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.
however, from the mouth of the Indus was unknown to him, and he made
Cape Comorin project east of the mouth of the Ganges.
Cambridge History of India - v1
'The Indians are by far the
greatest multitude of all the peoples of men whom we know? ,' he says. Of
course, the Indians who came especially within the sphere of his know-
ledge would be the more or less barbarous tribes near the Persian frontier.
What he tells us therefore of their manners and customs does not apply to
civilised India. Of the peoples beyond the Persian frontier he had heard
of the marsh-dwellers, who dressed in garments made of soine sort of
water-reed? . Other Indians dwelling to the east of these are rovers,
eaters of raw flesh, and they are called 'Padaeans. ' He goes on to say that
members of the tribe were killed on the approach of old age and eaten by
their fellow-tribesmen”. Others of the Indians would not eat the flesh of
any living thing or sow fields or live in houses. “Whenever a man of this
people falls into a sickness, he goes into the desert and lies down there :
and no one pay3 any regard when a man is dead or fallen ill. ' The Indians
who dwelt near the city of Kaspa pyros and the country of the Pactyes
(Pashtus), that is, the hill-tribes about the Kābul valley, were, he says, the
most warlike. It was from these, of course, that the Persian government
drew levies. Among them was the tribe called Kallatiai, who ate the
bodies of their dead relations. He describes the dros3 of the Indians
serving in the army of Xerxes. They wore garments made from trees
1 III, 98.
2 III, 94.
3 These would be people living in the country flooded by the Indus, the Miānwāli
district of Sind, where, as Lassen points out, mats and baskets are still made from
the reeds of the river,
4 Lieutenant Prendergast, quoted in the Asiatic Journal, New Series, V (1831),
p. 161, was assured by a Gond that in his native village cannibalism of this kind was
still practised. This inay have been the isolated survival of a more general canniba.
lism among the Gonds. As Lieutenant Prendergast's statement, now more than 80
years old, is still quoted in evidence for the practice among these tribes, one presumes
that later evidence is hard to find. E. T. Dalton, Ethnology of Bengal (1872), p. 220,
mentions a tribe called Birhors, accused of cannibalism. Some of them had assured
him that they had themselves given up the practice, but they admitted that their
fathers were in the habit of disposing of the dead in the manner indicated viz. by
feasting on the bodies ; but they declared they never shortened life to provide such
feasts, and shrank with horror at the idea of any bodies but those of their own blood
relations being served up to them ! ' The Cyclopaedia of India (Quaritch, 1885), which
quotes the passage from Dalton, under 'Birhor,' omits to note that Dalton himself
says, "I have no faith in the story. '
5 III, 38.
## p. 356 (#394) ############################################
356
[CH.
INDIA IN GREEK AND LATIN LITERATURE
O
(i. e. , cotton) and carried bows of reed and arrows of reed with iron heads? .
Some fought on foot and some in chariots drawn by horses and wild asses? .
The account of the ants who throw up mounds of gold dust, which after-
wards became a permanent element in the classic conception of India, was
given in full by Herodotus”. The facts on which the account was based
seem now fairly clear. Gold-dust was actually brought as tribute by the
tribes of Dardistān in Kashmir and was called by the Indians pipilika, ‘ant
gold. ' When Herodotus says that the ants were the size of dogs and
fiercely attacked any one carrying off the gold, it has been plausibly sug.
gested that the account was derived from people who had been chased by
the formidable dogs kept by the native miners.
As to the peculiar products of India, it is interesting that Herodotus
told the Greek world, perhaps for the first time, of the trees that bore wool,
'surpassing in beauty and in quality the wool of sheep ; and the Indian
wear clothing from these trees. '
The peacock, which was introduced into Greece during the second
half of the fifth century B. C. ; retained in his designations evidences both of
his Indian origin (taws) and of the route-via the Persian empire – by
which he had been conveyed (M781k'os o "puus); and it seems to be more than
a coincidence that the only Buddhist mention of Babylon is in connexion
with a story concerning the importation of this magnificent bird".
