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.
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.
Cambridge History of India - v1
The obverse type
is a horseman, with lance at rest, charging down upon a retreating
elephant, on the back of which are two men turning round to face their
pursuer. On the reverse, beside the monogram, is a tall figure, wearing
cloak and cap, and having a sword by his side, standing to left holding a
thunderbolt and a spear. In spite of certain features which are not alto-
gether satisfactory, the genuineness of the coin has been unhesitatingly
accepted by Head and Gardner, and from such experienced judges it would
be very rash to differ. Gardner, who was the first to publish it (N. C. ,
1887, p. 177), was disposed to give it to Bactria and to connect it with 'some
notable victory won by a Greek King of Bactria over the invading hordes
of Yueh-chi in the second century B. C. ' Head, on the other hand, comes
to the conclusion, ‘after a careful study of the fabric. . . that it belongs to
Alexander's own time, and that it records the historical event of his
invasion of the Punjab in 326 B. C. ' He sees in the standing figure a
representation of Alexander as Zeus, while he puts forward the interesting
suggestion that the lance is being wielded, not by the horseman, but by
the rearmost of the two elephant-riders, and that consequently the scene
depicted is the retreat of Porus and his pursuit by Taxiles, exactly as
recorded by Arrian (v, 18). The coin, he thinks, may have been struck by
Taxiles himself at his capital city Takshaçilā. Unfortunately this hypothesis
is not supported by the 'find-spot' of the decadrachm. It was discovered
at Khullum in Bukhāra.
A similar inconclusive result awaits any endeavour to sift the asser-
tions so frequently advanced as to the circulation, and even the striking,
of double darics in India. These fine gold coins (Pl. I, 6) are, in the strict
sense, Persian. But it is hardly likely that any of them were minted until
after the defeat of the last of the Achaemenids by Alexander. It is certain
that the great majority bear Greek monograms or letters, and that they
were issued at Babylon, and possibly elsewhere, by the satraps of the
## p. 350 (#388) ############################################
350
[сн
ANCIENT GREEK COINS IN INDIA
Macedonian conqueror. That they were popular in the East is beyond
question. Whether they made their way into India is another matter.
The statement that they were struck there has nothing whatever to confirm
it. Nearly all of the specimens in the British Museum were acquired at
Rāwalpindi, but the real source seems to have been the rich find or series
of finds made about 1877 and 1878 in Bukhāra, ‘eight marches beyond the
Oxus, at an old fort on the tongue of land formed by two joining rivers. '
The precise locality appears to have been Kabadian, a town on the
Kapinahan, in the Sogdiāna.
## p. 351 (#389) ############################################
CHAPTER XVI
INDIA IN EARLY GREEK AND LATIN LITERATURE
In this chapter we shift our point of view. We no longer try to trans-
fer ourselves to ancient India and see for ourselves what is going on there :
we ask instead what impression this magnitude, India, made upon another
people, the Hellenes on the shores of the Mediterranean, the progenitors
of our modern European rationalistic civilisation. India is for us now
a remote country, 2800 miles away.
The Greek peoples at the time when the Homeric poems were
composed had probably never heard of India, and knew nothing of
the Aryan cousins separated from them by the great Semitic kingdoms of
Assyria and Babylonia. At most they knew that peoples of dark complexion
dwelt, some towards the setting, and some towards the rising, sun'.
The Homeric Greeks used ivory, and were no doubt aware that it was
the tusk of an animal--the Phoenician traders indeed will have called it, as
the Hebrews did, shen, 'tooth' - but the ivory was more prubably African
ivory brought from Egypt than Indian? .
The Greek word for tin, again, found already in Homer, kassiteros, has
been adduced to show that tin was among the wares which travelled to the
Greek world from India. For the Greek word is obviously the same as the
Sanskrit word kastira. Unfortunately the borrowing seems to have been the
other way. The word kastira found its way comparatively late into India
from Greece
In the sixth century B. C. the Semitic and other kingdoms of Nearer
Asia disappeared before a vast Āryan Empire, the Persi an, which touched
Greece at one extremity and India at the other. Tribute from Ionia and
1 Odyssey I, 22 f.
2 The derivation of the Greek word for ivory, elephas, given in Liddell and Scott
is etymology at its wildest. It is supposed to be the Sanskrit word ibha, meaning
'elephant,' preceded by the Arabic definite article el (! ). Not much can be built upon
the passage, I Kings, X, 22, where the Hebrew author states that the navy of King
Solomon in the tenth century B. C. brought (according to our English version) 'ivory,
apes and peacocks. ' See Cheyne in Encycl. Bibl. , 8. v. 'Ophir' and 'Peacocks. '
3 E. g. by Lassen, II, 632.
4 Daremberg and Saglio, 8. v. 'stannum. ,
>
351
## p. 352 (#390) ############################################
352
(CH.
