A History of Sanskrit Literature c24.s1.19

c24.s1.19

Much that has been adduced definitely³ in favour of Greek priority is extremely dubious. The Trojan horse, however, is much older than the capture by an elephant of wood filled with soldiers of Udayana, but the *motif* is traced also in Egypt,⁴ and cannot be deemed too recondite to be original in India. The love of Phaidra for Hippolytos is striking, but the *motif* is found in the Jātaka¹ and belongs to human nature. The device of consoling the living for the dead by striking means is ascribed to Demokritos, is found in Lukianos, in Julian's letters, and in pseudo-Kallisthenes, but it also is attested by the Chinese version of the Tripiṭaka, which bids the mourner bring fire from a house where none has died. Androclus' grateful lion has an Indian parallel in the grateful elephant; Milo's death reminds us of the foolish ape in the *Pañcatantra*; India knows of paintings which deceive by likeness to life, as Parrhasios deceived even Zeuxis by his painted curtain. The tale of how an adulteress clears herself by a cunningly devised oath is early enough in India to have been deemed the source of Isolde's falsehood,² but we have the same idea in the oath of Ovid's Mestra.³ The effort to find in the tract *Physiologos* the proof of Indian influence on the western legend of the unicorn or the source of Caesar's tale of the elks of the Black Forest, which cannot rise if once they fall to the ground, is clearly a failure. From India may be borrowed the tale of the Charadrios, a bird which bears jaundice to the sun, but, as this idea is extremely early in India, it may be an ancient Indo-European belief.