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The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c26: Chapter XVI. India in Early Greek and Latin Literature

The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c26

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English

Contents

Chapter XVI. India in Early Greek and Latin Literature

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In this chapter we shift our point of view. We no longer try to transfer ourselves to ancient India and see for ourselves what is going on there: we ask instead what impression this magnitude, India, made upon another people—the Hellenes on the shores of the Mediterranean, the progenitors of our modern European rationalistic civilisation. India is for us now a remote country, 2800 miles away.

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The Greek peoples at the time when the Homeric poems were composed had probably never heard of India, and knew nothing of the Āryan cousins separated from them by the great Semitic kingdoms of Assyria and Babylonia. At most they knew that peoples of dark complexion dwelt, some towards the setting, and some towards the rising, sun¹. The Homeric Greeks used ivory, and were no doubt aware that it was the tusk of an animal—the Phoenician traders indeed will have called it, as the Hebrews did, *shēn*, 'tooth'—but the ivory was more probably African ivory brought from Egypt than Indian².

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¹ *Odyssey* i, 22 f.

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² The derivation of the Greek word for ivory, *elephas*, given in Liddell and Scott is etymology at its wildest. It is supposed to be the Sanskrit word *ibha*, meaning 'elephant,' preceded by the *Arabic* definite article *el* (!). Not much can be built upon the passage, I Kings, x, 22, where the Hebrew author states that the navy of King Solomon in the tenth century b.c. brought (according to our English version) 'ivory, apes, and peacocks.' See Cheyne in *Encycl. Bibl.*, *s.v.* 'Ophir' and 'Peacocks.'

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The Greek word for tin, again, found already in Homer, *kassiteros*, has been adduced³ to show that tin was among the wares which travelled to the Greek world from India. For the Greek word is obviously the same as the Sanskrit word *kastīra*. Unfortunately the borrowing seems to have been the other way. The word *kastīra* found its way comparatively late into India from Greece⁴.

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³ E.g. by Lassen, ii, 632.

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⁴ Daremberg and Saglio, *s.v.* 'stannum.'

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In the sixth century b.c. the Semitic and other kingdoms of Nearer Asia disappeared before a vast Āryan Empire, the Persian, which touched Greece at one extremity and India at the other. Tribute from Ionia and tribute from the frontier hills of India found its way into the same imperial treasure-houses at Ecbatana or Susa.

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Contingents from the Greek cities of Asia Minor served in the same armies with levies from the banks of the Indus. From the Persian the name *Indoi*, 'Indians,' now passed into Greek speech. Allusions to India begin to appear in Greek literature¹.

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¹ Indian influence has been alleged in the philosophy of Pythagoras who must have been born in the early years of the sixth century, some fifty years before the Persian conquest of Babylon. The question is examined at length by Prof. A. B. Keith in the *J.R.A.S.* for 1909, pp. 569 f., *Pythagoras and the Doctrine of Transmigration*. Prof. Keith's conclusion is that there is no evidence for the Indian influence.

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It is not a mere accident that the books produced by a people who dwelt so far away from India should to-day contribute to our knowledge of ancient India. In the Greek republics a new quality was appearing in the world—or rather the development of a certain factor in the human mind to an activity and power not seen before—the quality which we may describe as Rationalism. That is what makes the essential continuity between the ancient Mediterranean civilisation and the civilisation which has developed so wonderfully in Europe during the last five centuries. A characteristic of this rationalism is a lively curiosity as to the facts of the Universe, an interest which directs itself upon the endless variety of the world, in contrast with that movement of the spirit, exemplified in the sages of India and in the piety of medieval Europe, which seeks to flee from the Many to the One. To be interested in a fact as such, to care so much about its precise individual character, as to examine and verify and try to get its real contours, to value hypothesis only so far as it can be substantiated by reference to objective truth—these are the motives behind modern Western Science; and a disinterested intellectual curiosity in the facts of the outside world has actually helped to give the West a power to modify and control that world for practical uses never before possessed by man. It was the beginning of this interest in the facts of the world, the desire to see things as they really were, which marked ancient Greek culture, as expressed in its writings and its art. The universal curiosity of Herodotus in the fifth century B.C., the eager eyes of the men of science and of action who accompanied Alexander, the industrious enquiries of Megasthenes—it is to these that we owe such information about India as the Greek and Latin books contain.

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And yet in order to estimate this information truly one must bear in mind some limiting considerations. The motive of intellectual curiosity just described, the critical scientific temper, up in their own ears (*Ōtoliknoi* or *Enōtokoitoi*), of people with one eye, and so on, with which the Greek tradition about India thus started and which it retained to the end¹. These stories, it is now recognised, correspond with statements in the old Indian books about peoples on the confines of the Indian world, and Scylax may therefore very well have really heard them from Indians and accepted them in simple faith.

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¹ Philostratus, *Vit. Apoll.* III, 47; Tzetzes, *Chil.* VII, 630 f.

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Hecataeus of Miletus had probably already given forth his geographical work, the *Periodos Gēs*, before 500 B.C. At the extremity of his field of vision there was some vague picture, derived from Scylax and the Persians, of the Indian world. His knowledge stopped on the frontier of the Persian Empire, the river Indus. Beyond that was just a great desert of sand. But the name of the people called Gandhāri on the upper Indus had reached him, and the name of a city in that region, whence Scylax had started on his expedition down the river: Hecataeus wrote it as Kaspapyros. He mentioned the names of other Indian peoples too of the frontier hills—Opiai, Kalatiai are the ones preserved in his fragments—and a city of India which he called Argante. The fabulous Skiapodes also appeared in Hecataeus as well as in Scylax, though Hecataeus by some confusion connected them with the African Aethiopians instead of with India².

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² See article by Von Radinger in Pauly-Wissowa, *s.v.* ‘Hekataios.’

