Page:Ancient India as described by Megasthenês and Arrian.djvu/122

 103 Besides these tbere are diviners and sorcerers, and adepts in the rites and customs relating to the dead, who go about begging both in villages and towns. Even snch of them as are of snperior culture and refinement inculcate such superstitions re- garding Hades as they consider favourable to piety and holiness of life. Women pursue phi- losophy with some of them, but abstain from sexual intercourse. Fragm. XLII. Clem. Alex. g^om. I. p. 305 D (ed. Colon. 1688). That the Jewish race is by far the oldest of all these, and that their philosophy, which has been committed to writing, preceded the philo- sophy of the Greeks, Philo the Pythagorean shows by many arguments, as does also Aristoboulos the Peripatetic, and many others whose names I need not waste time in enumerating. Megas- thenes, the author of a work on India, who lived with SeleukosNikator, writes most clearly on this point, and his words are these : — " All that has been said regarding nature by the ancients is asserted also by philosophers out of Greece, on the one pa/rt in India by the Brachmanes, and on the other in Syria by the people called the Jews." circnmstance that the religion, of Buddha should never have been expressly noticed by the Greek authors, though it had existed for two centuries before Alexander. The only ex- planation is that the appearance and manners of its fol- lowers were not so peculiar as to enable a foreigner to distinguish them from the mass of the people."