Ancient India as Described in Classical Literature

Front matter

ANCIENT INDIA

As described in Classical Literature

BEING A COLLECTION OF GREEK AND LATIN TEXTS RELATING TO INDIA, EXTRACTED FROM HERODOTUS, STRABO, DIODORUS SICULUS, PLINY, AELIAN, PHILOSTRATUS, DION CHRYSOSTOM, PORPHYRY, STOBAEUS, THE ITENERARY OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT, THE PERIEGESIS OF DIONYSIUS, THE DIONYSIAKA OF NONNUS, THE ROMANCE HISTORY OF ALEXANDER AND OTHER WORKS

Introduction

INTRODUCTION

This is the sixth and last volume of a series of works, which, in accordance with the original design announced in the first volume which appeared in 1877, contains annotated translations of all the Greek and Roman Classics which throw any light upon the distant past of India.

The volumes already published are:—

Westminster, 1893. New edition, 1896. This work contains translations of the accounts of Alexander's campaigns in India and Afghanistan found in Arrian, Q. Curtius, Diodorus Siculus, Plutarch, and Justinus. The Introduction contains a sketch of the History of Alexander, and the Preface to the new edition brings the work up to date.

The present volume, which completes the series, contains translations of all the remaining accounts of India which occur in the Classics, and which are all either extracts from larger works, or merely incidental notices.

The extracts have been collected from the following sources:—

The Itinerary of Alexander the Great, An excellent work. (by an unknown author) dedicated to the Emperor Constantius, and meant for his guidance in the war against Sapor for which he was preparing.

Works containing passages about the Brachmans and Buddhists of India:—

The Pseudo-Kallisthenes, or Romance History of Alexander, which contains the short treatise by Palladius About the Nations of India and the Brachmans.

Various authors by whom the Brachmans are incidentally noticed: Clemens Alexandrinus, Origen, St. Jerome, Archelaus, Kedrenus, Rufinus, and Hierokles.

Various works in which India is incidentally noticed, as in Polybius, Pausanias, Frontinus, Plutarch, Appian, Ammianus Marcellinus, Dion Cassius, and some Latin poets.

The texts which we have thus enumerated contain all, or nearly all, the information of worth relating to India that can be gathered from classical sources, and we propose in the sequel to offer a few general observations directed chiefly to show the value of these texts and how they may best be classified. It may be said at once that their value cannot well be overrated in view of the fact that without them our knowledge of India before the era of the Mohammedan Conquest would have remained all but an utter blank on the page of history. The Indians themselves did not write history. They produced, no doubt, a literature both voluminous and varied, and containing works which rank as masterpieces in various departments of Philosophy, Poetry, and Science, but within its vast range History is conspicuous by its absence. Their learned men were Brahmans whose modes and habits of thought almost necessarily incapacitated them for the task of historical composition, Absorbed in devout meditation on the Divine Nature or in profound speculations on the insoluble mystery of existence, they regarded with indifference or contempt the concerns of this transitory world which they accounted as unreal, as a scene of illusion, or, to use their own expression, as Mâya. Hence they allowed events, even those of the greatest public moment, to pass unrecorded, and so to perish from memory. With regard, for instance, to such a memorable episode in the national history as the Macedonian Invasion, scarcely an allusion can be traced in Sanskrit writings. So, too, the existence of a line of Greco-Baktrian kings, some of whom extended their rule into Afghanistan and far into Northern India is a fact that remained unknown until brought to light by modern researches. We are, again, left still to this day in darkness as to the origin and progress of that great revolution by which the Brahmans succeeded not only in overthrowing Buddhism, which had for centuries been the state religion, but even in all but completely extirpating it from the land of its birth. These, and other instances that might be cited, let us see that so far as the native literature is concerned, the ancient history of India would have remained for ever shrouded in all but impenetrable darkness. That the case is not so is mainly due to the classical records, which for a period of more than a thousand years give us from time to time some insight more or less into the internal condition of the country, as well as into the nature and extent of its commerce with foreign nations. It was fortunate, again, that about the time when the light from the Classics began to fail, light was vouchsafed from another source—the narratives of Buddhist pilgrims who between the fourth and eighth centuries of our era came from China to India to visit the scenes which had been consecrated by the presence of their great Teacher, as well as to procure authentic copies of the laws of their Faith, The classical accounts, however, are not only earlier than the Chinese by some six or seven centuries, but deal with a far greater variety of subjects. Oriental scholars and archeologists, by combining the knowledge derived from these sources with that which has been elicited from a close scrutiny of the native literature and such memorials of the past of India as time has spared, have succeeded not only in materially mitigating the obscurity in which Indian antiquity lay enshrouded, but even in constructing an outline of the early national history and in bringing its chronology into order and into line with the chronology of the outside world.