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We may probably infer from the long geographical passages in the plays of Aeschylus, that a lively interest in far-off peoples and strange lands was general in the Greek world of the fifth century. Where an ancient Argive king in the *Suppliants* has to express wonder at the foreign garb of the Egyptian maidens, the poet takes the opportunity to give evidence of his anthropological knowledge. The king mentions different races whose appearance might be like that, and, in the course of his speculations, says—

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‘Moreover I hear tell of Indians, of women that go roving on camels, mounted horse-fashion, riding on padded saddles, them that are citizens of a land neighbouring the Ethiopians³.’

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³ > Ἰνδάς τ’ ἀκούω νομάδας ἱπποβάμοσιν

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εἶναι καμήλοις ἀστραβιζούσας, χθόνα
παρ’ Αἰθίοψιν ἀστυγειτονουμένας.
*Supplices* 284–286.

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So the passage reads in Sidgwick’s text. This involves a certain amount of conjectural emendation, since the MS. reading is obviously in part corrupt. One must add that the emendation proposed by Professor Tucker and approved by W. Headlam, *τοίας* for Ἰνδάς (MS. Ἰνδούς), eliminates the Indians altogether.

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In the Greek books which we possess this is the earliest mention of Indians by name.

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A good deal of what Herodotus wrote about India (middle of the fifth century) was no doubt drawn from Hecataeus—his idea, for instance, that the river Indus flowed towards the east, and that beyond that corner of India which the Persians knew there was nothing towards the east but a waste of sand. Perhaps what Herodotus says is less remarkable than what he does not say. For of the monstrous races which Scylax and Hecataeus before him, which Ctesias and Megasthenes after him, made an essential part of the Indian world, Herodotus says not a word. Hellenic rationalism took in him the form of a saving good sense. Certain of the broad facts about India Herodotus knew correctly—the diversity of its population, for one. 'There be many nations of Indians,' he says, 'diverse one from the other in tongue, some of them are roving tribes, some of them are settled, and some dwell in the swamps of the river, and live on raw fish which they catch from boats of reed (*kalamos*)'¹. Herodotus knew also that the population of India was a very vast one. 'The Indians are by far the greatest multitude of all the peoples of men whom we know',² he says. Of course, the Indians who came especially within the sphere of his knowledge would be the more or less barbarous tribes near the Persian frontier. What he tells us therefore of their manners and customs does not apply to civilised India. Of the peoples beyond the Persian frontier he had heard of the marsh-dwellers, who dressed in garments made of some sort of water-reed³. Other Indians dwelling to the east of these are rovers, eaters of raw flesh, and they are called 'Padaeans.' He goes on to say that members of the tribe were killed on the approach of old age and eaten by their fellow-tribesmen⁴.

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¹ III, 98.

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² III, 94.

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³ These would be people living in the country flooded by the Indus, the Miānwāli district of Sind, where, as Lassen points out, mats and baskets are still made from the reeds of the river.

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⁴ Lieutenant Prendergast, quoted in the *Asiatic Journal*, New Series, v (1831), p. 161, was assured by a Gond that in his native village cannibalism of this kind was still practised. This may have been the isolated survival of a more general cannibalism among the Gonds. As Lieutenant Prendergast's statement, now more than 80 years old, is still quoted in evidence for the practice among these tribes, one presumes that later evidence is hard to find. E. T. Dalton, *Ethnology of Bengal* (1872), p. 220, mentions a tribe called Birhors, accused of cannibalism. Some of them had assured him that they had themselves given up the practice, but 'they admitted that their fathers were in the habit of disposing of the dead in the manner indicated, viz. by feasting on the bodies; but they declared they never shortened life to provide such feasts, and shrank with horror at the idea of any bodies but those of their own blood relations being served up to them!’ The *Cyclopaedia of India* (Quaritch, 1885), which quotes the passage from Dalton, under ‘Birhor,’ omits to note that Dalton himself says, ‘I have no faith in the story.’

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Others of the Indians would not eat the flesh of any living thing or sow fields or live in houses. ‘Whenever a man of this people falls into a sickness, he goes into the desert and lies down there: and no one pays any regard when a man is dead or fallen ill.’ The Indians who dwelt near the city of Kaspapyros and the country of the Pactyes (Pashtus), that is, the hill-tribes about the Kābul valley, were, he says, the most warlike. It was from these, of course, that the Persian government drew levies. Among them was the tribe called Kallatiai, who ate the bodies of their dead relations¹. He describes the dress of the Indians serving in the army of Xerxes. They wore garments made from trees (i.e. cotton) and carried bows of reed and arrows of reed with iron heads². Some fought on foot and some in chariots drawn by horses and wild asses³. The account of the ants who throw up mounds of gold dust, which afterwards became a permanent element in the classic conception of India, was given in full by Herodotus⁴. The facts on which the account was based seem now fairly clear. Gold-dust was actually brought as tribute by the tribes of Dardistān in Kashmīr and was called by the Indians *pipīlika*, ‘ant gold’⁵. When Herodotus says that the ants were the size of dogs and fiercely attacked any one carrying off the gold, it has been plausibly suggested that the account was derived from people who had been chased by the formidable dogs kept by the native miners⁶.

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¹ III, 38.

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² VII, 65.

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³ VII, 86.

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⁴ III, 102 f.

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⁵ The gold-digging ants are mentioned in the *Mahābhārata*, II, 1860 (Calcutta ed.).

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⁶ M'Crindle, *Ancient India*, p. 44, note 3.

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As to the peculiar products of India, it is interesting that Herodotus told the Greek world, perhaps for the first time, of the trees that bore wool, ‘surpassing in beauty and in quality the wool of sheep; and the Indians wear clothing from these trees’⁷.

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⁷ III, 106.

