Age of the Nandas and Mauryas c9.s32.8

c9.s32.8

Some of these statements particularly those relating to slavery and law-suits, were repeated by Megasthenes with a much wider application. His statement on slavery has been extracted by Diodorus, Arrian, and Strabo³; we may reproduce Arrian's as being the clearest and most complete of them ; 'All the Indians are free, and not one of them is a slave. The Lacedaemonians and the Indians are so far in agreement. The Lacedaemonians, however, hold the Helots as slaves, and these do servile labour ; but the Indians do not even use aliens as slaves, and much less a countryman of their own.' To understand this statement in its proper sense, we should remember that Megasthenes had Onesicritus before him ; and we find him deliberately extending to all India a statement that his predecessor made particularly of one country visited by him, and equally deliberately correcting or contradicting him in regard to Helotry. Megasthenes says in effect, that there are no slaves in India as Onesicritus knew, but his comparison of the Indian servants to Helots is wrong, for the Helots were put to servile labour and were in fact slaves. Obviously Megasthenes is here thinking of slavery in its full legal and political implications according to which the slave was the chattel of his master with no rights of any kind whatsoever. And by a close study of the rules of the *Arthaśāstra* on *dāsas* and *karmakaras*, serfs and hired labourers, Breloer has shown that *dāsas* were not slaves in this sense ; for they could not be employed in unclean work—servile labour as Megasthenes would call it, and they could hold and transmit property and regain their freedom by right under certain conditions. And this appears to be the correct meaning of the text before us. Megasthenes was neither misled by the mildness of Indian slavery into denying its existence, nor was he idealising Indian conditions for the edification of the Greeks, but simply stating and interpreting a fact as he saw and understood it, incidentally commenting on the view of another writer known to him¹.