For the classification of the classical accounts of India, we have selected as the most useful principle of division that of the order of time in which they were produced. They thus fall into two classes according as they appeared before or after the Christian era, and are at the same time further differentiated by the fact that while the former were nearly all written by observers on the spot, this signal advantage cannot be claimed with certainty for more than one or two works of the latter class. It is a matter of profound regret that, with the exception of the History of Herodotus, all the works of the earlier date are lost and only known from fragments of their contents cited in works of the later date.

WRITERS ON INDIA BEFORE THE CHRISTIAN ERA

The early works again admit of a subdivision according as they appeared before or after the Macedonian Invasion (326 B.C.), which was the means of opening up India and its wonders to the knowledge of mankind, which antecedently to that event was as meagre as it was vague and nebulous. There were four works in which that knowledge, such as it was, was found embodied:—

The treatise on India, called the Indika, written by Ktêsias the Knidian (about 400 B.C.), a work full of wonderful stories about India, with which the author had been entertained while resident for seventeen years in Persia as physician to the royal family.

The work of Ktêsias had been some seventy years before the world, when Alexander's Asiatic expedition showed to what extent that author's accounts of India squared or otherwise with the facts as observed. The great conqueror’s expedition was not entirely military; it was also partly scientific, and made vast additions to the sum of human knowledge. Alexander himself had been a disciple of the great master of knowledge, and among the officers who accompanied him into India, not a few were distinguished for their literary and scientific culture. Some of these employed their pens in recording his warlike achievements and in describing the countries into which he had carried his arms. Among these the more eminent were: Ptolemy, the son of Lagus, who became King of Egypt; Aristobulus of Potidæa; Nearchus, the admiral of Alexander's fleet; Onesikritus, the pilot of the fleet; Eumenes of Kardia, Alexander's secretary; Chares of Mitylene; Kallisthenes, Aristotle's kinsman; Kleitarchus, son of Deinon of Rhodes; Polykleitus of Larissa; Anaximenes of Lampsakus; Diognetus and Bæton, the measurers of Alexander's marches; Kyrsilus of Pharsalus, and a few others, These writers were succeeded by three others, ambassadors sent successively by Greek sovereigns to the Indian court at Palibothra (Patna), namely, Megasthenes and Deïmachus sent from the Syrian court, and Dionysius sent from the Egyptian, These all had the advantage which only one or two writers of the later period enjoyed, that of describing India from what they had seen with their own eyes. To them belongs the merit of having been the first who communicated to the world conceptions of India approximating to the truth on points of such principal importance as its position relative to other countries, its boundaries, its general configuration, its total dimensions both in length and breadth, its physical features and productions, the character of its inhabitants and the nature of their social and political institutions. It must be noted, however, that the personal acquaintance of Alexander and his companions with India was limited to the North—to the regions traversed by the Kophen (Kabul river) and the Indus, and the tributaries of these great rivers. Megasthenes, however, saw more of the country than the writers who preceded him, for while their knowledge of it terminated at the Hyphasis (Beias river), he crossed that river near its junction with the Hesidrus (Satlej river), and, pursuing his journey along the Royal Road, which ran from the Indus to the Jumna and the Ganges, arrived at Palibothra, the capital of Sandracottus (Chandra Gupta), the founder of the celebrated Mauryan Dynasty, This city, the ruins of which now lie buried to a depth of twelve or fifteen feet below the site of its modern representative, Patna, lay about two degrees to the north of the summer tropic, on the southern bank of the Ganges, at the point where up till 1379 A.D. it received the waters of the Erannoboas, now the Sôn river. Here Megasthenes resided for several years, in the course of which he was admitted, as we are told, to several interviews with Sandracottus, and, as we may suppose, to interviews also with his Queen, who was the daughter of his friend and sovereign, Seleukus Nikator, the King of Syria. Here also with assiduous observation and inquiry he collected the materials from which he composed his famous work on India, called the Indika, the merits of which were so conspicuous that it became of paramount authority, and the main source whence subsequent writers derived their accounts of India. Strabo, indeed, accused him of mendacity, but in spite of this censure he frequently cites him. Megasthenes, moreover, is now recognised as a writer of scrupulous veracity, for it is found that the picture which he presents of Indian life, customs, and institutions is, so far as can now be judged, singularly correct. The ground on which Strabo has mainly based his attack is, that Megasthenes has described as existing in India some races of men which were not only of monstrous, but even of impossible, deformity. Now the names of these races are either transliterations or translations of names, all of which occur in Sanskrit literature, a fact which shows that Megasthenes did not invent the stories about those races, but must have heard them from natives—descendants of the Aryan conquerors of India, who were in the habit of holding up to contempt and odium the indigenous tribes who had resisted their arms.

