Than all Bocara's vaunted gold, Than all the gems of Samarcand. - William Jones

Jones was forever emphasizing the similarities between India and Greece, or pointing out Europe's debt to Indian philosophy, or hinting at a common source for the two great civilizations, writing, for instance, in the third anniversary discourse that it was impossible, "to read the Vedanta, or the many fine compositions in illustration of it, without believing that Pythagoras and Plato derived their sublime theories from the same fountain with the sages of India."

I am in love with the gopis, he wrote to Wilkins in 1784, 'charmed with Krishna, an enthusiastic admirer ofRama and a devout adorer of Brahma. Yudhisthir, Arjuna, Bhirna and other warriors of the Mahabharata appear greater in my eyes than Agamemnon, Ajax, and Achilles appeared when I first read the Iliad.

Of the Indian Religion and Philosophy, I shall here say but little; because a full account of each would require a separate volume: it will be sufficient in this dissertation to assume, what might be proved beyond controversy, that we now live among the adorers of those very deities, who were worshipped under different names in Old Greece and Italy, and among the professors of those philosophical tenets, which the Ionic and Attic writers illustrated with all the beauties of their melodious language.