The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c26.58

v1.c26.58

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]