Deïmachus also wrote a work on India, but nothing more is known of it than that it consisted of two books and grossly exaggerated the dimensions of the country, Still less is known of Dionysius, who, as Pliny tells us, was sent by Ptolemy Philadelphus to the Indian King, and like Megasthenes made known the forces of the Indian nations.

Somewhat later than the work of Megasthenes on India, another was written by Patrokles, not however restricted to that country, but embracing also the provinces between the Indus and the Kaspian Sea, which he governed both for Seleukus Nikator and Antiochus I. Patrokles is often cited by Strabo and commended for his veracity.

The information contained in the works of Patrokles was held in high esteem and much used by Eratosthenes, the President (from 240 to 196 B.C.) of the Alexandrian Library, and the first who raised Geography to the rank of a science, by collecting its facts hitherto scattered and disjointed, and arranging them in a system framed on scientific principles. The conclusions, however, at which Eratosthenes arrived with regard to the position and configuration of India were far from correct. He conceived, for instance, that the projecting point of the peninsula faced south-east instead of south, and even advanced towards the east farther than the mouth of the Ganges, herein departing from the guidance of Patrokles. Like Herodotus, moreover, he conceived that India lay at the world's end on the verge of the Eastern Ocean.

The History of Polybius, who wrote about 144 B.C., contained, there is reason to believe, valuable information about India relating to the times of the Seleucid sovereigns. But most of the books of that work have been lost, and we have only the one short notice which is given in this volume (pp. 209, 210).

The next writer after Polybius who notices India and belongs to the period under consideration was Artemidorus of Ephesus, who flourished about 100 B.C. and was the author of an excellent work on Geography, extracts from which were preserved by Marcianus of Herakleia (about 400 A.D.). With regard to India he seems to have followed inferior authorities, and his account of it is pronounced by Strabo to be inaccurate. He avoided, however, the too common error of making the Ganges flow from west to east, Some of his estimates of distances along the coasts of India have been preserved.

From this review of the early literature about India it will be seen that after the time of Megasthenes very scanty additions were made to the knowledge of India during the period under notice. We may attribute this in great measure to the rise and spread of the Parthian power, which interposed as a barrier to prevent communication between Syria and her provinces in the East which had revolted from her authority in the reign of Antiochus II. How effective this barrier proved in preventing the knowledge of what was happening in the East from penetrating to the West, may be judged from the fact that we are indebted to the researches of modern scholars for our knowledge of the existence of the Greco-Baktrian sovereigns, some of whom had extended their sway into Northern India as far, perhaps, as to the mouth of the Narbada. The conclusions of these scholars have been based on a few incidental notices in the classical writers, but mainly on the inscriptions on coins of the sovereigns found in great abundance in North Afghanistan and Baktria.

