The monkeys too were a species of creature which
naturally
fascinated
the foreigners.
the foreigners.
Cambridge History of India - v1
Graec.
II, p.
440).
3 Frag. 4.
4 Susemihl, op.
cit.
5 Frag. Il=Strabo XV, C. 689.
6 Frag. l=Strabo XV, C. 689.
? Patrocles, Frag. l=Strabo II, C. 68. 8 Frag. 6=Arr. Ind. 3, 70
P. 657.
## p. 360 (#398) ############################################
360
CH
INDIA IV GREEK AND LATIN LITERATURE
ch.
(А
HIMALAYA MOUNTAINS
770 miles
1360 miles
Rindus
A Ganges
B
D
1350 miles
1350 miles
N
C Comonn
W
E
А
16000 stades (1838 miles)
D
13000 scades (1493 miles) 00
16000 stades (1838 miles)
13000 stades (2189
Scale
130. 000 009
miles)
Dimensions and orientation of India according to the true map and according
to Eratosthenes
## p. 361 (#399) ############################################
xvi]
CLIMATE AND WEATHER
361
made the greatest length from the northern to the southern side to be we
are not told, but his contemporary Daimachus affirmed that in some places
it was as much as 30,000 stades (3448 miles,'. The distance from west to
east, where it is shortest - the distance, that is, from the Indus to the Bay
of Bengal— Patrocles put at 15,000 stades (1724 miles) and Megasthenes
at 16,000 stades (1838 miles)? . The actual distance is about 1360 miles, but
the figure of Megasthenes was got apparently by combining the 10,000 stades
measured along the Royal Road from the Indus to Pātaliputra with the
estimated distance from Pājaliputra by way of the Ganges to the sea, 6000
stades. Eratosthenes, the great geographer, a generation later (born 276 B. c. ),
who is followed by Strabo, accepted the 16,000 stades of Megasthenes as
the extent of India from the Indus to the mouth of the Ganges. But the
western side of the quadrilateral - the course of the Indus- he reduced to
13,000 stades (1493 miles). The real projection of India to the south,
however, from the mouth of the Indus was unknown to him, and he made
Cape Comorin project east of the mouth of the Ganges. India was
represented by a quadrilateral whose southern side was 3000 stades longer
than the northern and the eastern 3000 stades longer than the western? .
The accompanying figure will show that the general shape of the quadri-
lateral is fairly true to the reality. What is wrong is (1) the orientation,
and (2) the exaggerated size.
Besides inquiring as to the figure which India made upon the globe,
the Greeks had curious eyes for the unfamiliar physical phenomena which
here confronted them. The heavens themselves showed novel features, if
.
one went far enough south-the sun at midday vertically overhead, the
shadows in summer falling towards the south, the Great Bear hidden below
the horizon". The companions of Alexander may have seen the sun over-
head at the southernmost point which they reached, for the mouths of the
Indus almost come under the Tropic of Cancer, and Nearchus may
actually just have crosssed it ; they learnt at any rate that they had only
to go a little farther south to see these things. Onesicritus seems to have
thought it a pity that his book should lose in sensational interest by this
accidental limitation, and therefore to have boldly transferred them to the
banks of the Hyphasis". The desire to achieve literary effect interfered conti-
nually, in the case of the ancient Greeks, as has been said, with scientific
precision.
The climate of the country, the new laws of the weather, struck the
Greeks. They had never known anything like the rains which broke upon
1Diamachus Frag. l=Strabo II, C. 69.
2 Megasth. Frag. 6=Arr. Ind. 3, 7,
3 Strabo XV, C. 689.
4 Plin. II, § 148 ; Diod. II, 35, 5 Onesier. Frag. 24=Plin. Nat. Hest. II, § 183.
## p. 362 (#400) ############################################
362
[CH.
INDIA IN GREEK AND LATIN LITERATURE
>
them in the summer of 326 B. C. Aristobulus? recorded that rains began
when the European army reached Takshaçilā in the spring of 326 and
became continuous, with the prevalence of the monsoon, all the time they
were marching eastward along the foothills of the Himālayas. At the
same season the following year the Europeans were voyaging down the
Lower Indus. Here they had no rain. The rainfall of Sind, which is un-
refreshed by either of the monsoons, is scanty and irregular. Almost
rainless seasons are the rule. The cause of the summer' rains Eratosthenes
found partly in the moisture brought by the monsoon (and in so far he was
correct), partly in the exhalations of the Indian rivers.
When the Greeks looked round upon the features of the country
itself, India seemed, before anything else, to be the land of immense rivers.
If, in discussing the topography of Alexander's expedition through Sind,
one has to reckon with the fact of great changes in the course of the rivers,
that characteristic of these rivers did not escape Aristobulus. On one
occasion, he told, a commission on which Alexander sent him took him to
a region left desert by a shifting of the Indus to the east; there he saw the
remains of over a thousand towns and villages once full of men'.
Megasthenes got his informants to give him a list of the navigable rivers of
the peninsula, 58 in all. Of this list 35 names are preservedó, and in spite
of distortions, due either to the Greek's mishearing of the native sounds or
to the various transcriptions through which they bave come down to us,
some are still recognisable to-day.