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The peacock, which was introduced into Greece during the second half of the fifth century B.C., retained in his designations evidences both of his Indian origin (*ταῶς*) and of the route—via the Persian empire—by which he had been conveyed (Μηδικὸς ὄρνις); and it seems to be more than a coincidence that the only Buddhist mention of Babylon is in connexion with a story concerning the importation of this magnificent bird⁸.

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⁸ See the *Bāveru Jātaka* (No. 339 of the *Jātaka* collection) and M. Sylvain Lévi’s article in *Annuaire de l’École Pratique des Hautes Études* (1913–4).

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Ctesias of Cnidus, a generation later than Herodotus, had exceptional opportunities for acquiring knowledge about India, since he resided for seventeen years (from 415 to 397 B.C.) at the Persian court as physician to the king Artaxerxes Mnēmōn¹. As a matter of fact his contribution seems to have been the most worthless of all those which went to make up the classical tradition. Ctesias apparently was a deliberate liar. Modern writers urge that some of his monstrosities—his dog-faced men², his pygmies and so on—can be paralleled by the statements in old Indian books. This shows that Ctesias was not above saving himself the trouble of fresh invention when statements sufficiently sensational were furnished him by others. Any parallel which can be proved between Ctesias and old-Indian tradition is, of course, interesting and exhibits the Greek as to that extent a borrower rather than as creatively mendacious, and, where we cannot prove a parallel, it is always possible that the statements of Ctesias may have been suggested by travellers' tales; but it is equally possible that he was drawing upon nothing but his imagination. One of his most monstrous animals, the creature as large as a lion, with a human face, which shoots stings out of the end of its tail, called in the Indian language, says Ctesias, *martikhora*—as a matter of fact the word is Persian—Ctesias affirms that he had himself seen, as one was sent as a present to the Persian king! This gives the measure of the man. No doubt, his wildest statements about the *fauna* and *flora* of India can, if sufficiently trimmed, be made to bear a sort of resemblance to something real³, but it seems ingenuity wasted to attempt to establish these connexions. The influence of Ctesias upon the Greek conception of India was probably great. It confirmed for ever in the West the idea that India was a land where nothing was impossible—a land of nightmare monsters and strange poisons, of gold and gems⁴.

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¹ Diod. II, 32, 4; Plut. *Artax.* 21.

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² The *çvamukhas* of Sanskrit literature, e.g. Varāhamihira, *Bṛihatsaṃhitā*.

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³ For what may be done in this direction, see Prof. H. H. Wilson's *Notes on the Indica of Ctesias* (Oxford, 1836).

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⁴ Cf. Plin. *N.H.* VI, § 58 f.

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Where Ctesias described the people of India as 'very just' (δικαιότατοι), we may see the reflexion of a common Greek belief that a people of ideal goodness lived somewhere at the extremities of the earth, or in this case we may perhaps gather the impression made upon strangers by a social system so firmly governed in its complex structure and the working of its parts by traditional law.

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It was generally recognised in the Greek world of the fourth century that a great race called Indian, a substantial part of mankind, lived towards the sunrising¹. When European science, in the person of those philosophers who accompanied Alexander, first entered upon the Indian world, it had already made one substantial discovery as to the world in which man is placed. It was generally recognised in the Greek philosophic schools that the earth was a globe. It was already a matter of interest to determine the size of the globe and to know the measure of the lands and seas which covered it. And the men with Alexander, who found themselves in the plains of India stretching to even vaster distances beyond, or who, from the mouth of the Indus saw the coast fading to the eastward out of sight, were anxious to know what dimensions and shape they ought actually to give to this India upon their maps. They had not traversed more than a corner of it, and, had they gone to its extremities, they possessed none of our means of accurate surveying. It was only by report of the people of the land, based ultimately no doubt upon the rough practical reckonings of merchants and seamen, that they could form any conception of it. This being so, the conjectures which they recorded for the instruction of the West, have interest for us to-day, only as showing how near the truth under such circumstances men could come.

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¹ Ephorus, frag. 38 (*Frag. Hist. Graec.* I, p. 243).

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Of the companions of Alexander, three men chiefly enriched the Greek conception of India by their writings. One was Nearchus, a Cretan by extraction, whose home was in Macedonia, where he had been a friend in youth of Alexander's. This was the man whom Alexander put in command of the fleet which explored the coast between the Indus and the Persian gulf, and Nearchus later on gave his own account of this expedition to the world. His book also contained a good deal of incidental information about India. He appears from the fragments quoted to have been an honest reporter, who took pains to verify the stories which were told him². Another was Onesicritus from the Greek island of Aegina, who regarded the Cynic philosopher Diogenes as his master, a man with some practical knowledge of sea-craft, since Alexander made him pilot of the royal vessel down the Indus. Onesicritus took part in the expedition of Nearchus, and he too afterwards wrote a book about it and about India. Strabo considered him untruthful, and he has generally a bad reputation with modern scholars, though this unfavourable judgment has been seriously challenged¹. The third was Aristobulus, a Greek probably from the Chalcidic peninsula, who not only accompanied Alexander through India, but was entrusted with certain commissions, perhaps not military ones². Aristobulus wrote his book long afterwards, in extreme old age. His interest was predominantly geographical, not military; yet his book seems to have been adversely affected by the rhetorical fashion and perhaps by the Alexander myth which had already begun to take popular shape at the time when he wrote³. A fourth writer, a contemporary, but not a companion, of Alexander, Clitarchus of Colophon, also contributed to popular notions about India. Clitarchus wrote a history of Alexander of a highly journalistic character, drawing largely, it would seem, upon imagination. The book became the most popular of all the histories of Alexander. Although Clitarchus in his main outlines had to keep to the facts, so many eye-witnesses being still alive, the romance, as distinguished from the history, of Alexander takes its start from him. In the Indian part of his history, for instance, he introduced a delightful story of how the Macedonian army, marching through the jungles, had mistaken a troop of monkeys for a hostile army⁴. Statements about India, from such a source, might get very wide currency without having much basis in reality.