It is greatly to be regretted that, with the exception of Herodotus, not one of the works on India penned by any of the foregoing writers who knew the country personally has come down to us except in epitomes or citations from later authors.

WRITERS ABOUT AND AFTER THE TIME OF THE CHRISTIAN ERA

These later writers on India differ from their predecessors in this respect, that, with only one or two doubtful exceptions, they all write without personal knowledge of the country. The author of the Periplûs of the Erythræan Sea probably visited the seats of commerce on the western seaboard, and Kosmas Indikopleustes, the island of Ceylon and the Malabar coast, but so much as this cannot, so far as I am aware, be said safely of any other writers on India who belonged to this period. We are indebted, however, to these writers not only for having preserved much of what they had learned themselves from the earlier works, all lost since their time, but also for much valuable information which they had gathered from merchants engaged in the Indian trade, from travellers who had visited India, from ambassadors sent from India to the emperors either at Rome or at Constantinople, and from Indians themselves settled in Alexandria, if not also in other places.

The writers who have made most additions to the old stock of information are the unknown author of the Periplûs referred to, Pliny, Ptolemy the Geographer, Porphyry, Stobæus, and Kosmas Indikopleustes. The author of the Periplûs and Pliny have thrown much light on the geography of India, and on the nature of its commerce with Egypt and the West. Ptolemy, again, made important additions to the knowledge of the geography of Ceylon, the interior of India, and India beyond the Ganges. His map of India, however, has been distorted out of recognition by a portentous error, which makes the west coast, instead of running direct south to Cape Comorin, turn round, a little below the latitude of Bombay, and run eastward, thus altogether effacing the peninsula. Porphyry and Stobæus have preserved from Bardesanes, who flourished in the later half of the second century A.D., interesting particulars regarding the Brahman and Buddhist ascetics.

The story of Alexander's conquest of India, as related by his companions and other contemporaries, has been preserved by six authors in more or less detail: Diodorus Siculus, Arrian, Plutarch, Q. Curtius, Justinus, and the unknown author of the Itinerarium Alexandri Magni, a work written for the guidance of the Emperor Constantius II. in his war against Persia. Polyænus in his Stratagems of War, and Frontinus, who was at one time the Roman governor of Britain, in his work on the same subject, notice stratagems employed by Alexander in his Indian campaigns.

The period we are considering produced the two greatest works on Geography that antiquity can boast: the Geography of Strabo, completed about 19 A.D., and that of Claudius Ptolemy, which appeared about the middle of the second century A.D. Strabo's colossal work embraced Geography in all its branches—mathematical, physical, political, commercial, and historical. Ptolemy's Guide to Geography, which continued to be the paramount authority on the science till the discoveries of the great navigators of the later years of the fifteenth century showed its errors, differed from Strabo's production as does a skeleton from the living body. It contained very few descriptive notices, for Ptolemy's object in composing it was to correct and reform the map of the world, to expound the geometrical principles on which Geography should be based, and to determine the position of places on the surface of the earth by their latitudes and longitudes. Thus the bulk of his work consists of tables of names of places, followed by the figures for their latitudes and longitudes. In the Indian tables we find the names of many places which occur nowhere else. These he probably found in itineraries now lost, or in Sanskrit texts brought to Alexandria from India. Four other geographical works may be mentioned which make reference to India: The Compendium of Geography by Pomponius Mela, another Compendium by Solinus, the Periêgêsis of Dionysius, and the Periplûs of the Outer Sea by Marcianus of Herakleia. Geography was a science about which the Romans cared but little, and in their litcrature only two regular treatises oh the subject have come down to us, the Compendiums of Mela and Solinus. Mela wrote about 42 A.D. India has a place in his work, but Mela's knowledge of it was very vague, and his descriptive notices are borrowed from the ordinary Greek authorities. He regarded the promontory of Kolis (Cape Kory) as forming the eastern extremity of Asia in the South, and otherwise shows that he took no advantage of the increased knowledge in his day of the shores of India resulting from the extension of Roman commerce in the East. Solinus, who wrote about 238 A.D., derived nearly all his materials from Pliny's Natural History, the language of which he sometimes copies word for word without acknowledgment. He was partly also a copyist from Mela. His work was popular, and became the medium through which Pliny was best known in the middle ages. The eighty-five hexameter verses in which Dionysius Periêgêtes has described India and its conquest by Bacchus will be found translated in this volume. This poem was translated Into Latin hexameters both by Avienus and Priscian the Grammarian. Marcianus, who wrote in Greek (about A.D. 400?), follows Ptolemy, but his Periplûs gives no information about India that is not to be found in the great Alexandrian geographer. With regard to the Romance History of Alexander the Great (Pseudo-Kallisthenes), I have briefly indicated the nature of its contents, and translated the account given by Palladius in hisLausiac Histories of the Indian experience of the Theban scholar. Within the present decade Dr. Budge of the British Museum has published translations both of the Syriac and the Ethiopic versions of the Romance. It has been translated Into numerous other languages, and no book in the world, he says, except the Bible has been so widely read. I have sketched briefly the account given by Nonnus in his vast epic of the conquest of India by Bacchus.