INDIA IN GREEK AND LATIN LITERATURE
tribute from the frontier hills of India found its way into the same imperial
treasure-houses at Ecbatana or Susa. Contingents from the Greek cities of
Asia Minor served in the same armies with levies from the banks of
the Indus. From the Persian the name Indoi, 'Indians', now passed
into Greek speech. Allusions to India begin to appear in Greek literature. !
It is not a mere accident that the books produced by a people
who dwelt so far away from India should to-day contribute to our know-
ledge of ancient India. In the Greek republics a new quality was appearing
in the world - or rather the development of a certain factor in the human
mind to an activity and power not seen before-the quality which we may
describe as Rationalism. That is what makes the essential continuity bet-
ween the ancient Mediterranean civilisation and the civilisation which has
developed so wonderfully in Europe during the last five centuries. A charac-
teristic of this rationalism is a lively curiosity as to the facts of the
Universe, an interest which directs itself upon the endless variety of the
world, in contrast with that movement of the spirit, exemplified in the sages
of India and in the piety of medieval Europe, which seeks to flee from the
Many to the One. To be interested in a fact as such, to care so much
about its precise individual character, as to examine and verify and try to
get its real contours, to value hypothesis only so far as it can be substan-
tiated by reference to objective truth - these are the motives behind modern
Western Science; and a disinterested intellectual curiosity in the facts of
the outside world has actually helped to give the West a power to modify
and control that world for practical uses never before possessed by man.
It was the beginning of this interest in the facts of the world, the desire to
see things as they really were, which marked ancient Greek culture, as
expressed in its writings and its art. The universal curiosity of Herodotus
in the fifth century B. C. , the eager eyes of the men of scierce and of action
who accompanied Alexander, the industrious enquiries of Megasthenes-it
is to these that we owe such information about India as the Greek and
Latin books contain.
And yet in order to estimate this information truly one must bear in
mind some limiting considerations. The motive of intellectual curiosity just
described, the critical scientific temper, has never been exhibited in complete
purity. It is all a question of more or less. The Greeks had it more than
any previous people; the modern man of science has it more than the
Greeks ; but not even the modern man of science has so far reduced all the
other elements of human nature to their proper place, as to make his
1 Indian influence has been alleged in the philosophy of Pythagoras who must
have been born in the early years of the sixth century, some fifty years before the
Persian conquest of Babylon. The question is examined at length by Prof. A. B. Keith
in the J. R. A. S. for 1909, pp. 569 f. , Pythagoras and the Doctrine of Transmigration.
Prof. Keith's conclusion is that there is no evidence for the Indian influence.
## p. 353 (#391) ############################################
XVI]
SCYLAX OF CARY ANDA
353
curiosity absolutely disinterested or his criticism impeccably scientific. In
the case of the ancient Greeks, scientific curiosity was constantly being
interfered with and thwarted by another interest which was strong in
them – the love of literary form, the delight in logical expression. One of
the reasons why Natural Science never got farther than it did among the
Greeks is that a book-tradition would so soon establish itself in which the
original observation became stereotyped and passed on from writer to writer
with no fresh verification or addition. From the fifth century onwards a
conventional classicism was always hemming in vitality and making litera-
ture opaque to real life. This is what one has to remember in approaching
the Greek notices of India or their reproduction by Latin writers.
The classical notices of India represent only three groups of original
documents, (1) the works produced by Greeks of Asia Minor from the
latter part of the sixth century till the beginning of the fourth century
B. C. , (2) the works based upon the expedition of Alexander in the fourth
century, and (3) the works of the Greek ambassadors sent in the third
century from Syria and Egypt to the court of Pāțaliputra. The first group-
Scylax, Hecataeus, Herodotus, Ctesias - was for most purposes superseded
by the two later ones, since the expedition of Alexander marked a new
epoch of geographical knowledge. Yet to some extent even in later times
the earlier writers were drawn upon.
