Page:Ancient India as described by Megasthenês and Arrian.djvu/93

74 cropped, this being a puniBhment to the last de- gree infamous. Fragm. XXVIII. Athen. iv. p. 153. OS the Suppers of the IncUans, Me^rasthen^s, in the second book of his Inddlcay says that when the Indians are at supper a table is placed before each person, this being like a tripod. There is placed upon it a golden bowl, into which they first put rice, boifed as oUe would boil barley, and then they add many 'dainties prepared according to Indian receipts. Fbagm. XXIX* Strab. XV. i. 57— p. 711. Of fabulous tribes. But deviating into fables he says there are men five spans and even three spans in height, some of whom want the nose, having only two orifices above the mouth through which they ' breathe. * Against the men of three spans, war, as Homer has sung, is waged by the cranes, and also by partridges, which are as large as geese, f • Cf . Stxab. II. i. 9,— p. 70 :— D^imachos and Megas- thends are especially unworthy of credit. It is they who tell those stories about the men who sleep in their ears, the men without mouths, the men without nostrils, the men with one eye, the men with long legs, and the men with their toes turned backward. They renewed Homer's fable about the battle between the Cranes and the Pygmies, asserting that the latter were three spans in height. They told of the ants that dig for gold, of Fans with wedge-shaped heads, and of serpents swallow- ing down oxen and stags, horns and all, — ^the one author meanwhile accusing the other of falsehood, as Eratosthenes has remarked. t Ktdsias in his Indika mentions Pygmies as belonging to India. The Indians themselves considered them as be- longing to the race of the Eir&tsa, a barbarous people who inhabited woods and mountains and lived by hunting, and who were so diminutiYe that their name became a synonym Digitized by Google