Ctesias of Cnidus, a generation later than Herodotus, and exceptional
opportunities for acquiring knowledge about India, since he resided for
seventeen years (from 415 to 397 B. c. ) at the Persian court as physician to
the king Artaxerxes Mnēmõne. As a matter of fact this contribution seems
to have been the most worthless of all those which went to make up the
classical tradition. Ctesias apparently was a deliberate liar. Modern writers
urge that some of his monstrosities – his dog-faced men', his pygmies and
so on--can be paralleled by the statements in old Indian books. This shows
that Ctesias was not above saving himself the trouble of fresh invention
when statements sufficiently sensational were furnished him by others. Any
parallel which can be proved between Ctesias and old-Indian tradition is,
of course, interesting and exhibits the Greek as to that extent a borrower
rather than as creatively mendacious, and, where we cannot prove a paral-
lel, it is always possible that the statements of Ctesias may have been
suggested by travellers' tales; but it is equally possible that he was drawing
1 VII, 65.
2 VII, 86.
3 III, 102 f.
4 The gold-digging ants are mentioned in the Mahābhārata, II, 1860 (Calcutta ed. ).
5 M'Crindle, Ancient India, p. 44, note 3.
6 III, 106.
? See the Bāveru Jätaka (No. 339 of the Jätaka collection) and M. Sylvain Lévi's
article in Annuair de l'Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (1913—4).
8 Diod, II, 32, 4 ; Plut. Artax. 21.
9 The çvamukhas of Sanskrit literature, e. g. Varāhamihira Brihatsamhita
## p. 357 (#395) ############################################
xvi]
CTESIAS'S DESCRIPTION
357
-
.
upon nothing but his imagination. One of his most monstrous animals,
the creature as large as a lion, with a human face, which shoots stings out
of the end of its tail, called in the Indian language, says Ctesias, martikhora
- as a matter of fact the word is Persian-Ctesias affirms that he had him-
self seen, as one was sent as a present to the Persian king ! This gives the
measure of the man. No doubt, his wildest statements about the fauna and
flora of India can, if sufficiently trimmed, be made to bear a sort of resemb-
lance to something real', but it seems ingenuity wasted to attempt to esta-
blish these connexions. The influence of Ctesias upon the Greek conception
of India was probably great. It confirmed for ever in the West the idea that
India was a land where nothing was impossible - a land of nightmare mons-
ters and strange poisons, of gold and gemsa.
Where Ctesias described the people of India as 'very just' (Skalotatot),
we may see the reflexion of a common Greek belief that a people of ideal
goodness lived somewhere at the extremities of the earth, or in this case we
may perhaps gather the impression made upon strangers by a social system
so firmly governed in its complex structure and the working of its parts by
traditional law.
It was generally recognised in the Greek world of the fourth century
that a great race called Indian, a substantial part of mankind, lived to-
wards the sunrising. When European science, in the person of those philo-
sophers who accompanied Alexander, first entered upon the Indian world,
it had already made one substantial discovery as to the world in which
man is placed. It was generally recognised in the Greek philosophic schools
that the earth was a globe. It was already a matter of interest to deter-
mine the size of the globe and to know the measure of the lands and seas
which covered it. And the men with Alexander, who found themselves in
the plains of India stretching to even vaster distances beyond, or who,
from the mouth of the Indus saw the coast fading to the eastward out of
sight, were anxious to know what dimensions and shape they ought actu-
ally to give to this India upon their maps. They had not traversed more
than a corner of it, and, had they gone to its extremities, they possessed
none of our means of accurate surveying. It was only by report of the people
of the land, based ultimately no doubt upon the rough practical reckonings
of merchants and seamen, that they could form any conception of it. This
being so, the conjectures which they accorded for the instruction of the
West, have interest for us to-day, only as showing how near the truth under
such circumstances men could come.
1 For what may be done in this direction, seo Prof. H. H. Wilson's Notes on the
Indica of Ctesias (Oxford, 1836).
2 Cf. Plin. N. H. vi, § 58 f.
3 Ephorus, frag. 38 (Frug. Hist. Graec. I, p. 243).
## p. 358 (#396) ############################################
358
[CH.
INDIA IN GREEK AND LATIN LITERATURE
Of the companions of Alexander, three men chiefly enriched the
Greek conception of India by their writings. One was Nearchus, a Cretan
by extraction, whose home was in Macedonia, where he had been a friend
in youth of Alexander's. This was the man whom Alexander put in com-
mand of the fleet which explored the coast between the Indus and the
Persian gulf, and Nearchus later on gave his own account of this expedition
to the world. His book also contained a good deal of incidental information
about India. He appears from the fragments quoted to have been an
honest reporter, who took pains to verify the stories which were told him'.
