As has been noted by Émile Benveniste (1969: 99–101), ‘order’ is an extremely important concept for Indo-Europeans and is represented by, inter alia, Greek ‘harmonia’, Sanskrit ṛtá, Avestan aša, and Old Persian arta, all of which descend from the same PIE root – *H2er- (to become adjusted, to fit). However, as Franklin has pointed out, the importance of order to Indo-Europeans is often discussed in light of the connection between arta and ṛtá. It is surprising that there have been scarcely any accounts of the striking similarities between harmonia and ṛtá, and my aim in this paper is to shed some light on that affinity. Harmonia was an important cosmological and ethical concept for Heraclitus, Empedocles and the so-called Pythagoreans; ṛtá, on the other hand, is considered by many to be the quintessence of Vedic philosophy. I argue that both these terms can be understood as abstract concepts of order, and I rely on evidence from the Ṛgveda and from the fragments of Heraclitus, Empedocles and Philolaus in order to do so. (For ṛtá see also Jurewicz in this volume.)

The first pressing problem concerning both terms is that they are not easily translatable. A cursory glance at any lexicon will demonstrate the vast range of meanings that ṛtá has; and harmonia isn't nearly as straightforward as most present-day translators have taken it to be – indeed much is lost in unhesitatingly translating it as ‘harmony’. Accordingly, I will begin with an overview of the various meanings of each of these terms before turning to the Ṛgvedic hymns and Pre-Socratic fragments in order to offer a conceptual comparison between the two.

Harmonia

I would like to begin with a brief note on the etymology of ‘harmonia’ (‘harmoniē’ in the Ionic Greek dialect). The abstract suffix ‘ia’, (-iə̯) is added to a conjectural theme *ar-mn, which itself presumably comes from the PIE root *H2er- (fit). Harmonia does not, of course, mean what contemporary music theorists define as ‘harmony’; indeed, as the other words that derive from this root suggest, the earliest uses of harmonia are not even specifically musical. For Homer, in whose works we find the first extant occurrence of the word, the primary meaning is ‘physical joining’ together of planks of wood. In the same corpus, though, we already encounter a more abstract meaning in the Iliad (22.255–6), where harmonia stands for ‘covenant’ or ‘agreement’.

Can a comparison between Indian and Greek philosophies abstract from history? Most scholars would agree that to isolate philosophical positions from the socio-cultural history in which they were formulated is artificial and problematic, but the question then becomes what sort of history is needed. Of course the Vedas were preceded by the Indus Valley civilisation and Homer by the Mycenaeans, but such precursors cast little light on philosophy and can be left to other specialists. So histories of Sanskrit thinking usually start with the Ṛgveda, much as their Greek equivalents start with Homer. No doubt many scholars take for granted that no other style of history is or ever will be feasible.

The assumption is paradoxical, however, since, as languages, Sanskrit and Greek have histories that go back well before the Vedas and Homer. For two centuries philologists have been writing their own sort of history, embodying many of their findings in the starred forms they attribute to the Indo-European protolanguage (usually dated to the fourth millennium BCE). This history involves semantics as well as phonology, and the well-known work of Benveniste (1969) studied the vocabulary of Indo-European institutions. Equally well-recognised are Calvert Watkins (1995), who applied a similar approach to the history of Indo-European poetical phraseology, and Martin West (2007), who in addition tackled some particular constructs found in Indo-European myth and epic.

More immediately relevant is the vast corpus of comparativism produced by Georges Dumézil (1898–1986), much of it addressing the Indo-European ‘trifunctional ideology’. Leaving the functions till later, I emphasise the word ‘ideology’, which Dumézil defines in various ways. Depending on viewpoint, it can be defined ‘either as a means of exploring material and moral reality or as a means of ordering the capital of ideas accepted by the society’. It was ‘at once an ideal and a way of analysing and interpreting the forces that ensure the smooth running of the world (le cours du monde) and the life of men’. Trifunctionality was ‘the framework (cadre) of a system of thought, an explanation of the world, in brief a theology and a philosophy, or, if you like, an ideology’.

Greek accounts

These three passages are almost the only references to the customs of any Indian peoples in what survives of Ctesias’ account of India. Ctesias of Cnidus was a physician who held a post at the court of the Persian King Artaxerxes I, probably from 415 to 398/7 BCE. He wrote an extensive account of Persian history in twenty- three books and a much shorter description of India in one book. His history of Persia is regarded as extremely unreliable, not least where it contradicts his predecessor Herodotus, but it probably contains much that was in oral circulation in Persian court circles. Ctesias’ Indica is the first monograph devoted in Greek (or any other language) to India: he did not visit India but recorded what he had learned from merchants, some of them Bactrian, visiting Persia from the Indus Valley and the ‘Silk Road’. His works are lost, but we possess long excerpts from both of them in the reading diary of the tenth-century Byzantine bishop Photius, as well as scattered quotations in other writers, notably Aelian. Most of the Indian extract is devoted to hydrography, to zoological and botanical marvels – griffins, poisonous birds, manticores – and to bizarre races like the Dog-headed people. By contrast, Megasthenes, who spent time at the court of Chandragupta Maurya in the early third century BCE, wrote a book which included extensive information on manners and customs, including (F27 Schwanbeck = FGrH 715F32) their simplicity and the infrequency of lawsuits among them.