The Social and Military Position of the Ruling Caste in Ancient India, as Represented by the Sanskrit Epic c2.s5.41

c2.s5.41

With this account from Megasthenes it is interesting to compare Tacitus: Quotiens bella non ineunt, multum venatibus plus per otium transigunt, dediti somno ciboque. Fortissimus quisque nihil agens delegata domus et penatium et agrorum cura feminis senibusque et infirmissimo cuique ex familia; ipsi hebent; mira diversitate naturæ, cum iidem homines sic ament inertiam et oderint quietem (G. 15). Holtzmann (Epos, s. 5, with notes) has compared many of the points wherein the Hindu Epic ‘is often the best commentary on the Germania.’ There are so many points of contact between the ethnographic description of the Germania and the life of the Hindu, both in the original texts and in what remains of Megasthenes, that the question has risen in my mind whether Tacitus, in representing an ideal opposed to the rank life of the Roman Imperial period (as some have assumed to be the cause of his writing), did not fill out his lacunæ of information with the reports of an equally foreign and more unknown folk, and help himself from the descriptions of Megasthenes (of which we have now but part). The position of the great chiefs, the fondness for dice, the description of the soldier-life, all correspond. What information concerning the Germans the writer really had would supersede the worth of imagination or of borrowing. Where he had none, he might have borrowed.