Another was Onesicritus from the Greek island of Aegina, who regarded
the Cynic philosopher Diogenes as his master, a man with some practical
knowledge of sea-craft, since Alexander made him pilot of the royal vessel
down the Indus. Onesicritus took part in the expedition of Nearchus,
and he too afterwards wrote a book about it and about India. Strabo
considered him untruthful, and he has generally a bad reputation with
modern scholars, though this unfavourable judgment has been seriously
challenged? The third was Aristobulus, a Greek probably from the
Chalcidic peninsula, who not only accompanied Alexander through India,
but was entrusted with certain commissions, perhaps not military ones.
Aristobulus wrote his book long afterwards, in extreme old age. His
interest was predominantly geographical, not military ; yet his book seems
to have been adversely affected by the rhetorical fashion and perhaps by
the Alexander myth which had already begun to take popular shape at the
time when he wrote". A fourth writer, a contemporary, but not a com-
panion, of Alexander, Clitarchus of Colophon, also contributed to popular
notions about India. Clitarchus wrote a history of Alexander of a highly
journalistic character, drawing largely, it would seem, upon imagination.
The book became the most popular of all the histories of Alexander. Al-
though Clitarchus in his main outlines had to keep to the facts, so many
eye-witnesses being still alive, the romance, asd istinguished from the
history of Alexander takes its start from him. In the Indian part of his
history for instance, he introduced a delightful story of how the Macedo-
nian army, marching through the jungles, had mistaken a troop of monkeys
for a hostile army. Statements about India, from such a source, might get
very wide currency without having much basis in reality.
The books written by the companions of Alexander or derived from
their accounts were supplemented in the third century by the books in
3 Susemihl, Gesch. d. griech. Lit. in der Alexandrinerzeit, I. p. 653.
2 Susemihl, op. cit. I, 536, pronounces against Onesieritus ; E. Schwartz defends
him.
3 Strabo xv, C. 693 ; Arr. VI, 29, 10.
4 Susemihl, op. cit. p. 510 ; Schwartz ‘Aristobulus (14)' in Pauly-Wissowa, de-
preciatory.
5 Ael, Vit. Anim. XVII, 25.
## p. 359 (#397) ############################################
XVI]
ERATOSTHENES
359
which the European ambassadors sent by the Hellenistic kings to Indial
told what they heard and saw. It is very odd that with such oppor-
tunities none of the ambassadors seems to have produced anything
substantial except Megasthenes. Had Daïmachus or Dionysius given any
fresh first-hand information of interest, we could not fail to have traced
some of it in later writers. The statements quoted from Daïmachus, that
there was a species of yellow pigeons in India which were brought as
presents to the king? , and the notice of some peculiar-shaped sideboard®,
are a poor yield. On the other hand the book written by Megasthenes
was the fullest account of India which the Greek world ever had. Only
one other writer calls for mention, Patrocles, who held command in the
eastern provinces of Irān under Seleucus I and Antiochus I. One does
not gather that his book touched India except in so far as it dealt with the
general dimensions of the countries of Asia Patrocles, however, had
.
,
access to official sources and what he did say of India seems to have been
creditably near the truth4.
The companions of Alexander did not, so far as we know, attempt
to give any precise statement of the dimensions of India. Onesicritus)
shot valiantly beyond the mark, declaring that it was a third of the habit-
able earth. Nearchus gathered that it took four months to cross the plains
to the eastern oceano. When Seleucus had established his rule over
Irān, and entered into diplomatic relations with the court of Pāțaliputra,
Greek writers ventured to give figures for India as a whole. Patrocles put
down the distance from the southernmost point of India to the Himālayas
as 15,000 stades (1724 miles)—a happy guess, for the actual distance is
about 1800 miles. Megasthenes was farther out in putting the extent
from rorth to south, where it is shortest, at 22,300 stades. “Where it is
'
shortest' makes a difficulty, which the modern books seem to pass by.
Megasthenes probably conceived the Indus, like Eratosthenes, to flow
directly southwards and thus to constitute the western side of the
quadrilateral India. The general direction of the coast from the mouth of
the Indus to Cape Comorin was thought of, not as it really is, south-
south-easterly, but as east-south-east, making it the southern side of the
quadilateral. But, if so, the course of the Indus itself measures the
distance from the northern to the southern side, were it is shortest.