The mineral, the vegetable, the animal world in India had all their
special wonders for the Europeans. As to minerals, India was the land of
gems and gold. In the book of Pliny's Natural History which deals with
precious stones (Book xxxvii) a great many are said to be products of
India. It is often doubtful what stone is intended by Pliny's description,
but one can recognise diamondsø, opals? , and agates amongst those enumer-
ated. The ultimate source of information would here, of course,
not be a literary one, but the practical knowledge of merchants. As to
gold, Nearchus and Megasthenes confirmed the account given by Herodotus
of the ants as big as foxes which dug up gold. Nearchus, honest man that
he was, admitted that he had never seen one of these ants, but he had
seen their skins, which were brought to the Macedonian camp. Megasthenes
in repeating the story with minor variations added the useful piece of
information that the country the gold came from was the country of the
1 Aristob. Frag. 29=Strabo XV, C. 691 cf. C. 697.
2 Strabo XV, C. 690.
3 Strabo XV, C. 689.
4 Aristob. Frag. 29=Strabo XV, C. 693.
5 Frag. 18 = Arr. Ind. 4 ; Plin. Nat. Hist. VI. § 64 f.
$ $ 55f.
7 $S 80 f.
8 $ 140.
9 Vearchus, Frag. 12=Arr. Ind. 15.
6
8
§
## p. 363 (#401) ############################################
XVI]
VEGETATION
363
Derdae (in Sanskrit Darad or Dārada ; modern Dardistān in Kashmir)".
Among the mineral wonders of the land Megasthenes seems also to have
reckoned sugar-candy, which he took to be a sort of crystal; a strange sort
which, on being ground between the teeth, proved to be 'sweeter than figs
or honey? . He wrote down too what his Indian informants told him of a
river Silas among the mountains of the north in which all substances went
to the bottom like stones.
In the vegetable realm, the Greeks noticed the two annual harvests,
the winter and summer one, the sign of an astonishing fertility'. They
knew that rice and millet were sown in the summer, wheat and barley in
the winter, and Aristobulus described the cultivation of rice in enclosed
sheets of water. They saw trees, which the generative power of the Indian
soil endowed with a strange capacity of self-propagation -- the branches
curving to the ground to become themselves new trunks, till a single tree
became a pillared tent, under whose roof of broad leaves a troop of horse-
men could find shade from the noonday heat? . Among the plants two
especially interested them. One was the sugar-cane, the reeds that make
honey without the agency of beeg. Megasthenes seems to have attempted
a scientific explanation of its sweet juice. It was due to the water which it
absorbed from the soil being so warmed by the sun's heat, that the plant
was virtually cooked as it grew! The other plant was the cotton-plant,
yielding vegetable wool. Some of it the Macedonians used uncarded as
stuffing for saddles and suchlikelo. Precious spices, of course, also and
strange poisons were associated in the Greek mind with India. As to the
latter, Aristobulus was told that a law obtaining among the Indians
pronounced death upon any man revealing a new poison, unless he at the
same time revealed a remedy for it ; if he did both, he received a reward
from the king! !
1 Megasth. Frag. 39 = Strabo XV, C. 706.
2 ‘Stones are dug up of the colour of frankincense, sweeter than figs or honey. '
Megasth. Frag. 10=Strabo XV, C, 703.
3 Megasth. Frag. 19=Arr. Ind. 6, 2; Strabo XV, C. 703. Çilā means 'stone'in
Sanskrit.
4 Megasth. Frag. 9=Strabo XV, C. 693.
5 Strabo XV, C. 690.
Aristob. Frag, 29=Strabu XV, C. 692.
? Strabo XV, C. 694 ; Arrian, Ind. 11 ; Plin. XII, SS
22 f.
8 Nearchus. Frag. 8=Strabo XV, C. 694. The phrase uenigow un Olowu
might be interpreted as above. If M'Crindle's version ‘although there are no bees' is
what the Greek writer meant, he made a curious mistake. Bees and honey are well
known in early Indian literature. But M. Crindle's version, strictly speaking, would
require výk ovou.
9 Megasth. Frag. 9=Strabo XV, C. 693.
10 Vearchus, Frag. 8=Strabo XV, C. 693, See Bretzl, Botanische Forschungen d.
Alaxanderzuges, Leipzig, 1903.
11 Aristob. Frag. 30=Strabo XV, C. 694.
V
## p. 364 (#402) ############################################
364
[ch.
INDIA IN GREEK AND LATIN LITERATURE
Among the animals of India, it was the elephants, the monkeys,
and the snakes which especially drew the attention of the Greeks. The
elephants, of course, showed them a type of animal unlike anything they
had ever seen. Their size must have accorded with the impression of
vastness made by the rivers and the trees of India. And to this was added
their extraordinary form with the serpentine proboscis. Megasthenes gave
an account of the way in which wild elephants were captured, agreeing
closely with the practice of to-day. The longevity of the elephant was
? .
also a fact which the Greeks discovered, though Onesicritus accepted from
some informant the extravagant estimate of 300 years for an elephant's
life”. “They are so teachable, that they can learn to throw stones at a
mark and to use arms, also to sew beautifully. ' 'If any animal has a wise
spirit, it is the elephant. Some of them, when their drivers have been
killed in battle, have picked them up themselves and carried them to burial;
some have defended them as they lay ; some have saved those who fell off
at their own peril. Once when an elephant killed his driver in a rage he
died of remose and despairs. ' 'It is a very great thing to possess an
elephant chariot. A woman who receives an elephant as a present from
her lover acquires great prestige,' and any moral frailty she might show
under such an inducement was condonedº.