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² Susemihl, *Gesch. d. griech. Lit. in der Alexandrinerzeit*, I, p. 653.

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¹ Susemihl, *op. cit.* I, 536, pronounces against Onesicritus: E. Schwartz defends him.

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² Strabo xv, C. 693; Arr. VI, 29, 10.

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³ Susemihl, *op. cit.* p. 540: Schwartz ‘Aristobulus (14)’ in Pauly-Wissowa, depreciatory.

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⁴ Ael. *Nat. Anim.* XVII, 25.

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The books written by the companions of Alexander or derived from their accounts were supplemented in the third century by the books in which the European ambassadors sent by the Hellenistic kings to India⁵ told what they heard and saw. It is very odd that with such opportunities none of the ambassadors seems to have produced anything substantial except Megasthenes. Had Daïmachus or Dionysius given any fresh first-hand information of interest, we could not fail to have traced some of it in later writers. The statements quoted from Daïmachus, that there was a species of yellow pigeons in India which were brought as presents to the king⁶, and the notice of some peculiar-shaped sideboard¹, are a poor yield. On the other hand the book written by Megasthenes was the fullest account of India which the Greek world ever had. Only one other writer calls for mention, Patrocles, who held command in the eastern provinces of Irān under Seleucus I and Antiochus I. One does not gather that his book touched India except in so far as it dealt with the general dimensions of the countries of Asia. Patrocles, however, had access to official sources and what he did say of India seems to have been creditably near the truth².

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⁵ See also Chapter XIX.

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⁶ Frag. 3 (*Frag. Hist. Graec.* II, p. 440).

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¹ Frag. 4.

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² Susemihl, *op. cit.* p. 657.

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The companions of Alexander did not, so far as we know, attempt to give any precise statement of the dimensions of India. Onesicritus³ shot valiantly beyond the mark, declaring that it was a third of the habitable earth. Nearchus gathered that it took four months to cross the plains to the eastern ocean⁴. When Seleucus had established his rule over Irān, and entered into diplomatic relations with the court of Pāṭaliputra, Greek writers ventured to give figures for India as a whole. Patrocles put down the distance from the southernmost point of India to the Himālayas as 15,000 stades (1724 miles)⁵—a happy guess, for the actual distance is about 1800 miles. Megasthenes was farther out in putting the extent from north to south, *where it is shortest*, at 22,300 stades⁶. ‘Where it is shortest’ makes a difficulty, which the modern books seem to pass by. Megasthenes probably conceived the Indus, like Eratosthenes, to flow directly southwards and thus to constitute the western side of the quadrilateral India. The general direction of the coast from the mouth of the Indus to Cape Comorin was thought of, not as it really is, south-south-easterly, but as east-south-east, making it the southern side of the quadrilateral. But, if so, the course of the Indus itself measures the distance from the northern to the southern side, *where it is shortest*. Megasthenes must then have made an enormous miscalculation, and that in a region traversed and measured by Alexander, for the distance as the crow flies from the Himālayas to the mouth of the Indus is equivalent only to 6700 stades (770 miles). What Megasthenes made the greatest length from the northern to the southern side to be we are not told, but his contemporary Daïmachus affirmed that in some places it was as much as 30,000 stades (3448 miles)⁷. The distance from west to east, where it is shortest—the distance, that is, from [Figure: Dimensions and orientation of India according to the true map and according to Eratosthenes]

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³ Frag. 11 = Strabo xv, C. 689.

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⁴ Frag. 1 = Strabo xv, C. 689.

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⁵ Patrocles, Frag. 1 = Strabo ɪɪ, C. 68.

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⁶ Frag. 6 = Arr. *Ind.* 3, 7.

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⁷ Daïmachus, Frag. 1 = Strabo ɪɪ, C. 69.

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the Indus to the Bay of Bengal—Patrocles put at 15,000 stades (1724 miles) and Megasthenes at 16,000 stades (1838 miles)¹. The actual distance is about 1360 miles, but the figure of Megasthenes was got apparently by combining the 10,000 stades measured along the Royal Road from the Indus to Pāṭaliputra with the estimated distance from Pāṭaliputra by way of the Ganges to the sea, 6000 stades. Eratosthenes, the great geographer, a generation later (born 276 B.C.), who is followed by Strabo, accepted the 16,000 stades of Megasthenes as the extent of India from the Indus to the mouth of the Ganges. But the western side of the quadrilateral—the course of the Indus—he reduced to 13,000 stades (1493 miles). The real projection of India to the south, however, from the mouth of the Indus was unknown to him, and he made Cape Comorin project east of the mouth of the Ganges. India was represented by a quadrilateral whose southern side was 3000 stades longer than the northern and the eastern 3000 stades longer than the western². The accompanying figure will show that the general shape of the quadrilateral is fairly true to the reality. What is wrong is (1) the orientation, and (2) the exaggerated size.

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¹ Megasth. Frag. 6 = Arr. *Ind.* 3, 7.

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² Strabo xv, C. 689.

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Besides inquiring as to the figure which India made upon the globe, the Greeks had curious eyes for the unfamiliar physical phenomena which here confronted them. The heavens themselves showed novel features, if one went far enough south—the sun at midday vertically overhead, the shadows in summer falling towards the south, the Great Bear hidden below the horizon³. The companions of Alexander may have seen the sun overhead at the southernmost point which they reached, for the mouths of the Indus almost come under the Tropic of Cancer, and Nearchus may actually just have crossed it; they learnt at any rate that they had only to go a little farther south to see these things. Onesicritus seems to have thought it a pity that his book should lose in sensational interest by this accidental limitation, and therefore to have boldly transferred them to the banks of the Hyphasis⁴. The desire to achieve literary effect interfered continually, in the case of the ancient Greeks, as has been said, with scientific precision.