Megasthenes must then have made an enormous miscalculation, and that
in a region traversed and measured by Alexander, for the distance as the
crow flies from the Himālayas to the mouth of the Indus is equivalent only
1 See also Chapter XIX.
2 Frag. 3 (Frag. Hist. 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.
greatest multitude of all the peoples of men whom we know? ,' he says. Of
course, the Indians who came especially within the sphere of his know-
ledge would be the more or less barbarous tribes near the Persian frontier.
What he tells us therefore of their manners and customs does not apply to
civilised India. Of the peoples beyond the Persian frontier he had heard
of the marsh-dwellers, who dressed in garments made of soine sort of
water-reed? . Other Indians dwelling to the east of these are rovers,
eaters of raw flesh, and they are called 'Padaeans. ' He goes on to say that
members of the tribe were killed on the approach of old age and eaten by
their fellow-tribesmen”. Others of the Indians would not eat the flesh of
any living thing or sow fields or live in houses. “Whenever a man of this
people falls into a sickness, he goes into the desert and lies down there :
and no one pay3 any regard when a man is dead or fallen ill. ' The Indians
who dwelt near the city of Kaspa pyros and the country of the Pactyes
(Pashtus), that is, the hill-tribes about the Kābul valley, were, he says, the
most warlike. It was from these, of course, that the Persian government
drew levies. Among them was the tribe called Kallatiai, who ate the
bodies of their dead relations. He describes the dros3 of the Indians
serving in the army of Xerxes. They wore garments made from trees
1 III, 98.
2 III, 94.
3 These would be people living in the country flooded by the Indus, the Miānwāli
district of Sind, where, as Lassen points out, mats and baskets are still made from
the reeds of the river,
4 Lieutenant Prendergast, quoted in the Asiatic Journal, New Series, V (1831),
p. 161, was assured by a Gond that in his native village cannibalism of this kind was
still practised. This inay have been the isolated survival of a more general canniba.
lism among the Gonds. As Lieutenant Prendergast's statement, now more than 80
years old, is still quoted in evidence for the practice among these tribes, one presumes
that later evidence is hard to find. E. T. Dalton, Ethnology of Bengal (1872), p. 220,
mentions a tribe called Birhors, accused of cannibalism. Some of them had assured
him that they had themselves given up the practice, but they admitted that their
fathers were in the habit of disposing of the dead in the manner indicated viz. by
feasting on the bodies ; but they declared they never shortened life to provide such
feasts, and shrank with horror at the idea of any bodies but those of their own blood
relations being served up to them ! ' The Cyclopaedia of India (Quaritch, 1885), which
quotes the passage from Dalton, under 'Birhor,' omits to note that Dalton himself
says, "I have no faith in the story. '
5 III, 38.
## p. 356 (#394) ############################################
356
[CH.
INDIA IN GREEK AND LATIN LITERATURE
O
(i. e. , cotton) and carried bows of reed and arrows of reed with iron heads? .
Some fought on foot and some in chariots drawn by horses and wild asses? .
The account of the ants who throw up mounds of gold dust, which after-
wards became a permanent element in the classic conception of India, was
given in full by Herodotus”. The facts on which the account was based
seem now fairly clear. Gold-dust was actually brought as tribute by the
tribes of Dardistān in Kashmir and was called by the Indians pipilika, ‘ant
gold. ' When Herodotus says that the ants were the size of dogs and
fiercely attacked any one carrying off the gold, it has been plausibly sug.
gested that the account was derived from people who had been chased by
the formidable dogs kept by the native miners.
As to the peculiar products of India, it is interesting that Herodotus
told the Greek world, perhaps for the first time, of the trees that bore wool,
'surpassing in beauty and in quality the wool of sheep ; and the Indian
wear clothing from these trees. '
The peacock, which was introduced into Greece during the second
half of the fifth century B. C. ; retained in his designations evidences both of
his Indian origin (taws) and of the route-via the Persian empire – by
which he had been conveyed (M781k'os o "puus); and it seems to be more than
a coincidence that the only Buddhist mention of Babylon is in connexion
with a story concerning the importation of this magnificent bird".