The first Greek book about India was perhaps written in the latter
part of the sixth century B. c. by Scylax of Caryanda, a Greek sea-captain,
whom King Darius (522-486 B. c. ) employed to explore the course
of the Indus? . The book seems to have lain before Aristotle two centu-
ries later, who quotes, as coming from it, a statement that among the
Indians the kings were held to be of a superior race to their subjects.
Scylax probably did not tell much of his own experiences in descending the
Indus, or we should have heard of his book in connexion with the voyage
of Alexander. He probably preferred to astonish his countrymen with
travellers’tales-stories of people who used their enormous feet as sunshades
(Skiapodes), of people who wrapped themselves up in their own ears
(Otoliknoi or Enotokoitoi), of people with one eye, and so on, with which
the Greek tradition about India thus started and which it retained to the
ends. These stories, it is now recognised, correspond with statements in
the old Indian books about peoples on the confines of the Indian world,
and Scylax may therefore very well have really heard them from Indians
and accepted them in simple faith.
Herodotus IV, 44.
2 Polit. VII, 14.
Philostratus, Vit. A poll, III, 47 ; Tzetzes, Chil. VII, 630 f,
## p. 354 (#392) ############################################
351
[ch.
INDIA IN GREEK AND LATIN LITERATURE
POS.
Hecataeus of Miletus had probably already given forth his geographic
cal work, the Periodos Ges, before 500 B. C. At the extremity of his field
of vision there was some vague picture, derived from Scylax and the
Persians, of the Indian world. His knowledge stopped on the frontier of
the Persian Empire, the river Indus. Beyond that was just a great desert
of sand. But the name of the people called Gandhāri on the upper Indus
had reached him, and the name of a city in that region, whence Scylax had
started on his expedition down the river : Hecataeus wrote it as Kaspapy-
He mentioned the names of other Indian peoples too of the frontier
hills-Opiai, Kalatiai are the ones preserved in his fragments, and a city
of India which he called Argante. The fabulous Skiapodes also appeared in
Hecataeus as well as in Scylax, though Hecataeus by some confusion
connected them with the African Aethiopians instead of with India'.
We may probably infer from the long geographical passages in the
plays of Aeschylus, that a lovely interest in far-off peoples and strange
lands was general in the Greek world of the fifth century. Where an
ancient Argive king in the Suppliants has to express wonder at the foreign
garb of the Egyptian, maidens, the poet takes the opportunity to give eri-
dence of his anthropological knowledge. The king mentions different races
whose appearance might be like that, and in the course of bis specula-
tions, says –
‘Moreover I hear tell of Indians, of women that go roving on camels,
mounted horse-fashion, riding on padded saddles, them that are citizens
of a land neighbouring the Ethiopians. '
In the Greek books which we possess this is the earliest mention of
Indians by name.
A good deal of what Herodotus wrote about India (middle of the
fifth century) was no doubt drawn from Hecataeus- his idea, for instance,
that the river Indus flowed towards the east, and that beyond that corner
of India which the Persians knew there was nothing towards the east but a
waste of sand. Perhaps what Herodotus says is less remarkable than what
he does not say. For of the monstrous races which Scylax and Hecataeus
before him, which Ctesias and Megasthenes after him, made an essential
part of the Indian world, Herodotus says not a word. Hellenic rationalism
1 See article by Von Radinger in Pauly-Wissowa, s. v. 'Hekataios. '
Ινδας το α'ko'υω νομαδας ιπποβ' αμοσιν
ειναι καμ’ηλοι3 αστραβίζουσας αθ'ονα
παρ' Αιθιοψιυ α' στυγειτουουμ'ευα3
Supplices 284-286,
So the passage reads in Sidgwick's text. This involves a certain amount of conjectural
emendation, since the MS. reading is obviously in part corrupt. One must add that
the emendation proposed by Professor Tucker and approved by W. Headlam, tolas for
'Ivdds (MS. ’Iudous), eliminates the Indians altogether.
a
2
## p. 355 (#393) ############################################
xvi]
HERODOTUS
355
took in him the form of a saving good sense. Certain of the broad facts
about India Herodotus knew correctly - the diversity of its population, for
one. “There be many nations of Indians,' he says, 'diverse one from the
other in tongue, some of them are roving tribes, some of them are settled,
and some dwell in the swamps of the river, and live on raw fish which they
catch from boats of reed (kalamos)? ' Herodotus knew also that the
population of India was a very vast one. '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.
