Ctesias studies flourish, but Indica has still not attracted a very long bibliography. So N. does not enter a crowded field. But it is a field with one elephant right in the middle, viz. Lenfant's 800+ page Budé Ctesias. Inevitably one asks what N.'s readers get that they do not get from Lenfant. One answer is a book in English – which will be a huge (and probably determinative) plus for a considerable readership. But there are several things they do not get.

There is no map to locate Indian geographical names mentioned in the commentary. The book is not entirely user-friendly: there are no paragraph-numbers in the 48 pages of commentary on F45, making them a nightmare for anything but sequential reading of text and notes. The bibliography has pertinent gaps, for example J. Auberger, ‘L’Inde de Ctésias', in J.-C. Carrière (ed.), Inde, Grèce ancienne (1995), pp. 35–59; D.L. Gera, ‘Viragos, Eunuchs, Dogheads and Parrots in Ctesias’, in G. Herman & I. Shatzman (edd.), Greeks between East and West (2007), pp. 75–92; A. Zambrini, ‘Gli Indika di Megastene’, ASNP 12 (1982), 71–149; and P. Schneider, L'Éthiopie et l'Inde (2004). The translation is not always reliable. Some cases are arguable: ‘light blue’ for γλαυκός (45[15]), ‘foul’ for θολερός (45[44]) and ‘very thin strips’ for μασθλήματα (45[42]) – the last a hapax deserving attention in the notes. But others are certain: σχοῖνος (45dβ) is not ‘rope’; the 260 talents in 45(41) is a weight, not a quantity of money; 45c speaks of 2 (not 2,000) orgyiai; ‘when it aims them towards the rear it stretches its tail out flat like the Saka’ (45dβ) should be ‘when it aims them towards the rear like the Saka, it stretches …’; ‘what an artisan would draw or mould’ (45h) should be ‘what an artisan draws or moulds’; there is no ‘male ass’ in 45iβ (N. has misread ὀίων as ὄνων); and 45kε should start ‘Ethiopians make the claims about the longevity of this king less astonishing …’, not ‘the Ethiopians make less astonishing claims …’ (the fragment incidentally is from Valerius Maximus 8.13 ext. 5, not 8 ext. 5). Lenfant does not do better in all of these points (she also has no useful map), but N. is not an improvement.

Nor does his free-standing book offer much more substantial or radically distinct annotation: the commentary is probably only 15–20% longer, and often runs in parallel to Lenfant. Sometimes, of course, he offers things not found in Lenfant. He provides more information about editions/translations of Sanskrit literary works; expatiates on the ‘Interpolations’ in Cod. Monach. 287 (noting similar material in Cod. Holkham. Graecus 110); knows about Shafer's Historia 1964 paper (but misses his suggestion about Gaitros, and keeps spelling his name wrong); has extra material about the Indian ‘worm’ (but has not fully understood Amigues, RPhil [2005]), spitting snakes, the unicorn and falconry – rightly querying Oppenheim's postulated Persian royal falconer in fifth-century Babylon (but unaware that the man is possibly Jewish and also associated with fish). He also comments on the deaf-mute analogy in 45(37) (cf. Xen. An. 4.5.33?), speculates that Ctesias quizzed Indian visitors about health-matters, mentions (ad 45[31]) Pliny's report of an Indian drug that gave the guilty bad dreams (but why no comment on its being called achaemenis?), and suggests (118) that the dung of the dikairon-bird is charas (a resinous extract from cannabis sativa) or bhang or paan. (That dikairon-dung is ineluctably fatal seems a rather important difference from cannabis.)