The monkeys too were a species of creature which naturally fascinated
the foreigners. Different kinds are described. ‘Among the Prasioi (the people
of Magadha),' says a late writer, copying from Megasthenes, 'there is a
breed of apes human in intelligence, about the size of Hyrcanian dogs to
look at, with a natural fringe above the forehead. One might take them for
ascetics, if one did not know. They are bearded like satyrs, and their tail
like a lion's. . . At the city of Latage they come in crowds to the region
outside the gates and eat the boiled rice which is put out for them from
the king's house-every day a banquet is placed conveniently for them-
and when they have had their fill they go back to their haunts in the forest,
in perfect order, and do no damage to anything in the neighbourhoods. '
The same writer takes from Megasthenes an account of the apes like satyrs
which inhabited the glens of the Himālayas. “When they hear the noise of
huntsmen and the baying of hounds, they run up to the top of the cliffs
with incredible swiftness and repel attack by rolling stones down upon their
assailants. They are hard to catch. Only occasionally, at rare intervals,
some of them are brought to the country of the Prasioi, and these are either
1 Megasth. Frag. 38= Arr. Ind. 13.
2 Onesier. Fraz. 21=Strabo XV, C. 705.
3 Megasth. Frag. 38=Arr. Ind. 14.
4 Xearchus, Frag. 16=Strabo XV, C. 705 ; Arr. Ind. 17.
5 Megasth. Frag. 11=Ael. Nat. Anim. XVI, 10.
## p. 365 (#403) ############################################
XVI]
SNAKES AND OTHER ANIMALS
365
sick ones or pregnant females? ' The forests on the upper
Jhelum
(Hydaspes, Vitastā), one of the companions of Alexander recorded, were
full of a pes, and he was told that they were caught by the huntsmen putting
on trousers in view of the apes, and leaving other pairs of trousers behind,
smeared on the inside with birdlime, which the imitative animals would
not fail to put on in their turn? !
The snakes of India were a third arresting species in the animal
world. And here again it was the size, in the case of pythons, which
impressed the Europeans. Some were so large, Megasthenes wrote, as to
swallow bulls wholes. The envoys coming from Abhisāra to the Macedo-
nian camp asserted boldly that their rāja kept two serpents, 80 and 140
cabits long respectively (about 160 and 280 feet)4 ! On the other hand.
Nearchus knew that the smaller poisonous snakes were the more dangerous,
and described how life in India was burdened with the fear of finding them
anywhere, 'in tents, in vessels, in walls. ' Sometimes they infested a parti-
cular house to the point of making it uninhabitable. The charmers who
went about the country were supposed to know how to cure snake bites.
There was really indeed very little for a doctor to do in India except to cure
snake bites, since diseases were so rare among Indians-so at least, as we
shail see, the Greeks believed". The Greeks also understood that there was
some breed of flying snakes, which dropped from the air at night a poisonous
secretion, corrupting the flesh of anyone upon whom it felle.
The animals which lived in the jungles would, of course, be less in
evidence for the Europeans who passed through the land, but they heard
of them by native report. Nearchus never saw a live tiger, only a tiger's
skin? ; Megasthenes heard that there were tigers twice the size of lions, and
he knew of one in captivity which, while held by four men, fastened the
claws of his free hindleg upon a mule and mastered it. The Greeks heard
too of the wild sheep and goats of the hills®, and of the rhinoceros, though
the account given of it (taken probably from Megasthenes) can certainly
not be based upon actual observation10.
Of the domestic animals the Greeks have most to say about the
Indian dogs. There was that fierce breed, of which king Saubhūti had
given Alexander an exhibition, the dogs which would not relax their bite
1 Ael. Nat. Anim. XVI, 21.
2 Strabo XV, C. 699.
3 Megasth. Frag. 14=Plin. Nat. Hist. VIII $ 36.
4 Onesier. Frag. 7=Strabo XV, C. 698.
5 Nearchus, Frag. 15=Strabo XV, C. 706
6 Magasth. Frags. 10 and 12= Strabo XV, C. 703 ; Aelian, Nat. Anim. XVI, 41.
? Nearchus, Frag. 12=Arr. Ind. 15.
8 Megasth. Frag. 10=Strabo XV, C. 703.
9 Megasth. Frag. 13=Aelian, Nat. Anim. XVI, 20.
10 Megasth. Frag. 13=Strabo XV, C. 710 ; Aelian, loc. cit.
>
## p. 366 (#404) ############################################
366
[CH.
IVDIA IN GREEK AVD LATIV LITERATURE
upon a lion, although their legs were sawn off! . It was this breed, or
a similar one, which the Greeks understood from the Indians to be a cross
between dogs and tigers" !
When we turn to the Greeks' account of indian humanity, we find
them noting that they were a tall people -'tall and slender,' says Arrian",
‘lightly-built to a degree far beyond any other people. On the other
hand Diodorus, following perhaps some other source, describes them as
eminently tall and massive'. In the south of India complexions approxi-
mate to the Ethiopian and in the north to the Egyptian. But in features
there is not any marked difference, and no Indian people has woolly
hair, like the negro races, ‘owing to the dampness of the Indian climate's.
It is curious that there should have been discussion among the Greeks
whether the darkness of skin was due to the action of the sun or
to a property in the water of the African and Indian rivers. The
Indians, or some races among them, were believed by the Greeks, in
striking contrast with the truth, to be singularly free from diseases and
long-lived? The people of Sind, Onesieritus said, sometimes reached 130
years. The intellectual powers which they displayed in the arts and crafts
were attributed, like their health and longevity, to the purity of the
air and the rarified quality of water', but their health was also attributed
to the simplicity of their diet and their abstinence from wine10.