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³ Plin. II, § 184; Diod. II, 35.

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⁴ Onesicr. Frag. 24 = Plin. *Nat. Hist.* II, § 183.

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The climate of the country, the new laws of the weather, struck the Greeks. They had never known anything like the rains which broke upon them in the summer of 326 b.c. Aristobulus¹ recorded that rains began when the European army reached Takshaçilā in the spring of 326 and became continuous, with the prevalence of the monsoon, all the time they were marching eastward along the foothills of the Himālayas. At the same season the following year the Europeans were voyaging down the Lower Indus. Here they had no rain. The rainfall of Sind, which is unrefreshed by either of the monsoons, is scanty and irregular. Almost rainless seasons are the rule. The cause of the summer rains Eratosthenes found partly in the moisture brought by the monsoon (and in so far he was correct), partly in the exhalations of the Indian rivers².

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¹ Aristob. Frag. 29 = Strabo xv, C. 691, cf. C. 697.

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² Strabo xv, C. 690.

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When the Greeks looked round upon the features of the country itself, India seemed, before anything else, to be the land of immense rivers³. If, in discussing the topography of Alexander’s expedition through Sind, one has to reckon with the fact of great changes in the course of the rivers, that characteristic of these rivers did not escape Aristobulus. On one occasion, he told, a commission on which Alexander sent him took him to a region left desert by a shifting of the Indus to the east; there he saw the remains of over a thousand towns and villages once full of men⁴. Megasthenes got his informants to give him a list of the navigable rivers of the peninsula, 58 in all. Of this list 35 names are preserved⁵, and in spite of distortions, due either to the Greek’s mishearing of the native sounds or to the various transcriptions through which they have come down to us, some are still recognisable to-day.

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³ Strabo xv, C. 689.

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⁴ Aristob. Frag. 29 = Strabo xv, C. 693.

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⁵ Frag. 18 = Arr. *Ind.* 4; Plin. *Nat. Hist.* vi, § 64 f.

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The mineral, the vegetable, the animal world in India had all their special wonders for the Europeans. As to minerals, India was the land of gems and gold. In the book of Pliny’s *Natural History* which deals with precious stones (Book xxxvii) a great many are said to be products of India. It is often doubtful what stone is intended by Pliny’s description, but one can recognise diamonds⁶, opals⁷, and agate⁸ amongst those enumerated. The ultimate source of information would here, of course, not be a literary one, but the practical knowledge of merchants. As to gold, Nearchus and Megasthenes confirmed the account given by Herodotus of the ants as big as foxes which dug up gold.

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⁶ §§ 55 f.

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⁷ §§ 80 f.

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⁸ § 140.

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Nearchus¹, honest man that he was, admitted that he had never seen one of these ants, but he had seen their skins, which were brought to the Macedonian camp. Megasthenes in repeating the story with minor variations added the useful piece of information that the country the gold came from was the country of the Derdae (in Sanskrit *Darad* or *Dārada*; modern Dardistān in Kashmīr)². Among the mineral wonders of the land Megasthenes seems also to have reckoned sugar-candy, which he took to be a sort of crystal; a strange sort which, on being ground between the teeth, proved to be 'sweeter than figs or honey'³. He wrote down too what his Indian informants told him of a river Silas among the mountains of the north in which all substances went to the bottom like stone⁴.

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¹ Nearchus, Frag. 12 = Arr. *Ind.* 15.

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² Megasth. Frag. 39 = Strabo xv, C. 706.

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³ 'Stones are dug up of the colour of frankincense, sweeter than figs or honey,' Megasth. Frag. 10 = Strabo xv, C. 703.

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⁴ Megasth. Frag. 19 = Arr. *Ind.* 6, 2; Strabo xv, C. 703. *Çilā* means 'stone' in Sanskrit.

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In the vegetable realm, the Greeks noticed the two annual harvests, the winter and summer one, the sign of an astonishing fertility⁵. They knew that rice and millet were sown in the summer, wheat and barley in the winter⁶, and Aristobulus described the cultivation of rice in enclosed sheets of water⁷. They saw trees, which the generative power of the Indian soil endowed with a strange capacity of self-propagation—the branches curving to the ground to become themselves new trunks, till a single tree became a pillared tent, under whose roof of broad leaves a troop of horsemen could find shade from the noonday heat⁸. Among the plants two especially interested them. One was the sugar-cane, the reeds that make honey without the agency of bees⁹. Megasthenes seems to have attempted a scientific explanation of its sweet juice. It was due to the water which it absorbed from the soil being so warmed by the sun's heat, that the plant was virtually cooked as it grew¹⁰! The other plant was the cotton-plant, yielding vegetable wool. Some of it the Macedonians used uncarded as stuffing for saddles and suchlike¹. Precious spices, of course, also and strange poisons were associated in the Greek mind with India. As to the latter, Aristobulus was told that a law obtaining among the Indians pronounced death upon any man revealing a new poison, unless he at the same time revealed a remedy for it; if he did both, he received a reward from the king².

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⁵ Megasth. Frag. 9 = Strabo xv, C. 693.

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⁶ Strabo xv, C. 690.

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⁷ Aristob. Frag. 29 = Strabo xv, C. 692.

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⁸ Strabo xv, C. 694; Arrian, *Ind.* 11; Plin. XII, §§ 22 f.

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⁹ Nearchus, Frag. 8 = Strabo xv, C. 694. The phrase μελισσῶν μὴ οὐσῶν might be interpreted as above. If M'Crindle's version 'although there are no bees' is what the Greek writer meant, he made a curious mistake. Bees and honey are well known in early Indian literature. But M'Crindle's version, strictly speaking, would require οὐκ οὐσῶν.

