The Political Institutions and Theories of the Hindus: A Study in Comparative Politics c12.s1.t2.27

c12.s1.t2.27

Two other nations came to have close touch with the troops of Alexander. These are the Agalassoi and the Nysaians. The former, as Curtius says, put up a strong resistance to the Greek invaders, and may be taken to have been the first historic protagonists of Hindu *Bushido* or Kṣatriyaism. For when they were defeated by the enemy, these gallant patriots preferred death to dishonor and national humiliation. Accordingly they "set fire to the town and cast themselves with their wives and children into the flames".⁴ Thus, in the pride of nationalism, which was subsequently fostered also on the occasion of Moslem invasions in the Middle Ages, has to be sought one of the feeders of the custom that in subsequent ages came to be practised exclusively by women, viz., the *satî* (the self-immolation of widows on the funeral pyres of their husbands).