In what they say of the earlier history of India, the Greeks were con.
cerned to fit in what their Indian informants told them with their own
mythology and historical tradition. In their view of the past of India the
two outstanding events were the invasions of the country by Dionysus and
by Heracles respectively. Greek mythology told of the wine-god Dionysus
as some one who had led about Asia a wandering army of revellers,
garlanded with vine and ivy, to the accompaniment of drums and cymbals,
and in India the religious processions in honour of Çiva, the royal pro-
gresses with drum and cymbals, especially characteristic of certain tribesll,
seem to have struck them as Bacchic in character. Evidently Çivå was
1 Megasth. Frag. 10=Strabo XV, C. 700 ; Ael. Nat. Anim, IV, 19.
2 Plin. N. H. VIII, § 148 ; Ael. Nat. Anim. VIII, 1.
3 Ind. 17.
4 II, 36.
5 Strabo XV, C. 690.
6 Strabo XV, C. 695.
? Nearchus, Frag. 14=Arr. Ind. 15, 10.
8 Onesier. Frag. 20=Strabo XV, C. 701.
9 udwo Astrtou EPSOTITOV, Diod. II, 36, 1.
10 Nearchus, Frag. 15=Strabo XV, C. 706.
11 The name of the people is given by Strabo as the Sydrakai (Strabo XV,C. 687).
From C. 701 we gather that these are identical with the Oxydrakai on the Beās (Vipācā)
The Oxydrakai were a people of the plains where the vine does not grow. On th3.
strength of Strabo's assertion that the vine grew among the Sydrakai, to shift the
Oxydrakai to the bills, as Dr Vincent Smith does (J. R. A. S. October, 1903), is a ques-
tionable expedient.
## p. 367 (#405) ############################################
XVI]
SOCIAL DIVISIONS
367
India's memory of the conquering god, and these usages had been learnt
from him ages ago.
Heracles the Greeks seemed to themselves to discover in Krishna.
It was an accidental variation that the Greek legend represented him
as having been born in Thebes and the Indians claimed him as sprung from
the Indian earth. This Heracles,' according to Megasthenes, 'was especially
worshipped by the Suraseni, an Indian people (the Çūrasenas), where there
are two great cities, Methora (Mathurā, Muttra) and Clisobora (Krishna-
pura), and a navigable river, the Jobanes (Jumna), flows through their
country. The garb worn by this Heracles was the same as that of the
Theban Heracles, as the Indians themselves narrate ; a great number
of male children were born to him in India (for this Heracles also married
many women) and one only daughter. Her name was Pandaea, and the
country where she was born and which Heracles gave her to rule is called
Pandaea after her (the Pāņdya kingdom in South India). She had by her
father's gift five hundred elephants, four thousand horsemen, and 130,000
foot-soldiers. . . And the Indians tell a story that when Heracles knew his end
was near, and had no one worthy to whom he might give his daughter ini
marriage, he wedded her himself, though she was then only seven years old,
so that a line of Indian kings might be left of their issue. Heracles
therefore bestowed on her miraculous maturity, and from this act it comes
that all the race over whom Pandaea ruled, has this characteristic by grace
of Heracles? Our Greek author tells the story with some disgust and
observes impatiently that, if Heracles could do as much as this, he might
presumably have prolonged his own life a little. All this mythology, we may
notice, the more critical Greeks, such as Eratosthenes and Strabo, were as
prompt as any modern European rationalist to regard as unhistorical”.
Megasthenes was given at the court of Pātaliputra a list of the kings
who had preceded Chandragupta on the throne, 153 in number, covering
by their reigns a period of over 6000 years. The line began with the most
Bacchic' of the companions of Dionysus, Spatembas, left behind as king of
the land, when Dionysus retired.
The most interesting part of Megasthenes' account is that relating
to contemporary India, so far as he could learn about it at Pāțaliputra.
His description of the seven 'tribes' or classes into which the whole
people was divided is well known. These, as Dr Vincent Smith has urged',
have little to do with the four regular castes of Hinduism. Megasthenes
may have got his number seven from some Indian informant, or he
may have simply ascertained the fact that the people was divided into
functional castes which did not intermarry, and then have made his
1 Megasth. Frag. 23=Arr. Ind. 7 f.
2 Strabo XV, C. 686 f.
3 Megasth. Frag. 24. 4 Caste in India (East and West, 1913, pp. 552-63).
a
## p. 368 (#406) ############################################
368
[ch.
INDIA IN GREEK AND LATIN LITERATURE
own list of various occupations as they presented themselves to his eye.
The confusion which he makes between Brāhmans and Sannyāsis - to
both the Greek terms philosophoi or sophistai, 'wise men,' were indiscri- .
minately applied-and his separation of the Brāhmans into different castes,
according as their employment might be priestly or administrative or
political, make it difficult to suppose that he was reproducing what any
Indian had told him. But this seven classes may truly reflect the various
activities which a Greek resident at Pāšalip'ıra could see going on round
about him in the third century B. C.
The first class of Megasthenes consisted of 'philosophers,' under
which term, as has just been said, Brāhmans and ascetics were confused,
It was numerically the smallest class, but the highest in honour, immune
from labour and taxation. Its only business was to perform public sacrifice,
to direct the sacrifice of private individuals, and to divine. On the New
Year all the philosophers assembled at the king's doors and made
predictions with a view to guiding agriculture or politics. If any one's
prophecy was falsified by the event, he had to keep silence for the rest
of his life.