is a horseman, with lance at rest, charging down upon a retreating
elephant, on the back of which are two men turning round to face their
pursuer. On the reverse, beside the monogram, is a tall figure, wearing
cloak and cap, and having a sword by his side, standing to left holding a
thunderbolt and a spear. In spite of certain features which are not alto-
gether satisfactory, the genuineness of the coin has been unhesitatingly
accepted by Head and Gardner, and from such experienced judges it would
be very rash to differ. Gardner, who was the first to publish it (N. C. ,
1887, p. 177), was disposed to give it to Bactria and to connect it with 'some
notable victory won by a Greek King of Bactria over the invading hordes
of Yueh-chi in the second century B. C. ' Head, on the other hand, comes
to the conclusion, ‘after a careful study of the fabric. . . that it belongs to
Alexander's own time, and that it records the historical event of his
invasion of the Punjab in 326 B. C. ' He sees in the standing figure a
representation of Alexander as Zeus, while he puts forward the interesting
suggestion that the lance is being wielded, not by the horseman, but by
the rearmost of the two elephant-riders, and that consequently the scene
depicted is the retreat of Porus and his pursuit by Taxiles, exactly as
recorded by Arrian (v, 18). The coin, he thinks, may have been struck by
Taxiles himself at his capital city Takshaçilā. Unfortunately this hypothesis
is not supported by the 'find-spot' of the decadrachm. It was discovered
at Khullum in Bukhāra.
A similar inconclusive result awaits any endeavour to sift the asser-
tions so frequently advanced as to the circulation, and even the striking,
of double darics in India. These fine gold coins (Pl. I, 6) are, in the strict
sense, Persian. But it is hardly likely that any of them were minted until
after the defeat of the last of the Achaemenids by Alexander. It is certain
that the great majority bear Greek monograms or letters, and that they
were issued at Babylon, and possibly elsewhere, by the satraps of the
## p. 350 (#388) ############################################
350
[сн
ANCIENT GREEK COINS IN INDIA
Macedonian conqueror. That they were popular in the East is beyond
question. Whether they made their way into India is another matter.
The statement that they were struck there has nothing whatever to confirm
it. Nearly all of the specimens in the British Museum were acquired at
Rāwalpindi, but the real source seems to have been the rich find or series
of finds made about 1877 and 1878 in Bukhāra, ‘eight marches beyond the
Oxus, at an old fort on the tongue of land formed by two joining rivers. '
The precise locality appears to have been Kabadian, a town on the
Kapinahan, in the Sogdiāna.
## p. 351 (#389) ############################################
CHAPTER XVI
INDIA IN EARLY GREEK AND LATIN LITERATURE
In this chapter we shift our point of view. We no longer try to trans-
fer ourselves to ancient India and see for ourselves what is going on there :
we ask instead what impression this magnitude, India, made upon another
people, the Hellenes on the shores of the Mediterranean, the progenitors
of our modern European rationalistic civilisation. India is for us now
a remote country, 2800 miles away.
The Greek peoples at the time when the Homeric poems were
composed had probably never heard of India, and knew nothing of
the Aryan cousins separated from them by the great Semitic kingdoms of
Assyria and Babylonia. At most they knew that peoples of dark complexion
dwelt, some towards the setting, and some towards the rising, sun'.
The Homeric Greeks used ivory, and were no doubt aware that it was
the tusk of an animal--the Phoenician traders indeed will have called it, as
the Hebrews did, shen, 'tooth' - but the ivory was more prubably African
ivory brought from Egypt than Indian? .
The Greek word for tin, again, found already in Homer, kassiteros, has
been adduced to show that tin was among the wares which travelled to the
Greek world from India. For the Greek word is obviously the same as the
Sanskrit word kastira. Unfortunately the borrowing seems to have been the
other way. The word kastira found its way comparatively late into India
from Greece
In the sixth century B. C. the Semitic and other kingdoms of Nearer
Asia disappeared before a vast Āryan Empire, the Persi an, which touched
Greece at one extremity and India at the other. Tribute from Ionia and
1 Odyssey I, 22 f.
2 The derivation of the Greek word for ivory, elephas, given in Liddell and Scott
is etymology at its wildest. It is supposed to be the Sanskrit word ibha, meaning
'elephant,' preceded by the Arabic definite article el (! ). Not much can be built upon
the passage, I Kings, X, 22, where the Hebrew author states that the navy of King
Solomon in the tenth century B. C. brought (according to our English version) 'ivory,
apes and peacocks. ' See Cheyne in Encycl. Bibl. , 8. v. 'Ophir' and 'Peacocks. '
3 E. g. by Lassen, II, 632.
4 Daremberg and Saglio, 8. v. 'stannum. ,
>
351
## p. 352 (#390) ############################################
352
(CH.