India is very frequently mentioned incidentally in the Classics. Many of the notices have been cited in the five previous volumes. Those given here throw some light on Roman commerce with India, and on the embassies sent from thence to the Imperial Courts of Rome and Constantinople. From the brevity with which these embassies are noticed, we can gather little more than that the greatness of the Roman power had made a deep impression on the Indian mind, especially along the western seaboard, where, until the third century of our era, the commerce with Alexandria was still maintained, though with such an abatement of its former activity as foreboded its approaching extinction.

With regard to the traffic conveyed by the shorter route of the Persian Gulf and the Euphrates, one or two notices give us glimpses as to its condition both before and after the fall of Palmyra (273 A.D.), which had risen to vast opulence, splendour, and power, from being the intermediary of that traffic.

We seldom find the classical writers on India failing to mention the legends concerning Bacchus, Prometheus, and Herakles, who is said to have been, fifteen generations later than Father Bacchus, the civiliser of India and its first king. Pliny, citing Megasthenes, tells us that from the days of Father Bacchus to Alexander the Great their kings are reckoned at 154, whose reigns extended over 6451 years and 3 months. Megasthenes seems to have been the first who began practice of connecting or identifying the mythic gods or heroes of Indian tradition with the mythic heroes of Greek poetry.

I may in conclusion notice as a remarkable feature in the classical accounts of Taprobanê (Ceylon), that they persistently exaggerate to an enormous extent the dimensions of that island. Even Ptolemy himself, who otherwise describes it very accurately, fell in with the common error, and made it almost twenty times exceed its actual size.

Section I

Section I

HERODOTOS

Herodotos of Halikarnassos, the Father of History, had a most vague and meagre knowledge of India. He knew that it was one of the remotest provinces of the Persian Empire towards the east, but of its extent and exact position he had no proper conception. His work contains the first notice of the famous gold-digging ants, whose labours yielded the vast tribute in gold which India in the days of Darius paid to the Persian crown. Herodotos was born in B.C. 484, and died at Thurii, a city in Magna Græcia, situated on the Tarentine Gulf, where he spent the later years of life, and where he wrote his History. His death was subsequent to the breaking out of the Peloponnesian War in 431 B.C.

Book III. 89-96. In these chapters Herodotos relates that Darius ascending the throne of Persia divided his empire into twenty governments called Satrapies, and fixed the amount of tribute which each of these should pay into his treasury. India stands last in his enumeration of these Satrapies.

97. Of the Indians, the population is by far the greatest of all nations whom we know of, and they paid a tribute proportionately larger than all the rest, 360 talents of gold dust; this was the twentieth division.