3 Frag. 4.
4 Susemihl, op.
cit.
5 Frag. Il=Strabo XV, C. 689.
6 Frag. l=Strabo XV, C. 689.
? Patrocles, Frag. l=Strabo II, C. 68. 8 Frag. 6=Arr. Ind. 3, 70
P. 657.
## p. 360 (#398) ############################################
360
CH
INDIA IV GREEK AND LATIN LITERATURE
ch.
(А
HIMALAYA MOUNTAINS
770 miles
1360 miles
Rindus
A Ganges
B
D
1350 miles
1350 miles
N
C Comonn
W
E
А
16000 stades (1838 miles)
D
13000 scades (1493 miles) 00
16000 stades (1838 miles)
13000 stades (2189
Scale
130. 000 009
miles)
Dimensions and orientation of India according to the true map and according
to Eratosthenes
## p. 361 (#399) ############################################
xvi]
CLIMATE AND WEATHER
361
made the greatest length from the northern to the southern side to be we
are not told, but his contemporary Daimachus affirmed that in some places
it was as much as 30,000 stades (3448 miles,'. The distance from west to
east, where it is shortest - the distance, that is, from the Indus to the Bay
of Bengal— Patrocles put at 15,000 stades (1724 miles) and Megasthenes
at 16,000 stades (1838 miles)? . The actual distance is about 1360 miles, but
the figure of Megasthenes was got apparently by combining the 10,000 stades
measured along the Royal Road from the Indus to Pātaliputra with the
estimated distance from Pājaliputra by way of the Ganges to the sea, 6000
stades. Eratosthenes, the great geographer, a generation later (born 276 B. c. ),
who is followed by Strabo, accepted the 16,000 stades of Megasthenes as
the extent of India from the Indus to the mouth of the Ganges. But the
western side of the quadrilateral - the course of the Indus- he reduced to
13,000 stades (1493 miles). The real projection of India to the south,
however, from the mouth of the Indus was unknown to him, and he made
Cape Comorin project east of the mouth of the Ganges. India was
represented by a quadrilateral whose southern side was 3000 stades longer
than the northern and the eastern 3000 stades longer than the western? .
The accompanying figure will show that the general shape of the quadri-
lateral is fairly true to the reality. What is wrong is (1) the orientation,
and (2) the exaggerated size.
Besides inquiring as to the figure which India made upon the globe,
the Greeks had curious eyes for the unfamiliar physical phenomena which
here confronted them. The heavens themselves showed novel features, if
.
one went far enough south-the sun at midday vertically overhead, the
shadows in summer falling towards the south, the Great Bear hidden below
the horizon". The companions of Alexander may have seen the sun over-
head at the southernmost point which they reached, for the mouths of the
Indus almost come under the Tropic of Cancer, and Nearchus may
actually just have crosssed it ; they learnt at any rate that they had only
to go a little farther south to see these things. Onesicritus seems to have
thought it a pity that his book should lose in sensational interest by this
accidental limitation, and therefore to have boldly transferred them to the
banks of the Hyphasis". The desire to achieve literary effect interfered conti-
nually, in the case of the ancient Greeks, as has been said, with scientific
precision.
The climate of the country, the new laws of the weather, struck the
Greeks. They had never known anything like the rains which broke upon
1Diamachus Frag. l=Strabo II, C. 69.
2 Megasth. Frag. 6=Arr. Ind. 3, 7,
3 Strabo XV, C. 689.
4 Plin. II, § 148 ; Diod. II, 35, 5 Onesier. Frag. 24=Plin. Nat. Hest. II, § 183.
## p. 362 (#400) ############################################
362
[CH.
INDIA IN GREEK AND LATIN LITERATURE
>
them in the summer of 326 B. C. Aristobulus? recorded that rains began
when the European army reached Takshaçilā in the spring of 326 and
became continuous, with the prevalence of the monsoon, all the time they
were marching eastward along the foothills of the Himālayas. At the
same season the following year the Europeans were voyaging down the
Lower Indus. Here they had no rain. The rainfall of Sind, which is un-
refreshed by either of the monsoons, is scanty and irregular. Almost
rainless seasons are the rule. The cause of the summer' rains Eratosthenes
found partly in the moisture brought by the monsoon (and in so far he was
correct), partly in the exhalations of the Indian rivers.
When the Greeks looked round upon the features of the country
itself, India seemed, before anything else, to be the land of immense rivers.
If, in discussing the topography of Alexander's expedition through Sind,
one has to reckon with the fact of great changes in the course of the rivers,
that characteristic of these rivers did not escape Aristobulus. On one
occasion, he told, a commission on which Alexander sent him took him to
a region left desert by a shifting of the Indus to the east; there he saw the
remains of over a thousand towns and villages once full of men'.
Megasthenes got his informants to give him a list of the navigable rivers of
the peninsula, 58 in all. Of this list 35 names are preservedó, and in spite
of distortions, due either to the Greek's mishearing of the native sounds or
to the various transcriptions through which they bave come down to us,
some are still recognisable to-day.