INDIA IN GREEK AND LATIN LITERATURE
tribute from the frontier hills of India found its way into the same imperial
treasure-houses at Ecbatana or Susa. Contingents from the Greek cities of
Asia Minor served in the same armies with levies from the banks of
the Indus. From the Persian the name Indoi, 'Indians', now passed
into Greek speech. Allusions to India begin to appear in Greek literature. !
It is not a mere accident that the books produced by a people
who dwelt so far away from India should to-day contribute to our know-
ledge of ancient India. In the Greek republics a new quality was appearing
in the world - or rather the development of a certain factor in the human
mind to an activity and power not seen before-the quality which we may
describe as Rationalism. That is what makes the essential continuity bet-
ween the ancient Mediterranean civilisation and the civilisation which has
developed so wonderfully in Europe during the last five centuries. A charac-
teristic of this rationalism is a lively curiosity as to the facts of the
Universe, an interest which directs itself upon the endless variety of the
world, in contrast with that movement of the spirit, exemplified in the sages
of India and in the piety of medieval Europe, which seeks to flee from the
Many to the One. To be interested in a fact as such, to care so much
about its precise individual character, as to examine and verify and try to
get its real contours, to value hypothesis only so far as it can be substan-
tiated by reference to objective truth - these are the motives behind modern
Western Science; and a disinterested intellectual curiosity in the facts of
the outside world has actually helped to give the West a power to modify
and control that world for practical uses never before possessed by man.
It was the beginning of this interest in the facts of the world, the desire to
see things as they really were, which marked ancient Greek culture, as
expressed in its writings and its art. The universal curiosity of Herodotus
in the fifth century B. C. , the eager eyes of the men of scierce and of action
who accompanied Alexander, the industrious enquiries of Megasthenes-it
is to these that we owe such information about India as the Greek and
Latin books contain.
And yet in order to estimate this information truly one must bear in
mind some limiting considerations. The motive of intellectual curiosity just
described, the critical scientific temper, has never been exhibited in complete
purity. It is all a question of more or less. The Greeks had it more than
any previous people; the modern man of science has it more than the
Greeks ; but not even the modern man of science has so far reduced all the
other elements of human nature to their proper place, as to make his
1 Indian influence has been alleged in the philosophy of Pythagoras who must
have been born in the early years of the sixth century, some fifty years before the
Persian conquest of Babylon. The question is examined at length by Prof. A. B. Keith
in the J. R. A. S. for 1909, pp. 569 f. , Pythagoras and the Doctrine of Transmigration.
Prof. Keith's conclusion is that there is no evidence for the Indian influence.
## p. 353 (#391) ############################################
XVI]
SCYLAX OF CARY ANDA
353
curiosity absolutely disinterested or his criticism impeccably scientific. In
the case of the ancient Greeks, scientific curiosity was constantly being
interfered with and thwarted by another interest which was strong in
them – the love of literary form, the delight in logical expression. One of
the reasons why Natural Science never got farther than it did among the
Greeks is that a book-tradition would so soon establish itself in which the
original observation became stereotyped and passed on from writer to writer
with no fresh verification or addition. From the fifth century onwards a
conventional classicism was always hemming in vitality and making litera-
ture opaque to real life. This is what one has to remember in approaching
the Greek notices of India or their reproduction by Latin writers.
The classical notices of India represent only three groups of original
documents, (1) the works produced by Greeks of Asia Minor from the
latter part of the sixth century till the beginning of the fourth century
B. C. , (2) the works based upon the expedition of Alexander in the fourth
century, and (3) the works of the Greek ambassadors sent in the third
century from Syria and Egypt to the court of Pāțaliputra. The first group-
Scylax, Hecataeus, Herodotus, Ctesias - was for most purposes superseded
by the two later ones, since the expedition of Alexander marked a new
epoch of geographical knowledge. Yet to some extent even in later times
the earlier writers were drawn upon.
