The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c26.133

v1.c26.133

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