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Patna, the capital, in Megasthenes' time nine miles long by one and a half wide, and built of wood, he rebuilt in stone with walls intricately sculptured. Education was very widespread or universal. His edicts are sermons preached to the masses: simple ethical teachings touching on all points necessary to right living.
Callias took him further yet, to the home of the hermaphrodites; Nymphodorus showed him a race of fascinators who used enchanted words. With Apollonides he encountered women who killed with their eyes those on whom they looked too long. Megasthenes guided him to the Astomians, whose garments were the down of feathers, and who lived on the scent of the rose.
The Indians, says Megasthenes, were taller than other men, and of greater distinction and prouder bearing. The air and water of their land were the purest in the world; so you would expect in the people, the finest culture and skill in the arts. Almost always they gathered two harvests in the years; and famine had never visited India.
Had he gone further, and into the real India of the Ganges valley, his name, it is likely, would not have come down synonymous with victory; presentlv we will call Megasthenes to witness again as to the "unquestionable superiority of the Asiatic to the European."
It had already fulfilled that prophecy when the Greek Ambassador, Megasthenes, visited it in 303 B.C. A few remains only are being laboriously rescued from the waters of the Ganges, under which Pataliputra is for the most part buried.
I have not got the works of Arrian, or Mr. Lethbridge's 'History of the World' at hand, but I have some recollection of Sandracottus, or one of Asoka's fathers or grandfathers, marrying a Miss Megasthenes, or Seleucus. With such memories no wonder they call us 'Mean Whites." ALI BABA, K.C.B. No. I missed two people at the Delhi Assemblage of 1877.
Seleucus was stopt in his progress by the intelligence that Antigonus was about to invade his dominions; but before he retraced his steps towards the Euphrates, he formed a treaty with the Indian king Sandracottus, who resided at Palibothra: and afterwards sent Megasthenes, who had some knowledge of the country, from having accompanied Alexander, as his ambassador to him.
The people themselves, if we may believe Megasthenes, were a model people well worthy of a model government, though if he does not exaggerate, one is driven to wonder at the necessity for such fearful penalties as were inflicted for the most trivial breaches of the law.
Also he sent Megisthenes to be his ambassador at Pataliputra, Chandragupta's capital; and Megasthenes wrote; and in a few quotations from his lost book that remain, chiefly in Arrian, we get a kind of window wherethrough to look into India: the first, and perhaps the only one until Chinese travelers went west discovering. Here let me flash a green lantern.
For information about India itself, the Greeks were, for a long time, dependent upon the account of Megasthenes, an ambassador sent by Seleucus, one of Alexander's generals, to the Indian king of the Punjab.
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