Ctesias of Cnidus, a generation later than Herodotus, and exceptional
opportunities for acquiring knowledge about India, since he resided for
seventeen years (from 415 to 397 B. c. ) at the Persian court as physician to
the king Artaxerxes Mnēmõne. As a matter of fact this contribution seems
to have been the most worthless of all those which went to make up the
classical tradition. Ctesias apparently was a deliberate liar. Modern writers
urge that some of his monstrosities – his dog-faced men', his pygmies and
so on--can be paralleled by the statements in old Indian books. This shows
that Ctesias was not above saving himself the trouble of fresh invention
when statements sufficiently sensational were furnished him by others. Any
parallel which can be proved between Ctesias and old-Indian tradition is,
of course, interesting and exhibits the Greek as to that extent a borrower
rather than as creatively mendacious, and, where we cannot prove a paral-
lel, it is always possible that the statements of Ctesias may have been
suggested by travellers' tales; but it is equally possible that he was drawing
1 VII, 65.
2 VII, 86.
3 III, 102 f.
4 The gold-digging ants are mentioned in the Mahābhārata, II, 1860 (Calcutta ed. ).
5 M'Crindle, Ancient India, p. 44, note 3.
6 III, 106.
? See the Bāveru Jätaka (No. 339 of the Jätaka collection) and M. Sylvain Lévi's
article in Annuair de l'Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (1913—4).
8 Diod, II, 32, 4 ; Plut. Artax. 21.
9 The çvamukhas of Sanskrit literature, e. g. Varāhamihira Brihatsamhita
## p. 357 (#395) ############################################
xvi]
CTESIAS'S DESCRIPTION
357
-
.
upon nothing but his imagination. One of his most monstrous animals,
the creature as large as a lion, with a human face, which shoots stings out
of the end of its tail, called in the Indian language, says Ctesias, martikhora
- as a matter of fact the word is Persian-Ctesias affirms that he had him-
self seen, as one was sent as a present to the Persian king ! This gives the
measure of the man. No doubt, his wildest statements about the fauna and
flora of India can, if sufficiently trimmed, be made to bear a sort of resemb-
lance to something real', but it seems ingenuity wasted to attempt to esta-
blish these connexions. The influence of Ctesias upon the Greek conception
of India was probably great. It confirmed for ever in the West the idea that
India was a land where nothing was impossible - a land of nightmare mons-
ters and strange poisons, of gold and gemsa.
Where Ctesias described the people of India as 'very just' (Skalotatot),
we may see the reflexion of a common Greek belief that a people of ideal
goodness lived somewhere at the extremities of the earth, or in this case we
may perhaps gather the impression made upon strangers by a social system
so firmly governed in its complex structure and the working of its parts by
traditional law.
It was generally recognised in the Greek world of the fourth century
that a great race called Indian, a substantial part of mankind, lived to-
wards the sunrising. When European science, in the person of those philo-
sophers who accompanied Alexander, first entered upon the Indian world,
it had already made one substantial discovery as to the world in which
man is placed. It was generally recognised in the Greek philosophic schools
that the earth was a globe. It was already a matter of interest to deter-
mine the size of the globe and to know the measure of the lands and seas
which covered it. And the men with Alexander, who found themselves in
the plains of India stretching to even vaster distances beyond, or who,
from the mouth of the Indus saw the coast fading to the eastward out of
sight, were anxious to know what dimensions and shape they ought actu-
ally to give to this India upon their maps. They had not traversed more
than a corner of it, and, had they gone to its extremities, they possessed
none of our means of accurate surveying. It was only by report of the people
of the land, based ultimately no doubt upon the rough practical reckonings
of merchants and seamen, that they could form any conception of it. This
being so, the conjectures which they accorded for the instruction of the
West, have interest for us to-day, only as showing how near the truth under
such circumstances men could come.
1 For what may be done in this direction, seo Prof. H. H. Wilson's Notes on the
Indica of Ctesias (Oxford, 1836).
2 Cf. Plin. N. H. vi, § 58 f.
3 Ephorus, frag. 38 (Frug. Hist. Graec. I, p. 243).
## p. 358 (#396) ############################################
358
[CH.
INDIA IN GREEK AND LATIN LITERATURE
Of the companions of Alexander, three men chiefly enriched the
Greek conception of India by their writings. One was Nearchus, a Cretan
by extraction, whose home was in Macedonia, where he had been a friend
in youth of Alexander's. This was the man whom Alexander put in com-
mand of the fleet which explored the coast between the Indus and the
Persian gulf, and Nearchus later on gave his own account of this expedition
to the world. His book also contained a good deal of incidental information
about India. He appears from the fragments quoted to have been an
honest reporter, who took pains to verify the stories which were told him'.