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¹⁰ Megasth. Frag. 9 = Strabo xv, C. 693.

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¹ Nearchus Frag. 8=Strabo xv, C. 693. See Bretzl, *Botanische Forschungen d. Alexanderzuges*, Leipzig, 1903.

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² Aristob. Frag. 30=Strabo xv, C. 694.

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Among the animals of India, it was the elephants, the monkeys, and the snakes which especially drew the attention of the Greeks. The elephants, of course, showed them a type of animal unlike anything they had ever seen. Their size must have accorded with the impression of vastness made by the rivers and the trees of India. And to this was added their extraordinary form with the serpentine proboscis. Megasthenes gave an account of the way in which wild elephants were captured, agreeing closely with the practice of to-day³. The longevity of the elephant was also a fact which the Greeks discovered, though Onesicritus accepted from some informant the extravagant estimate of 300 years for an elephant’s life⁴. ‘They are so teachable, that they can learn to throw stones at a mark and to use arms, also to sew beautifully.’ ‘If any animal has a wise spirit, it is the elephant. Some of them, when their drivers have been killed in battle, have picked them up themselves and carried them to burial; some have defended them as they lay; some have saved those who fell off at their own peril. Once when an elephant killed his driver in a rage he died of remorse and despair⁵.’ ‘It is a very great thing to possess an elephant chariot. A woman who receives an elephant as a present from her lover acquires great prestige,’ and any moral frailty she might show under such an inducement was condoned⁶.

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³ Megasth. Frag. 38=Arr. *Ind.* 13.

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⁴ Onesicr. Frag. 21=Strabo xv, C. 705.

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⁵ Megasth. Frag. 38=Arr. *Ind.* 14.

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⁶ Nearchus, Frag. 16=Strabo xv, C. 705; Arr. *Ind.* 17.

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The monkeys too were a species of creature which naturally fascinated the foreigners. Different kinds are described. ‘Among the Prasioi (the people of Magadha),’ says a late writer, copying from Megasthenes, ‘there is a breed of apes human in intelligence, about the size of Hyrcanian dogs to look at, with a natural fringe above the forehead.’ One might take them for ascetics, if one did not know. They are bearded like satyrs, and their tail is like a lion’s....At the city of Latage they come in crowds to the region outside the gates and eat the boiled rice which is put out for them from the king’s house—every day a banquet is placed conveniently for them—and when they have had their fill they go back to their haunts in the forest, in perfect order, and do no damage to anything in the neighbourhood¹.’ The same writer takes from Megasthenes an account of the apes like satyrs which inhabited the glens of the Himālayas. ‘When they hear the noise of huntsmen and the baying of hounds, they run up to the top of the cliffs with incredible swiftness and repel attack by rolling stones down upon their assailants. They are hard to catch. Only occasionally, at rare intervals, some of them are brought to the country of the Prasioi, and these are either sick ones or pregnant females².’ The forests on the upper Jhelum (Hydaspes, Vitastā), one of the companions of Alexander recorded, were full of apes, and he was told that they were caught by the huntsmen putting on trousers in view of the apes, and leaving other pairs of trousers behind, smeared on the inside with birdlime, which the imitative animals would not fail to put on in their turn³!

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¹ Megasth. Frag. 11 = Ael. *Nat. Anim.* XVI, 10.

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² Ael. *Nat. Anim.* XVI, 21.

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³ Strabo xv, C. 699.

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The snakes of India were a third arresting species in the animal world. And here again it was the size, in the case of pythons, which impressed the Europeans. Some were so large, Megasthenes wrote, as to swallow bulls whole⁴. The envoys coming from Abhisāra to the Macedonian camp asserted boldly that their rāja kept two serpents, 80 and 140 cubits long respectively (about 160 and 280 feet)⁵! On the other hand, Nearchus knew that the smaller poisonous snakes were the more dangerous, and described how life in India was burdened with the fear of finding them anywhere, ‘in tents, in vessels, in walls.’ Sometimes they infested a particular house to the point of making it uninhabitable. The charmers who went about the country were supposed to know how to cure snake-bites. There was really indeed very little for a doctor to do in India except to cure snake-bites, since diseases were so rare among Indians—so at least, as we shall see, the Greeks believed⁶. The Greeks also understood that there was some breed of flying snakes, which dropped from the air at night a poisonous secretion, corrupting the flesh of anyone upon whom it fell¹.

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⁴ Megasth. Frag. 14 = Plin. *Nat. Hist.* VIII, § 36.

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⁵ Onesicr. Frag. 7 = Strabo xv, C. 698.

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⁶ Nearchus, Frag. 15 = Strabo xv, C. 706.

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¹ Megasth. Frags. 10 and 12 = Strabo xv, c. 703; Aelian, *Nat. Anim.* xvi, 41.

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The animals which lived in the jungles would, of course, be less in evidence for the Europeans who passed through the land, but they heard of them by native report. Nearchus never saw a live tiger, only a tiger's skin²; Megasthenes heard that there were tigers twice the size of lions, and he knew of one in captivity which, while held by four men, fastened the claws of his free hind-leg upon a mule and mastered it³. The Greeks heard too of the wild sheep and goats of the hills⁴, and of the rhinoceros, though the account given of it (taken probably from Megasthenes) can certainly not be based upon actual observation⁵.

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² Nearchus, Frag. 12 = *Arr. Ind.* 15.

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³ Megasth. Frag. 10 = Strabo xv, c. 703.

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⁴ Megasth. Frag. 13 = Aelian, *Nat. Anim.* xvi, 20.

