The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c22.54

v1.c22.54

The royal soldiery includes not only the nobles of military standing supported by the king but the poor members of the same Āryan order who with the un-Āryan ‘servants’ (not slaves) formed the rank and file of the foot-soldiers. In battle they are mentioned merely as hosts of nameless archers, slingers, rock-throwers, etc., and outside of battle-scenes they are scarcely mentioned at all. It is stated that a *rāthin’s*, ‘car-man’s,’ wage is ‘one thousand,’ that is, one thousand (coppers) a month, and that the king pensions the widows of fallen soldiers². The chief moral laws for members of the military caste were hospitality, the sacredness of the refugee, the law ‘not to forget’ a kindness or a hurt, and the rule already referred to, that when challenged to fight or gamble it was inglorious to refuse. The captured warrior becomes the slave of his captor for a year; if the captor allows him to go free, the captor becomes the captured one’s Guru or his ‘father.’ The sign of submission is to eat grass (*v. sup.* p. 247). When the Yavanas were conquered (in *Bṛihannār. Pur.*, VIII, 35) they ‘ate grass and leaped into water.’ The epic gives this grass-eating sign as a military rule. As compared with a member of the ‘people-caste,’ whose life is valued at a hundred head of cattle, the warrior’s life is valued at a thousand (paid in case of murder). As for the prominent sins of the royal military caste, they are mentioned as hunting, drinking, gambling, and sensuality withal in a sort of *versus memoralis* which has come down as an apophthegm of law and epic (*Mbh.*, XII, 59, 60, etc.). Dancing-girls and prostitutes were a part of the royal retinue, and hunting was the chief recreation of kings, deer and tigers, killed by a king with his sword, being the favourite game. Lions were hunted with dogs, as attested by Aelian and mentioned in the epic (*Mbh.*, II, 40, 7). The Buddhist prohibition of meat-eating remains as a rule of propriety, but the tales show that eating meat was as common as drinking intoxicants and that this was the regular court practice, while the story of the crowds surrounding a meat-shop (*Mbh.*, III, 207, 10 f.), where the complacent owner boasts that he sells but does not himself kill, shows that vegetarianism was by no means universal.