The mineral, the vegetable, the animal world in India had all their
special wonders for the Europeans. As to minerals, India was the land of
gems and gold. In the book of Pliny's Natural History which deals with
precious stones (Book xxxvii) a great many are said to be products of
India. It is often doubtful what stone is intended by Pliny's description,
but one can recognise diamondsø, opals? , and agates amongst those enumer-
ated. The ultimate source of information would here, of course,
not be a literary one, but the practical knowledge of merchants. As to
gold, Nearchus and Megasthenes confirmed the account given by Herodotus
of the ants as big as foxes which dug up gold. Nearchus, honest man that
he was, admitted that he had never seen one of these ants, but he had
seen their skins, which were brought to the Macedonian camp. Megasthenes
in repeating the story with minor variations added the useful piece of
information that the country the gold came from was the country of the
1 Aristob. Frag. 29=Strabo XV, C. 691 cf. C. 697.
2 Strabo XV, C. 690.
3 Strabo XV, C. 689.
4 Aristob. Frag. 29=Strabo XV, C. 693.
5 Frag. 18 = Arr. Ind. 4 ; Plin. Nat. Hist. VI. § 64 f.
$ $ 55f.
7 $S 80 f.
8 $ 140.
9 Vearchus, Frag. 12=Arr. Ind. 15.
6
8
§
## p. 363 (#401) ############################################
XVI]
VEGETATION
363
Derdae (in Sanskrit Darad or Dārada ; modern Dardistān in Kashmir)".
Among the mineral wonders of the land Megasthenes seems also to have
reckoned sugar-candy, which he took to be a sort of crystal; a strange sort
which, on being ground between the teeth, proved to be 'sweeter than figs
or honey? . He wrote down too what his Indian informants told him of a
river Silas among the mountains of the north in which all substances went
to the bottom like stones.
In the vegetable realm, the Greeks noticed the two annual harvests,
the winter and summer one, the sign of an astonishing fertility'. They
knew that rice and millet were sown in the summer, wheat and barley in
the winter, and Aristobulus described the cultivation of rice in enclosed
sheets of water. They saw trees, which the generative power of the Indian
soil endowed with a strange capacity of self-propagation -- the branches
curving to the ground to become themselves new trunks, till a single tree
became a pillared tent, under whose roof of broad leaves a troop of horse-
men could find shade from the noonday heat? . Among the plants two
especially interested them. One was the sugar-cane, the reeds that make
honey without the agency of beeg. Megasthenes seems to have attempted
a scientific explanation of its sweet juice. It was due to the water which it
absorbed from the soil being so warmed by the sun's heat, that the plant
was virtually cooked as it grew! The other plant was the cotton-plant,
yielding vegetable wool. Some of it the Macedonians used uncarded as
stuffing for saddles and suchlikelo. Precious spices, of course, also and
strange poisons were associated in the Greek mind with India. As to the
latter, Aristobulus was told that a law obtaining among the Indians
pronounced death upon any man revealing a new poison, unless he at the
same time revealed a remedy for it ; if he did both, he received a reward
from the king! !
1 Megasth. Frag. 39 = Strabo XV, C. 706.
2 ‘Stones are dug up of the colour of frankincense, sweeter than figs or honey. '
Megasth. Frag. 10=Strabo XV, C, 703.
3 Megasth. Frag. 19=Arr. Ind. 6, 2; Strabo XV, C. 703. Çilā means 'stone'in
Sanskrit.
4 Megasth. Frag. 9=Strabo XV, C. 693.
5 Strabo XV, C. 690.
Aristob. Frag, 29=Strabu XV, C. 692.
? Strabo XV, C. 694 ; Arrian, Ind. 11 ; Plin. XII, SS
22 f.
8 Nearchus. Frag. 8=Strabo XV, C. 694. The phrase uenigow un Olowu
might be interpreted as above. If M'Crindle's version ‘although there are no bees' is
what the Greek writer meant, he made a curious mistake. Bees and honey are well
known in early Indian literature. But M. Crindle's version, strictly speaking, would
require výk ovou.
9 Megasth. Frag. 9=Strabo XV, C. 693.
10 Vearchus, Frag. 8=Strabo XV, C. 693, See Bretzl, Botanische Forschungen d.
Alaxanderzuges, Leipzig, 1903.
11 Aristob. Frag. 30=Strabo XV, C. 694.
V
## p. 364 (#402) ############################################
364
[ch.
INDIA IN GREEK AND LATIN LITERATURE
Among the animals of India, it was the elephants, the monkeys,
and the snakes which especially drew the attention of the Greeks. The
elephants, of course, showed them a type of animal unlike anything they
had ever seen. Their size must have accorded with the impression of
vastness made by the rivers and the trees of India. And to this was added
their extraordinary form with the serpentine proboscis. Megasthenes gave
an account of the way in which wild elephants were captured, agreeing
closely with the practice of to-day. The longevity of the elephant was
? .
also a fact which the Greeks discovered, though Onesicritus accepted from
some informant the extravagant estimate of 300 years for an elephant's
life”. “They are so teachable, that they can learn to throw stones at a
mark and to use arms, also to sew beautifully. ' 'If any animal has a wise
spirit, it is the elephant. Some of them, when their drivers have been
killed in battle, have picked them up themselves and carried them to burial;
some have defended them as they lay ; some have saved those who fell off
at their own peril. Once when an elephant killed his driver in a rage he
died of remose and despairs. ' 'It is a very great thing to possess an
elephant chariot. A woman who receives an elephant as a present from
her lover acquires great prestige,' and any moral frailty she might show
under such an inducement was condonedº.
