Page:Ancient India as described by Megasthenês and Arrian.djvu/22

 THE FRAGMENTS OF THE INDIKA OF MEGASTHENÊS.

The ancient Greeks, till even a comparatively late period in their history, possessed little, if any, real knowledge of India. It is indeed scarcely so much as mentioned by name in their greatest poets, whether epic, lyric, or dramatic. They must, however, have known of its existence as early as the heroic times, for we find from Homer that they used even then articles of Indian merchandize, which went among them by names of Indian origin, such as kassiteros, tin, and elephas, ivory. But their conception of it, as we gather from the same source, was vague in the extreme. They imagined it to be an Eastern Ethiopia which stretched away to the uttermost verge of the world, and which, like the Ethiopia of the West, was inhabited by a race of men whose visages were scorched black by the