Another was Onesicritus from the Greek island of Aegina, who regarded
the Cynic philosopher Diogenes as his master, a man with some practical
knowledge of sea-craft, since Alexander made him pilot of the royal vessel
down the Indus. Onesicritus took part in the expedition of Nearchus,
and he too afterwards wrote a book about it and about India. Strabo
considered him untruthful, and he has generally a bad reputation with
modern scholars, though this unfavourable judgment has been seriously
challenged? The third was Aristobulus, a Greek probably from the
Chalcidic peninsula, who not only accompanied Alexander through India,
but was entrusted with certain commissions, perhaps not military ones.
Aristobulus wrote his book long afterwards, in extreme old age. His
interest was predominantly geographical, not military ; yet his book seems
to have been adversely affected by the rhetorical fashion and perhaps by
the Alexander myth which had already begun to take popular shape at the
time when he wrote". A fourth writer, a contemporary, but not a com-
panion, of Alexander, Clitarchus of Colophon, also contributed to popular
notions about India. Clitarchus wrote a history of Alexander of a highly
journalistic character, drawing largely, it would seem, upon imagination.
The book became the most popular of all the histories of Alexander. Al-
though Clitarchus in his main outlines had to keep to the facts, so many
eye-witnesses being still alive, the romance, asd istinguished from the
history of Alexander takes its start from him. In the Indian part of his
history for instance, he introduced a delightful story of how the Macedo-
nian army, marching through the jungles, had mistaken a troop of monkeys
for a hostile army. Statements about India, from such a source, might get
very wide currency without having much basis in reality.
The books written by the companions of Alexander or derived from
their accounts were supplemented in the third century by the books in
3 Susemihl, Gesch. d. griech. Lit. in der Alexandrinerzeit, I. p. 653.
2 Susemihl, op. cit. I, 536, pronounces against Onesieritus ; E. Schwartz defends
him.
3 Strabo xv, C. 693 ; Arr. VI, 29, 10.
4 Susemihl, op. cit. p. 510 ; Schwartz ‘Aristobulus (14)' in Pauly-Wissowa, de-
preciatory.
5 Ael, Vit. Anim. XVII, 25.
## p. 359 (#397) ############################################
XVI]
ERATOSTHENES
359
which the European ambassadors sent by the Hellenistic kings to Indial
told what they heard and saw. It is very odd that with such oppor-
tunities none of the ambassadors seems to have produced anything
substantial except Megasthenes. Had Daïmachus or Dionysius given any
fresh first-hand information of interest, we could not fail to have traced
some of it in later writers. The statements quoted from Daïmachus, that
there was a species of yellow pigeons in India which were brought as
presents to the king? , and the notice of some peculiar-shaped sideboard®,
are a poor yield. On the other hand the book written by Megasthenes
was the fullest account of India which the Greek world ever had. Only
one other writer calls for mention, Patrocles, who held command in the
eastern provinces of Irān under Seleucus I and Antiochus I. One does
not gather that his book touched India except in so far as it dealt with the
general dimensions of the countries of Asia Patrocles, however, had
.
,
access to official sources and what he did say of India seems to have been
creditably near the truth4.
The companions of Alexander did not, so far as we know, attempt
to give any precise statement of the dimensions of India. Onesicritus)
shot valiantly beyond the mark, declaring that it was a third of the habit-
able earth. Nearchus gathered that it took four months to cross the plains
to the eastern oceano. When Seleucus had established his rule over
Irān, and entered into diplomatic relations with the court of Pāțaliputra,
Greek writers ventured to give figures for India as a whole. Patrocles put
down the distance from the southernmost point of India to the Himālayas
as 15,000 stades (1724 miles)—a happy guess, for the actual distance is
about 1800 miles. Megasthenes was farther out in putting the extent
from rorth to south, where it is shortest, at 22,300 stades. “Where it is
'
shortest' makes a difficulty, which the modern books seem to pass by.
Megasthenes probably conceived the Indus, like Eratosthenes, to flow
directly southwards and thus to constitute the western side of the
quadrilateral India. The general direction of the coast from the mouth of
the Indus to Cape Comorin was thought of, not as it really is, south-
south-easterly, but as east-south-east, making it the southern side of the
quadilateral. But, if so, the course of the Indus itself measures the
distance from the northern to the southern side, were it is shortest.
Megasthenes must then have made an enormous miscalculation, and that
in a region traversed and measured by Alexander, for the distance as the
crow flies from the Himālayas to the mouth of the Indus is equivalent only
1 See also Chapter XIX.
2 Frag. 3 (Frag. Hist. 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.
