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fierce rays of the sun.[1] Much lies in a name, and the error made by the Greeks in thus calling India Ethiopia led them into the further error of considering as pertinent to both these countries narrations, whether of fact or fiction, which concerned but one of them exclusively. This explains why we find in Greek literature mention of peculiar or fabulous races, both of men and other animals, which existed apparently in duplicate, being represented sometimes as located in India, and sometimes in Ethiopia or the countries thereto adjacent.[2] We can hardly wonder, when we consider the distant and sequestered situation of India, that the first conceptions which the Greeks had of it should have been of this nebulous character, but it seems some-
- ↑ See Homer, Od. I. 23-24, where we read
Αἰθίοπες, τοὶ διχθὰ δεδαίαται, ἔσχατοι ἀνδρῶν,
οἱ μὲν δυσομένου Ὑπερίονος, οἱ δ' ἀνιόντος.
(The Ethiopians, who are divided into two, and live at the world's end—one part of them towards the setting sun, the other towards the rising.) Herodotos in several passages mentions the Eastern Ethiopians, bnt distinguishes them from the Indians (see particularly bk. vii. 70). Ktêsias, however, who wrote somewhat later than Herodotos, frequently calls the Indians by the name of Ethiopians, and the final discrimination between the two races was not made till the Makedonian invasion gave the Western world more correct views of India. Alexander himself, as we learn from Strabo, on first reaching the Indus mistook it for the Nile. - ↑ Instances in point are the Skiapodes, Kynamolgoi, Pygmaiôi, Psylloi, Himantopodes, Sternophthalmoi, Makrobioi, and the Makrokephaloi, the Martikhora, and the Krokotta.
