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Age of the Nandas and Mauryas c9.s35: 24. Marriage and occupation rules

Age of the Nandas and Mauryas c9.s35

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24. Marriage and occupation rules

c9.s35.1

Diodorus concludes his summary of this class-organisation with the following observations : 'Such, then, are about the parts into which the body politic of India is divided. No one is allowed to marry out of his own class, or to exercise any calling or art except his own : for instance, a soldier cannot become a husbandman or an artisan a philosopher.' Arrian has also similar remarks at the end with this addition : 'It is permitted that the sophist only be from any class ; for the life of the sophist is not an easy one, but the hardest of all.' By sophist of course an ascetic is meant here. Strabo also gives these restrictions regarding marriage and occupation, but adds that the philosophers are exempt from them on account of their superior merit. The stress laid on endogamy and the adherence to one's own occupation (*svadharma*), the only exception being in favour of the Brahmin, clearly indicate that Megasthenes did mean to describe the caste-system as we should now call it; but these restrictions obviously had no meaning with reference to some of his classes, particularly the sixth and seventh¹. Either he did not hear of the theory of the four *varṇas*, or was carried away by a desire, natural in a Hellenistic Greek, to establish a similarity between Egypt and India in social organisation². Allowing for all its inaccuracies, there is still much in Megasthenes' picture that is true to reality and is borne out by Indian literary works including the *Arthaśāstra*.

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¹ Breloer has argued that Megasthenes must have applied the term *mesos* to the classes, and used *genos* only in the statement on endogamy, that Diodorus and Strabo kept up this distinction, while Arrian has caused confusion by applying the term 'genos' to the Seven classes. In other words, the rule regarding endogamy is a piece of family law that stands apart from the division of the population into seven classes. *ZDMG*, 1934, p. 137. But I hesitate to accept this ingenious argument. Breloer has also sought to show on the strength of Pliny, VI, 19 (22) sec 66 and Solinus 52, 9 that Megasthenes made up his seven classes from the five of Taxila polity mentioned by an earlier writer, most probably Onesicritus, and that Herodotus' classes of Egypt had little to do with it. *Ibid* pp. 147-64.

c9.s35.3

² 'The Egyptians are divided into seven distinct classes—these are the priests, the warriors, the cowherds, the swineherds, the tradesmen, the interpreters, and the boatmen'. Herodotus, II, 164.

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