The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c26.128

v1.c26.128

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.