Intercourse between India and the Western World from the Earliest Times to the Fall of Rome c8.100

c8.100

Of the ancient history of India, Megasthenes apparently learnt nothing worth recording, save legends of a monarch whom he identified with Bacchus or Herakles. This is not surprising, as the science of history was always entirely neglected by the Hindus. Of the religion of the country he gives an interesting and intelligent account. The principal religious sects were the Brahmins, and the Sarmanes, who were the Buddhists and Jains. Besides these, there were, then as now, various fakirs, Yogis, and other mendicants of a low type, who had considerable liberty in the houses and markets, helping themselves in the bazaars to what they liked. Of Brahmin philosophy, we do not find so full an account in Megasthenes as in later writers¹. The charming fragment quoted from the pseudo-Origen by Schwanbeck², appears to owe little to Megasthenes, being Neo-platonic in tone. Megasthenes notes, however, the similarity between the speculations of the Brahmins and the teachings of Pythagoras and Plato; he speaks also of their physical speculations, and their belief that the world is spherical, liable to destruction, and permeated by the presence of the Deity³. They also, he says, believed in the existence of a fifth element—the Ākāśa or ether. These philosophers, he tells us, were devotees of Herakles, and there was a tribe called the Sibae, who were the descendants of the companions of Herakles. Herakles must be Śiva and the Sibae a Śaivite sect. The Greeks loved to identify the gods of other nations with their own deities. Indra is "Zeus Ombrios"; the immoral Śakti rites of certain tribes (e.g. the Oxydrakae) are the Bacchic orgies, and so forth. It has even been thought that the name of Mount Meru, suggesting the Μηρός of the Bacchus legend, went a long way towards confirming, in Greek minds, the persistent belief that Bacchus came from India.