The monkeys too were a species of creature which naturally fascinated
the foreigners. Different kinds are described. ‘Among the Prasioi (the people
of Magadha),' says a late writer, copying from Megasthenes, 'there is a
breed of apes human in intelligence, about the size of Hyrcanian dogs to
look at, with a natural fringe above the forehead. One might take them for
ascetics, if one did not know. They are bearded like satyrs, and their tail
like a lion's. . . At the city of Latage they come in crowds to the region
outside the gates and eat the boiled rice which is put out for them from
the king's house-every day a banquet is placed conveniently for them-
and when they have had their fill they go back to their haunts in the forest,
in perfect order, and do no damage to anything in the neighbourhoods. '
The same writer takes from Megasthenes an account of the apes like satyrs
which inhabited the glens of the Himālayas. “When they hear the noise of
huntsmen and the baying of hounds, they run up to the top of the cliffs
with incredible swiftness and repel attack by rolling stones down upon their
assailants. They are hard to catch. Only occasionally, at rare intervals,
some of them are brought to the country of the Prasioi, and these are either
1 Megasth. Frag. 38= Arr. Ind. 13.
2 Onesier. Fraz. 21=Strabo XV, C. 705.
3 Megasth. Frag. 38=Arr. Ind. 14.
4 Xearchus, Frag. 16=Strabo XV, C. 705 ; Arr. Ind. 17.
5 Megasth. Frag. 11=Ael. Nat. Anim. XVI, 10.
## p. 365 (#403) ############################################
XVI]
SNAKES AND OTHER ANIMALS
365
sick ones or pregnant females? ' The forests on the upper
Jhelum
(Hydaspes, Vitastā), one of the companions of Alexander recorded, were
full of a pes, and he was told that they were caught by the huntsmen putting
on trousers in view of the apes, and leaving other pairs of trousers behind,
smeared on the inside with birdlime, which the imitative animals would
not fail to put on in their turn? !
The snakes of India were a third arresting species in the animal
world. And here again it was the size, in the case of pythons, which
impressed the Europeans. Some were so large, Megasthenes wrote, as to
swallow bulls wholes. The envoys coming from Abhisāra to the Macedo-
nian camp asserted boldly that their rāja kept two serpents, 80 and 140
cabits long respectively (about 160 and 280 feet)4 ! On the other hand.
Nearchus knew that the smaller poisonous snakes were the more dangerous,
and described how life in India was burdened with the fear of finding them
anywhere, 'in tents, in vessels, in walls. ' Sometimes they infested a parti-
cular house to the point of making it uninhabitable. The charmers who
went about the country were supposed to know how to cure snake bites.
There was really indeed very little for a doctor to do in India except to cure
snake bites, since diseases were so rare among Indians-so at least, as we
shail see, the Greeks believed". The Greeks also understood that there was
some breed of flying snakes, which dropped from the air at night a poisonous
secretion, corrupting the flesh of anyone upon whom it felle.
The animals which lived in the jungles would, of course, be less in
evidence for the Europeans who passed through the land, but they heard
of them by native report. Nearchus never saw a live tiger, only a tiger's
skin? ; Megasthenes heard that there were tigers twice the size of lions, and
he knew of one in captivity which, while held by four men, fastened the
claws of his free hindleg upon a mule and mastered it. The Greeks heard
too of the wild sheep and goats of the hills®, and of the rhinoceros, though
the account given of it (taken probably from Megasthenes) can certainly
not be based upon actual observation10.
Of the domestic animals the Greeks have most to say about the
Indian dogs. There was that fierce breed, of which king Saubhūti had
given Alexander an exhibition, the dogs which would not relax their bite
1 Ael. Nat. Anim. XVI, 21.
2 Strabo XV, C. 699.
3 Megasth. Frag. 14=Plin. Nat. Hist. VIII $ 36.
4 Onesier. Frag. 7=Strabo XV, C. 698.
5 Nearchus, Frag. 15=Strabo XV, C. 706
6 Magasth. Frags. 10 and 12= Strabo XV, C. 703 ; Aelian, Nat. Anim. XVI, 41.
? Nearchus, Frag. 12=Arr. Ind. 15.
8 Megasth. Frag. 10=Strabo XV, C. 703.
9 Megasth. Frag. 13=Aelian, Nat. Anim. XVI, 20.
10 Megasth. Frag. 13=Strabo XV, C. 710 ; Aelian, loc. cit.
>
## p. 366 (#404) ############################################
366
[CH.
IVDIA IN GREEK AVD LATIV LITERATURE
upon a lion, although their legs were sawn off! . It was this breed, or
a similar one, which the Greeks understood from the Indians to be a cross
between dogs and tigers" !
When we turn to the Greeks' account of indian humanity, we find
them noting that they were a tall people -'tall and slender,' says Arrian",
‘lightly-built to a degree far beyond any other people. On the other
hand Diodorus, following perhaps some other source, describes them as
eminently tall and massive'. In the south of India complexions approxi-
mate to the Ethiopian and in the north to the Egyptian. But in features
there is not any marked difference, and no Indian people has woolly
hair, like the negro races, ‘owing to the dampness of the Indian climate's.
It is curious that there should have been discussion among the Greeks
whether the darkness of skin was due to the action of the sun or
to a property in the water of the African and Indian rivers. The
Indians, or some races among them, were believed by the Greeks, in
striking contrast with the truth, to be singularly free from diseases and
long-lived? The people of Sind, Onesieritus said, sometimes reached 130
years. The intellectual powers which they displayed in the arts and crafts
were attributed, like their health and longevity, to the purity of the
air and the rarified quality of water', but their health was also attributed
to the simplicity of their diet and their abstinence from wine10.
