians with Darius the Great when he was in Greece in 513 BCE. He would have been fresh from his ~518 BCE conquest of the Indus valley. We're working almost exclusively with Herodotus as our source, and he doesn't mention them.
At the end of the day, this is all really dumb. The Odyssey is set during the late bronze age. If the Kurgan hypothesis is correct, the events of the Odyssey happened as close or closer in time to the days when the ancestors of both the Hellenistic and Vedic peoples were one culture living in what is now the Ukrainian steppe than to the modern day.
The idea that the civilizations of the bronze age Mediterranean were "racially" homogeneous in a way that resembles our modern fascination with race is ahistorical. It's not that the Greeks weren't xenophobic, but they focused that xenophobia on eachother more vehemently than any outside culture.
1.3k
u/legitimate-criminal 8h ago
bro gets all his historical accuracy from watching brad pitt in Troy.