[564] "Brahma-Vasatya" in the Mahabharata; Lassen, loc. cit. 12, 973.
[565] Diod. 17, 102.
[566] Praesti; Curt. 9, 8. Lassen, loc. cit. 22, 187.
[567] Lassen, loc. cit. 12, 125.
[568] Droysen, loc. cit. 464, 469.
CHAPTER V.
POLITICAL AND SOCIAL LIFE OF THE INDIANS IN THE
FOURTH CENTURY B.C.
The Arians on the Indus and in the Panjab had remained more true to the old tendencies of life than their tribesmen who had turned towards the east. In the variety of the forms of their political life and their stimulating influence on each other, in healthy simple feeling, in warlike energy and martial spirit they were in advance of the land of the Ganges. Great as was the number of the tribes and states which filled the region of the Indus, and thickly as the land was populated, wide and many-sided as was the civilisation, in the development of religious and intellectual life, in industrial and mercantile activity, in civilisation of external life, in comfort and wealth, the land of the Ganges was undoubtedly in advance of the Indus.
After Alexander's army trod the soil of the Panjab, the eastern district also became better known to the Greeks. Megasthenes tells us that India was inhabited by 118 nations; the cities were so numerous that it was impossible to know and enumerate them.[569] Beyond the desert which extends from the Vipaça and Çatadru to the lands of the east,—the breadth is put by the Greeks at twelve days' journey—on the navigable Yamuna (Yomanes) dwelt the Çurasenas, whose cities were Mathura and Krishnapura;[570] further to the east were the Panchalas. At the head of this tribe, as we have seen, the Pandus once deposed the Kurus, the dominant family of the Bharatas, and took their place. Hence the name Panchalas was used instead of the name Bharatas for the tribes governed by the Pandus, first from Hastinapura and then from Kauçambi, as we assumed from native accounts (p. 96).[571] It has been remarked above (p. 366) that the dynasty of the Pandus came to an end about the middle of the fifth century, and the Çurasenas and Panchalas became subject to the kings of Magadha. In the south-west, on the hill and mountain territory, which gradually rises to the spurs of the Vindhyas, lay the Mavellas, according to the account of the Greeks, whose prince possessed five hundred elephants;[572] on the gulf of Cambay reigned kings, who resided in the city of Automela, which must have been a considerable place of trade. Lastly, in the peninsula of Surashtra (Guzerat) was a kingdom where the ruling family according to the Greeks bore the name of Pandus, and who therefore were connected by their lineage with Pandu, the father of Yudhishthira and Arjuna. The Pandus of Surashtra are said to have reigned over 300 cities and to have possessed 500 elephants of war.[573] If a branch of the house of Pandu, which ruled over the Panchalas and Bharatas, had founded the second Mathura on the south side of the Deccan, it was colonists from Surashtra who made Ceylon subject to the Brahmanic law (p. 369, 370). We have already stated what was known to Alexander and his companions of the inhabitants of the Ganges, the kingdom of the Gangarides, the Prasians (Prachyas), i. e. the men of the east, as they call themselves, obviously after the name common in the land of the Indus. The ample resources and powerful army which were ascribed in the land of the Indus to the ruler of this kingdom, the well-known Magadha, may have contributed in no small measure to the fact that Alexander's campaign came to an end on the Vipaça. In any case the accounts which the Greeks received in the land of the Indus about Magadha, confirm the predominant position which our inferences from native authorities compel us to ascribe to this kingdom after the time of king Kalaçoka, in the land of the Ganges. However exaggerated the statement of the Greeks about the power of the king of the Prasians may be, they give us the further proof that the consequence and power of Magadha under the Nandas in the first half of the fourth century B.C. had rather increased than diminished; they show us, finally, that even the usurper who overthrew the Nandas, and the Dhanapala who sat on the throne of Magadha at the time when Alexander marched through the Indus—the Greeks call him Xandrames—maintained the ruling position of Magadha on the Ganges.