254), wine, purple, gold and silver plate, also precious stones, corals, saffron, balm; but they had always far more to offer to foreign luxury than to receive for their own. Hence the Roman gold and silver money went in considerable quantities to the great Arabian and Indian emporia. In India it had already under Vespasian so naturalised itself that the people there preferred to use it. Of this Oriental traffic the greatest part went to Egypt; and if the increase of the traffic benefited the government-chest by the increased receipts from customs, the need for building ships and making mercantile voyages of their own elevated the prosperity of private individuals. While thus the Roman government limited its rule in Egypt to the narrow space which is marked off by the navigableness of the Nile, and, whether in pusillanimity or in wisdom, at any rate never attempted with consistent energy to conquer either Nubia or Arabia, it strove as energetically after the possession of the Arabian and the Indian wholesale traffic, and attained at least an important limitation of the competitors. As the unscrupulous pursuit of commercial interests characterised the policy of the republic, so not less did it mark that of the principate, especially in Egypt. [Sidenote: Romano-Indian commercial intercourse.] We can only determine approximately how far the direct Roman maritime traffic went towards the East. In the first instance it took the direction of Barygaza (Barôtch on the Gulf of Cambay above Bombay), which great mart must have remained through the whole imperial period the centre of the Egyptio-Indian traffic; several places in the peninsula of Gujerat bear among the Greeks Greek designations, such as Naustathmos and Theophila. In the Flavian period, in which the monsoon-voyages had already become regular, the whole west coast of India was opened up to the Roman merchants as far down as the coast of Malabar, the home of the highly-esteemed and dear-priced pepper, for the sake of which they visited the ports of Muziris (probably Mangaluru) and Nelcynda (in Indian doubtless Nilakantha from one of the surnames of the god Shiva, probably the modern Nîlêswara); somewhat farther to the south at Kananor numerous Roman gold coins of the Julio-Claudian epoch have been found, formerly exchanged against the spices destined for the Roman kitchens. On the island Salice, the Taprobane of the older Greek navigators, the modern Ceylon, in the time of Claudius a Roman official, who had been driven thither from the Arabian coast by storms, had met with a friendly reception from the ruler of the country, and the latter, astonished, as the report says, at the uniform weight of the Roman pieces of money in spite of the diversity of the emperor’s heads, had sent along with the shipwrecked man envoys to his Roman colleague. Thereby in the first instance it was only the sphere of geographical knowledge that was enlarged; it was not