Meanwhile Lenfant addresses things that N. does not. She says more about pre-Ctesian Greek writing about India, is alive to the ‘as in Greece’ trope (p. clvi), sees the relevance of Cyrop. 1.2.7 to F70 and is a bit clearer about the Tzetzes passage from which the fragment comes, reports knowledge of the langhur monkey in Mesopotamia in Neo-Assyrian times, knows about the liquid-thickening properties of fig-juice, and says more about the elephant and about sources of Indian gold. The connection between the sun's behaviour in India and odd phenomena in Sicily, Naxos and Lycia (Ctesias used the latter to prove the former: 45[20]) attracts Lenfant's interest but is ignored by N. – a pity as it shows comment on Umbria (F59) is not misplaced in a book on Asia (pace p. 35) and raises broader questions about structural connections in a text only continuously preserved in epitome. This is a topic worth sustained, even if aporetic, consideration. N. detects a medical theme in 45[30–5], but largely ignores the issue. (On an allied point, if 45[24], on the hunting of hares and foxes, applies to Indians in general, not to Pygmies, why not make it a new paragraph in the translation?)

Inescapably there are times when neither Lenfant nor N. satisfy the reader's curiosity. Why precisely 477 gems in 45(6)? Do walnuts (45[25]) appear in India? Is the fat-removing operation in 45(26)/45iβ feasible, and, if so, can up to 10 minae of fat really be recovered? Why do 45(46) (‘thick clay’) and 45r (‘rubbish’ = ϕορυτός) disagree about what will extinguish serpent-fire, and how does a claim that the Lycian fires can be extinguished with ‘rubbish’ (45[20]) fit in? What about other differences between parallel citations (45[14]/45c; 45[33]/45l)? Is the spring in which only iron, silver, gold and bronze sink (45[49]/45sα) a case of salt-water buoyancy, and is anything known about the Sicilian and Median parallels mentioned in 45sα? Is the comment about cannibalism (45kδ, 45kγ) not a riposte to Herodotus?

Indica mentions contacts between the ‘Indian king’ and the Achaemenid state and evokes Achaemenid penetration of the Indian sub-continent. Since the existence of Indica is contingent upon interactions between the Achaemenid state and the world beyond the mountains of Eastern Iran and Afghanistan and the concomitant presence of Indians at the Persian court, such matters are not peripheral: a proper commentary should address them fully and coherently. But Lenfant's introduction has only a few remarks, and N. offers even less. Neither author reports even passingly on archaeological investigations of Achaemenid-era sites in Pakistan. Nor does the Persepolis Fortification archive loom large. Lenfant (p. cxlviii n. 611) does mention the Indian traveller Abbatema and cite Bivar (in Cambridge History of Iran II) for other examples. N. does not go that far: for him (p. 50) Indians on the Apadana and other Persepolitan reliefs are apparently the only non-Ctesianic sign of Indians in Persia. Since there are some 40 texts (17 unpublished) relating to Indians in the Persepolis region and/or journeys to or from India, this is odd. Some Indians making such journeys are evidently of quite high status, as they are accompanied by elite guides and/or get meat rations; some have names that are not (or not certainly) Iranian. N. rightly seeks Ctesias' sources among visitors from India; the Persepolis documents reveal appropriate people a century earlier. That the archive is only partially published is limiting: a travel-group that includes four dogs (unique in a travel-text and exceptional in the archive as a whole) and thus (perhaps) evokes the Indian dogs known to Herodotus and Ctesias was not readily accessible to N. But the real issue is that he has not thought to undertake a thorough investigation of Persian–Indian relations in the first place. This is precisely the sort of thing that, while (perhaps) venially absent in Lenfant's work, one would expect to find in a work primarily devoted to Indica.

There are various misprints (the ‘intense draughts that plague the Sind region’ [p. 95] raise a smile), and some ghost-notes: p. 115 refers to a note on Indian justice in 45[16] that does not exist but might have done, while the words ‘cf. F1b §2.3 and note’ on p. 158 (ad F54) allude to a note that could not have done, being on a bit of text (from Persica) that does not appear in N.'s book. It is strangely reminiscent of the annotation ‘(cf. F1b §2,3, note)’ ad loc. in Lenfant p. 214a n. 974, but is presumably left over from the more extensive Ph.D. dissertation from which the present publication is derived (cf. p. 7).

In short: use of the English language will give N. a big advantage in many contexts (‘Greeks and Barbarians’ modules will benefit) and serious students of Indica will have to consult N. as well as Lenfant. But the book still feels like a missed opportunity.