The information gathered from the Sangam texts and archaeological excavations have been corroborated by the accounts of the Greek and Roman writers. These accounts, to a certain extent, have helped us in ascertaining the date of the Sangam texts.

Megasthenes gives a quaint account of the Pandyan kingdom “ruled over by Pandaiya, a daughter of Herakles, to whom he assigned that portion of India which lies southwards and extends to the sea.” He is the earliest non-Indian to make any mention of a southern kingdom. Strabo makes references to the Pandyan embassies to the court of Augustus.

He also refers to the change of Pandyan capital from Korkai to Madurai. Pliny the Elder mentions many Tamil ports on the west coast. The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea by an anonymous author (80-96 AD) gives the most elaborate information about the Tamil country which the author calls Damirike.

Ptolemy wrote half a century later (150 AD) and his work marks a decided advance in the regularity and volume of trade between the Roman Empire and India. And finally, the Peutingerian Tables, composed in 222 AD, speak of a temple of Augustus on the west coast of Tamilaham.

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Ptolemy’s accounts also show that the Roman trade with East, which began sometime in the reign of Augustus had by the first quarter of the second century AD reached beyond India to Indo­china and Sumatra. The recent discovery of a ‘Roman factory’ of the first century AD in the proximity of Pondicherry deserves particular mention. Southern India seems to have acted as the intermediary in the trade between China and the west.

The direct trade between Rome and southern India did not survive the second century AD; it declined and died out in the period of military anarchy which distracted the Roman Empire of the third century.

Virtually no Roman coin of the third century have been found in India, and business relations were not resumed till order and a stable gold currency had been re-established in the Byzantine period and then mostly through intermediaries.

The first and second centuries AD formed the period when Roman trade with India was brisk and the Tamil countries had many opportunities of contact with the Yavanas (Graeco-Romans) and their Wares, of which precious wines formed no small part.

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Musiri or Muziris and Tondi on the west coast of South India, Korkai and Kaveripattinam on the east were among the chief ports of the Tamil land where foreigners crowded; and sometimes they found their way into the interior in various capacities – as palace guards, door-keepers and so on. All this is vouched for by references in the Tamil poems of the period.

The Chinese writer Pan Kou (1st century AD) mentions the kingdom of Houangtche (Kanchi) in his ‘Ts’ien Han chou’. The Sri Lankan chronicle, Mahavamsa, read with the Uraiperu Katturai of Silappadikaram, gives us the clue to a crucial datum in Sangam history, i.e. the Senguttuvan-Gujabahu synchronism.

It was Gajabahu I of Sri Lanka who was present on the occasion of the installation of a temple to Kannagi the Goddess of Chastity, by the Chera king Senguttuvan. Gajabahu-I is known to have ruled in the second half of the 2nd century AD.