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⁵ Megasth. Frag. 13 = Strabo xv, c. 710; Aelian, *loc. cit.*

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Of the domestic animals the Greeks have most to say about the Indian dogs. There was that fierce breed, of which king Saubhūti had given Alexander an exhibition—the dogs which would not relax their bite upon a lion, although their legs were sawn off⁶. It was this breed, or a similar one, which the Greeks understood from the Indians to be a cross between dogs and tigers⁷!

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⁶ Megasth. Frag. 10 = Strabo xv, c. 700; Ael. *Nat. Anim.* iv, 19.

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⁷ Plin. *N. H.* viii, § 148; Ael. *Nat. Anim.* viii, 1.

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When we turn to the Greeks' account of Indian humanity, we find them noting that they were a tall people—'tall and slender,' says Arrian⁸, 'lightly-built to a degree far beyond any other people.' On the other hand Diodorus, following perhaps some other source, describes them as eminently tall and massive⁹. In the south of India complexions approximate to the Ethiopian and in the north to the Egyptian. But in features there is not any marked difference, and no Indian people has woolly hair, like the negro races, 'owing to the dampness of the Indian climate'¹⁰. It is curious that there should have been discussion among the Greeks whether the darkness of skin was due to the action of the sun or to a property in the water of the African and Indian rivers¹¹. The Indians, or some races among them, were believed by the Greeks, in striking contrast with the truth, to be singularly free from diseases and long-lived¹². The people of Sind, Onesicritus said, sometimes reached 130 years¹³. The intellectual powers which they displayed in the arts and crafts were attributed, like their health and longevity, to the purity of the air and the rarified quality of the water¹, but their health was also attributed to the simplicity of their diet and their abstinence from wine².

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⁸ *Ind.* 17.

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⁹ ii, 36.

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¹⁰ Strabo xv, c. 690.

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¹¹ Strabo xv, c. 695.

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¹² Nearchus, Frag. 14 = *Arr. Ind.* 15, 10.

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¹³ Onesicr. Frag. 20 = Strabo xv, c. 701.

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¹ ὕδωρ λεπτομερέστατον, Diod. II, 36, 1.

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² Nearchus, Frag. 15 = Strabo XV, C. 706.

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In what they say of the earlier history of India, the Greeks were concerned to fit in what their Indian informants told them with their own mythology and historical tradition. In their view of the past of India the two outstanding events were the invasions of the country by Dionysus and by Heracles respectively. Greek mythology told of the wine-god Dionysus as some one who had led about Asia a wandering army of revellers, garlanded with vine and ivy, to the accompaniment of drums and cymbals, and in India the religious processions in honour of Çiva, the royal progresses with drum and cymbals, especially characteristic of certain tribes³, seem to have struck them as Bacchic in character. Evidently Çiva was India's memory of the conquering god, and these usages had been learnt from him ages ago.

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³ The name of the people is given by Strabo as the Sydrakai (Strabo XV, C. 687). From C. 701 we gather that these are identical with the Oxydrakai on the Beās (Vipāçā). The Oxydrakai were a people of the plains where the vine does not grow. On the strength of Strabo's assertion that the vine grew among the Sydrakai, to shift the Oxydrakai to the hills, as Dr Vincent Smith does (*J.R.A.S.* October, 1903), is a questionable expedient.

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Heracles the Greeks seemed to themselves to discover in Kṛishṇa. It was an accidental variation that the Greek legend represented him as having been born in Thebes and the Indians claimed him as sprung from the Indian earth. 'This Heracles,' according to Megasthenes, 'was especially worshipped by the Suraseni, an Indian people (the Çūrasenas), where there are two great cities, Methora (Mathurā, Muttra) and Clisobora (Kṛishṇapura), and a navigable river, the Jobanes (Jumna), flows through their country. The garb worn by this Heracles was the same as that of the Theban Heracles, as the Indians themselves narrate; a great number of male children were born to him in India (for this Heracles also married many women) and one only daughter. Her name was Pandaea, and the country where she was born and which Heracles gave her to rule is called Pandaea after her [the Pāṇḍya kingdom in South India]. She had by her father's gift five hundred elephants, four thousand horsemen, and 130,000 foot-soldiers....And the Indians tell a story that when Heracles knew his end was near, and had no one worthy to whom he might give his daughter in marriage, he wedded her himself, though she was then only seven years old, so that a line of Indian kings might be left of their issue. Heracles therefore bestowed on her miraculous maturity, and from this act it comes that all the race over whom Pandaea ruled, has this characteristic by grace of Heracles¹.’ Our Greek author tells the story with some disgust and observes impatiently that, if Heracles could do as much as this, he might presumably have prolonged his own life a little. All this mythology, we may notice, the more critical Greeks, such as Eratosthenes and Strabo, were as prompt as any modern European rationalist to regard as unhistorical².

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¹ Megasth. Frag. 23 = Arr. *Ind.* 7 f.

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² Strabo xv, C. 686 f.

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Megasthenes was given at the court of Pāṭaliputra a list of the kings who had preceded Chandragupta on the throne, 153 in number, covering by their reigns a period of over 6000 years. The line began with the ‘most Bacchic’ of the companions of Dionysus, Spatembas, left behind as king of the land, when Dionysus retired³.

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³ Megasth. Frag. 23.

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The most interesting part of Megasthenes’ account is that relating to contemporary India, so far as he could learn about it at Pāṭaliputra. His description of the seven ‘tribes’ or classes into which the whole people was divided is well known. These, as Dr Vincent Smith has urged⁴, have little to do with the four regular castes of Hinduism. Megasthenes may have got his number seven from some Indian informant, or he may have simply ascertained the fact that the people was divided into functional castes which did not intermarry, and then have made his own list of various occupations as they presented themselves to his eye. The confusion which he makes between Brāhmans and Sannyāsīs—to both the Greek terms *philosophoi* or *sophistai*, ‘wise men,’ were indiscriminately applied—and his separation of the Brāhmans into different castes, according as their employment might be priestly or administrative or political, make it difficult to suppose that he was reproducing what any Indian had told him. But his seven classes may truly reflect the various activities which a Greek resident at Pāṭaliputra could see going on round about him in the third century B.C.⁵

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⁴ *Caste in India* (*East and West*, 1913, pp. 552–63).