In what they say of the earlier history of India, the Greeks were con.
cerned to fit in what their Indian informants told them with their own
mythology and historical tradition. In their view of the past of India the
two outstanding events were the invasions of the country by Dionysus and
by Heracles respectively. Greek mythology told of the wine-god Dionysus
as some one who had led about Asia a wandering army of revellers,
garlanded with vine and ivy, to the accompaniment of drums and cymbals,
and in India the religious processions in honour of Çiva, the royal pro-
gresses with drum and cymbals, especially characteristic of certain tribesll,
seem to have struck them as Bacchic in character. Evidently Çivå was
1 Megasth. Frag. 10=Strabo XV, C. 700 ; Ael. Nat. Anim, IV, 19.
2 Plin. N. H. VIII, § 148 ; Ael. Nat. Anim. VIII, 1.
3 Ind. 17.
4 II, 36.
5 Strabo XV, C. 690.
6 Strabo XV, C. 695.
? Nearchus, Frag. 14=Arr. Ind. 15, 10.
8 Onesier. Frag. 20=Strabo XV, C. 701.
9 udwo Astrtou EPSOTITOV, Diod. II, 36, 1.
10 Nearchus, Frag. 15=Strabo XV, C. 706.
11 The name of the people is given by Strabo as the Sydrakai (Strabo XV,C. 687).
From C. 701 we gather that these are identical with the Oxydrakai on the Beās (Vipācā)
The Oxydrakai were a people of the plains where the vine does not grow. On th3.
strength of Strabo's assertion that the vine grew among the Sydrakai, to shift the
Oxydrakai to the bills, as Dr Vincent Smith does (J. R. A. S. October, 1903), is a ques-
tionable expedient.
## p. 367 (#405) ############################################
XVI]
SOCIAL DIVISIONS
367
India's memory of the conquering god, and these usages had been learnt
from him ages ago.
Heracles the Greeks seemed to themselves to discover in Krishna.
It was an accidental variation that the Greek legend represented him
as having been born in Thebes and the Indians claimed him as sprung from
the Indian earth. This Heracles,' according to Megasthenes, 'was especially
worshipped by the Suraseni, an Indian people (the Çūrasenas), where there
are two great cities, Methora (Mathurā, Muttra) and Clisobora (Krishna-
pura), and a navigable river, the Jobanes (Jumna), flows through their
country. The garb worn by this Heracles was the same as that of the
Theban Heracles, as the Indians themselves narrate ; a great number
of male children were born to him in India (for this Heracles also married
many women) and one only daughter. Her name was Pandaea, and the
country where she was born and which Heracles gave her to rule is called
Pandaea after her (the Pāņdya kingdom in South India). She had by her
father's gift five hundred elephants, four thousand horsemen, and 130,000
foot-soldiers. . . And the Indians tell a story that when Heracles knew his end
was near, and had no one worthy to whom he might give his daughter ini
marriage, he wedded her himself, though she was then only seven years old,
so that a line of Indian kings might be left of their issue. Heracles
therefore bestowed on her miraculous maturity, and from this act it comes
that all the race over whom Pandaea ruled, has this characteristic by grace
of Heracles? Our Greek author tells the story with some disgust and
observes impatiently that, if Heracles could do as much as this, he might
presumably have prolonged his own life a little. All this mythology, we may
notice, the more critical Greeks, such as Eratosthenes and Strabo, were as
prompt as any modern European rationalist to regard as unhistorical”.
Megasthenes was given at the court of Pātaliputra a list of the kings
who had preceded Chandragupta on the throne, 153 in number, covering
by their reigns a period of over 6000 years. The line began with the most
Bacchic' of the companions of Dionysus, Spatembas, left behind as king of
the land, when Dionysus retired.
The most interesting part of Megasthenes' account is that relating
to contemporary India, so far as he could learn about it at Pāțaliputra.
His description of the seven 'tribes' or classes into which the whole
people was divided is well known. These, as Dr Vincent Smith has urged',
have little to do with the four regular castes of Hinduism. Megasthenes
may have got his number seven from some Indian informant, or he
may have simply ascertained the fact that the people was divided into
functional castes which did not intermarry, and then have made his
1 Megasth. Frag. 23=Arr. Ind. 7 f.
2 Strabo XV, C. 686 f.
3 Megasth. Frag. 24. 4 Caste in India (East and West, 1913, pp. 552-63).
a
## p. 368 (#406) ############################################
368
[ch.
INDIA IN GREEK AND LATIN LITERATURE
own list of various occupations as they presented themselves to his eye.
The confusion which he makes between Brāhmans and Sannyāsis - to
both the Greek terms philosophoi or sophistai, 'wise men,' were indiscri- .
minately applied-and his separation of the Brāhmans into different castes,
according as their employment might be priestly or administrative or
political, make it difficult to suppose that he was reproducing what any
Indian had told him. But this seven classes may truly reflect the various
activities which a Greek resident at Pāšalip'ıra could see going on round
about him in the third century B. C.
The first class of Megasthenes consisted of 'philosophers,' under
which term, as has just been said, Brāhmans and ascetics were confused,
It was numerically the smallest class, but the highest in honour, immune
from labour and taxation. Its only business was to perform public sacrifice,
to direct the sacrifice of private individuals, and to divine. On the New
Year all the philosophers assembled at the king's doors and made
predictions with a view to guiding agriculture or politics. If any one's
prophecy was falsified by the event, he had to keep silence for the rest
of his life.