98. The Indians obtain the great quantity of gold from which they supply the before-mentioned dust to the king, in the manner presently described. That part of India towards the rising sun is all sand; for of all the people with whom we are acquainted, and of whom anything certain is told, the Indians live the farthest towards the east and the sunrise, of all the inhabitants of Asia, for the Indians' country towards the east is a desert by reason of the sands. There are many nations of Indians, and they do not speak the same language as each other; some of them are nomades, and others not. Some inhabit the marshes of the river, and feed on raw fish, which they take going out in boats made of reeds; one joint of the reed makes a boat. These Indians wear a garment made of rushes, which, when they have cut the reed from the river and beaten it, they afterwards plait like a mat and wear it like a corselet.

99. Other Indians, living to the east of these, are nomades, and eat raw flesh; they are called Padæans. They are said to use the following customs. When any one of the community is sick, whether it be a woman or a man, if it be a man the men who are his nearest connections put him to death, alleging that if he wasted by disease his flesh would be spoilt; but if he denies that he is sick, they, not agreeing with him, kill and feast upon him. And if a woman be sick, in like manner the women who are most intimate with her do the same as the men. And whoever reaches to old age, they sacrifice and feast upon; but few among them attain to this state, for before that, they putto death every one that falls into any distemper.

100. Other Indians have the following different custom: they neither kill anything that has life, nor sow anything, nor are they wont to have houses, but they live upon herbs, and they have a grain the size of millet in a pod, which springs spontaneously from the earth, this they gather, and boil it and eat it with the pod. When any one of them falls into any disorder, he goes and lies down in the desert, and no one takes any thought about him, whether dead or sick.

101. The intercourse of all these Indians whom I have mentioned takes place openly as with cattle; and all have a complexion closely resembling the Ethiopians. The seed they emit is not white as that of other men, but black as their skin; the Ethiopians also emit similar seed. These Indians are situated very far from the Persians, towards the south, and were never subject to Darius.

102. There are other Indians bordering on the city of Caspatyrus and the country of Pactyice, settled northward of the other Indians, whose mode of life resembles that of the Bactrians. They are the most warlike of the Indians, and these are they who are sent to procure the gold; for near this part is a desert by reason of the sands. In this desert, then, and in the sand, there are ants in size somewhat less indeed than dogs, but larger than foxes. Some of them are in possession of the King of the Persians, which were taken there. These ants, forming their habitations underground, heap up the sand, as the ants in Greece do, and in the same manner; and they are very like them in shape. The sand that is heaped up is mixed with gold. The Indians therefore go to the desert to get this sand, each man having three camels, on either side a male one harnessed to draw by the side, and a female in the middle. This last the man mounts himself, having taken care to yoke one that has been separated from her young as recently born as possible; for camels are not inferior to horses in swiftness, and are much better able to carry burdens.

103. Is occupied with a short description of the camel.

104. The Indians then adopting such a plan and such a method of harnessing, set out for the gold, having before calculated the time, so as to be engaged in their plunder during the hottest part of the day, for during the heat the ants hide themselves under the ground. Amongst these people the sun is hottest in the morning, and not, as amongst others, at mid-day, from the time that it has risen some way, to the breaking up of the market; during this time it scorches much more than at mid-day in Greece, so that, it is said, they then refresh themselves in water. Mid-day scorches other men much the same as the Indians; but as the day declines, the sun becomes to them as it is to others in the morning; and

after this, as it proceeds it becomes still colder, until sunset; then it is very cold.

105. When the Indians arrive at the spot, having sacks with them, they fill them with the sand, and return with all possible expedition. For the ants, as the Persians say, immediately discovering them by the smell, pursue them, and they are equalled in swiftness by no other animal, so that the Indians, if they did not get the start of them while the ants were assembling, not a man of them could be saved. Now the male camels (for they are inferior in speed to the females) slacken their pace, dragging on, not both equally, but the females, mindful of the young they have left, do not slacken their pace. Thus the Indians, as the Persians say, obtain the greatest part of their gold; and they have some small quantity more that is dug in the country.