This repeated contact of the Indians with foreign invaders from the West naturally led to mutual influences in various branches of literature. With regard to the Epics, we find the statement of the Greek rhetorician Dio Chrysostomos (50-117 A.D.) that the Indians sang in their own language the poetry of Homer, the sorrows of Priam, the laments of Andromache and Hecuba, the valour of Achilles and Hector. The similarity of some of the leading characters of the Mahabharata, to which the Greek writer evidently alludes, caused him to suppose that the Indian epic was a translation of the Iliad. There is, however, no connection of any kind between the two poems. Nor does Professor Weber's assumption of Greek influence on the Ramayana appear to have any sufficient basis (p. 307). The view has been held that the worship of Krishna, who, as we have seen, plays an important part in the Mahabharata, arose under the influence of Christianity, with which it certainly has some rather striking points of resemblance. This theory is, however, rendered improbable, at least as far as the origin of the cult of Krishna is concerned, by the conclusions at which we have arrived regarding the age of the Mahabharata (pp. 286-287), as well as by the statements of Megasthenes, which indicate that Krishna was deified and worshipped some centuries before the beginning of our era. We know, moreover, from the Mahabhashya that the story of Krishna was the subject of dramatic representations in the second or, at latest, the first century before the birth of Christ.