The first Greek book about India was perhaps written in the latter
part of the sixth century B. c. by Scylax of Caryanda, a Greek sea-captain,
whom King Darius (522-486 B. c. ) employed to explore the course
of the Indus? . The book seems to have lain before Aristotle two centu-
ries later, who quotes, as coming from it, a statement that among the
Indians the kings were held to be of a superior race to their subjects.
Scylax probably did not tell much of his own experiences in descending the
Indus, or we should have heard of his book in connexion with the voyage
of Alexander. He probably preferred to astonish his countrymen with
travellers’tales-stories of people who used their enormous feet as sunshades
(Skiapodes), of people who wrapped themselves up in their own ears
(Otoliknoi or Enotokoitoi), of people with one eye, and so on, with which
the Greek tradition about India thus started and which it retained to the
ends. These stories, it is now recognised, correspond with statements in
the old Indian books about peoples on the confines of the Indian world,
and Scylax may therefore very well have really heard them from Indians
and accepted them in simple faith.
Herodotus IV, 44.
2 Polit. VII, 14.
Philostratus, Vit. A poll, III, 47 ; Tzetzes, Chil. VII, 630 f,
## p. 354 (#392) ############################################
351
[ch.
INDIA IN GREEK AND LATIN LITERATURE
POS.
Hecataeus of Miletus had probably already given forth his geographic
cal work, the Periodos Ges, before 500 B. C. At the extremity of his field
of vision there was some vague picture, derived from Scylax and the
Persians, of the Indian world. His knowledge stopped on the frontier of
the Persian Empire, the river Indus. Beyond that was just a great desert
of sand. But the name of the people called Gandhāri on the upper Indus
had reached him, and the name of a city in that region, whence Scylax had
started on his expedition down the river : Hecataeus wrote it as Kaspapy-
He mentioned the names of other Indian peoples too of the frontier
hills-Opiai, Kalatiai are the ones preserved in his fragments, and a city
of India which he called Argante. The fabulous Skiapodes also appeared in
Hecataeus as well as in Scylax, though Hecataeus by some confusion
connected them with the African Aethiopians instead of with India'.
We may probably infer from the long geographical passages in the
plays of Aeschylus, that a lovely interest in far-off peoples and strange
lands was general in the Greek world of the fifth century. Where an
ancient Argive king in the Suppliants has to express wonder at the foreign
garb of the Egyptian, maidens, the poet takes the opportunity to give eri-
dence of his anthropological knowledge. The king mentions different races
whose appearance might be like that, and in the course of bis specula-
tions, says –
‘Moreover I hear tell of Indians, of women that go roving on camels,
mounted horse-fashion, riding on padded saddles, them that are citizens
of a land neighbouring the Ethiopians. '
In the Greek books which we possess this is the earliest mention of
Indians by name.
A good deal of what Herodotus wrote about India (middle of the
fifth century) was no doubt drawn from Hecataeus- his idea, for instance,
that the river Indus flowed towards the east, and that beyond that corner
of India which the Persians knew there was nothing towards the east but a
waste of sand. Perhaps what Herodotus says is less remarkable than what
he does not say. For of the monstrous races which Scylax and Hecataeus
before him, which Ctesias and Megasthenes after him, made an essential
part of the Indian world, Herodotus says not a word. Hellenic rationalism
1 See article by Von Radinger in Pauly-Wissowa, s. v. 'Hekataios. '
Ινδας το α'ko'υω νομαδας ιπποβ' αμοσιν
ειναι καμ’ηλοι3 αστραβίζουσας αθ'ονα
παρ' Αιθιοψιυ α' στυγειτουουμ'ευα3
Supplices 284-286,
So the passage reads in Sidgwick's text. This involves a certain amount of conjectural
emendation, since the MS. reading is obviously in part corrupt. One must add that
the emendation proposed by Professor Tucker and approved by W. Headlam, tolas for
'Ivdds (MS. ’Iudous), eliminates the Indians altogether.
a
2
## p. 355 (#393) ############################################
xvi]
HERODOTUS
355
took in him the form of a saving good sense. Certain of the broad facts
about India Herodotus knew correctly - the diversity of its population, for
one. “There be many nations of Indians,' he says, 'diverse one from the
other in tongue, some of them are roving tribes, some of them are settled,
and some dwell in the swamps of the river, and live on raw fish which they
catch from boats of reed (kalamos)? ' Herodotus knew also that the
population of India was a very vast one. '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.