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⁵ Megasth. Frags. 35 and 36 = Arr. *Ind.* 11 f.; Strabo xv, C. 703. *V. inf.*, Chapter XIX, p. 477, n. 3.

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The first class of Megasthenes consisted of ‘philosophers,’ under which term, as has just been said, Brāhmans and ascetics were confused. It was numerically the smallest class, but the highest in honour, immune from labour and taxation. Its only business was to perform public sacrifice, to direct the sacrifice of private individuals, and to divine. On the New Year all the philosophers assembled at the king’s doors and made predictions with a view to guiding agriculture or politics. If any one’s prophecy was falsified by the event, he had to keep silence for the rest of his life. ‘These wise men pass their days naked, exposed in winter to the cold and in summer to the sun, in the fields and the swamps and under enormous trees....They eat the fruits of the earth and the bark of the trees, which is no less agreeable to the taste and no less nourishing than dates.’ The *second* class consisted of the cultivators, and included the majority of the Indian people. They never took any part in war, their whole business being to cultivate the soil and pay taxes—to the kings or to the free cities, as the case might be. Wars rolled past them. At the very time when a battle was going on, the neighbouring cultivators might be seen quietly pursuing their work of ploughing or digging, unmolested. All the land belonged to the king, and the cultivators paid one-fourth of the produce in addition to rent. The *third* class Megasthenes described as herdsmen and hunters. They lived a nomad life in the jungles and on the hills, but brought a certain proportion of their cattle to the cities as tribute. They also received in return for their services a grant of corn from the king. It is easy to recognise in the description low-caste people, who in ancient Pāṭaliputra, as in a modern Indian city, were to be seen performing certain services to the civilised community. The *fourth* class consisted of the traders, artisans, and boatmen. They paid a tax on the produce of their industry, except those who manufactured implements of war and built ships. These, on the other hand, received a subsidy from the royal exchequer. The *fifth* class was that of the fighters, the most numerous class after the cultivators. They performed no work in the community except that of fighting. Members of the other classes supplied them with weapons and waited upon them and kept their horses and elephants. They received regular pay even in times of peace, so that when not fighting they could live a life of ease and maintain numbers of dependents. The *sixth* and *seventh* classes of Megasthenes cannot have formed castes in any sense. The *sixth* consists of the government secret inspectors, whose business it was to report to the king, or, among the free tribes, to the headmen, what went on among the people, and the *seventh* of those constituting the council of the king or the tribal authorities. 'In numbers this class is a small one, but it is distinguished for wisdom and probity. For which reason there are chosen from among it the magistrates, the chiefs of districts, the deputy governors, the keepers of the treasury, the army superintendents, the admirals, the high stewards, and the overseers of agriculture.' When Megasthenes, in talking about the fixity of these classes, stated¹ that the only exception to the law which forbad a man changing his class was that any one might become a 'wise man,' he was saying something which was true only if by 'wise man' we understand an ascetic, not a Brāhman. A sense of the difference between Brāhmans living in the world and ascetics is implied in the statement of Nearchus that Indian 'sophists' were divided into Brāhmans, who followed the king as councillors, and the men who 'studied Nature.'²

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¹ Frag. 35 = Arr. *Ind.* 12, 9.

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² Nearchus, Frag. 7 = Strabo xv, C. 716.

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We may see something of the aspect of the country, as Megasthenes travelled through it, from his description of the towns built high above the level floods. 'All their towns which are down beside the rivers or the sea are made of wood; for towns built of brick' (i.e. sun-dried mud bricks) 'would never hold out for any length of time with the rains on the one hand, and, on the other, the rivers which rise above their banks and spread a sheet of water over the plains. But the towns which are built on elevated places out of reach, these are made of brick and clay³.' Of Pāṭaliputra itself Megasthenes left a summary description. Built at the confluence of the Ganges and the Son, it formed an oblong, 80 stades by 15 stades (9⅙ miles by 1 m. 1270 yds.) surrounded by a wooden palisade, with loop-holes for the archers to shoot through, and outside the palisade a ditch, 30 cubits (about 60 feet) deep by 6 plethra (200 yards) wide, which served both for defence and as a public sewer. Along the palisade were towers at intervals, 570 in all, and 64 gates⁴. He also described the palace of the great Indian king, no less sumptuous and magnificent than the palaces of Susa and Ecbatana. Attached to it was a goodly park,

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³ Megasth. Frag. 26 = Arr. *Ind.* 10.

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⁴ Megasth. Frag. 25 = Strabo xv, C. 702.

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in which were tame peacocks and pheasants....There were shady groves and trees set in clumps and branches woven together by some special cunning of horticulture. And the more impressive thing about the beauty of that climate is that the trees themselves are of the sort that are always green; they never grow old and never shed their leaves. Some of them are native, and some are brought from other lands with great care, and these adorn the place and give it glory—only not the

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olive; the olive does not grow of itself in India, and, if it is transported there, it dies. Birds are there, free and unconfined; they come of their own accord and have their nests and roosting-places in the branches, both birds of other kinds and parrots which are kept there and flock in bevies about the king....In this royal pleasance there are lovely tanks made by hand of men, with fishes in them very large and gentle, and nobody may catch them except the sons of the king, when they are yet children. In this water, as tranquil and as safe as any can be, they fish and play and learn to swim all at the same time¹.

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