Mythical Creatures in Ancient India: The Revelation in Alexander’s Letter to Aristotle

In the heart of antiquity, when the world was still shrouded in mystery and legend, Alexander the Great—the Macedonian conqueror who dreamed of uniting East and West—embarked on his epic campaign in India in 326 BC. Beyond the battles against kings like Porus and the marches across raging rivers, the chronicles of that expedition preserve a treasure of wonders: descriptions of mythical creatures that, according to Alexander’s own words, still inhabited those exotic lands. It is in the famous *Epistola Alexandri ad Aristotelem de miraculis Indiae*—a letter attributed to the great commander and addressed to his teacher Aristotle—that these captivating accounts emerge, portraying an India not merely as a realm of spices and elephants, but as the last stronghold of legendary beings that had survived the passage of time and the advance of reason.

This letter, transmitted through medieval manuscripts and enormously popular in the Latin world, is not an authentic historical document—scholars regard it as pseudepigraphic, likely composed centuries after Alexander’s death to embellish his legend. Yet its content faithfully reflects the beliefs of the classical and Hellenistic eras, when the boundary between reality and myth was blurred, especially at the edges of the known world. Alexander—or whoever wrote in his name—describes with vivid prose an Indian landscape teeming with marvels: crested serpents of colossal size, ferocious dragons known as “odontotyrannoi” (tooth-tyrants), bloodthirsty bats as large as eagles, and niticoraces—sinister nocturnal birds whose cries evoked spirits from the underworld.

These are not mere fantasies: for the ancients, they represented eyewitness testimonies of a world in which Greek myths—griffins, sirens, beast-men—found echoes in distant lands, suggesting that legendary creatures might still exist, hidden in the jungles and deserts of India.

Picture Alexander, fresh from the battle on the Hydaspes, writing to the wise Aristotle: “Illustrious master, I have seen things that defy philosophy.” The letter begins with the attack on Porus, but soon turns to the exploration of a mystical India, where the very landscape pulses with mythical dangers. Among the most evocative creatures is the “odontotyrannos,” a dragon described as a gigantic reptile with teeth capable of tearing through armor, terrorizing the Macedonian troops. Then there are the serpents of India—some with iridescent crests that emit deadly venom, others so enormous they could swallow entire elephants—echoes, perhaps, of king cobras or pythons, magnified by fear and wonder. Nor are absent voracious bats that attack in swarms, draining the blood of their victims, or birds such as the niticoraces, whose nighttime calls seemed to herald the end of the world. There are also allusions to beast-men, possibly inspired by anthropomorphic monkeys or remote tribes, and winged serpents reminiscent of the basilisks of Greek legend.

These descriptions are not isolated: they fit into a broader Greek tradition that portrayed India as a land of “mythical civilization.” Chroniclers such as Nearchus and Onesicritus, companions of Alexander, reported encounters with war elephants and naked ascetics, but the letter to Aristotle elevates everything to an epic level, implying that myths like those of Heracles and Dionysus—who, according to legend, had already conquered India—were still tangible. For the ancient Greeks, India was the “literary Orient,” a place where reality merged with the fantastic, influenced by Persian and Indian tales filtered through conquest.

Perhaps these beings were exaggerations of real fauna—Ganges crocodiles mistaken for dragons, or rhinoceroses confused with unicorns—but for Alexander and his men, they represented proof that the mythological world had not died out, but lived on, threatening and wondrous, at the frontiers of empire.

In the Middle Ages, this letter inspired chivalric romances and texts such as the *Historia de Preliis*, amplifying the legend of Alexander as the hero who challenged the unknown. Today, it invites us to reflect: in an age of science, these accounts remind us how human exploration has always intertwined fact and fantasy, transforming India into an eternal kingdom of marvels. Through this epistle, Alexander did not merely conquer lands—he captured the imagination of the world, suggesting that perhaps, somewhere in the mists of the Himalayas, mythical creatures may still whisper their secrets to the wind.