Page:Christianity in China, Tartary, and Thibet Volume I.djvu/42

30 was felt throughout the world. At that epoch the people of different nations had much more intercourse with each other, than has been commonly supposed, and the relations between the East and the West were much more frequent. There was apparently more individual energy then than in our days, and people did not require the aid of steam to undertake long and dangerous voyages. The natives of the banks of the Ganges were scattered over the West in much greater numbers than at present.

In the Letters of Alciphron, we find that the Greeks frequently had Hindoos of both sexes in their families, in the quality of domestics. The latter had especially emigrated in great numbers to Colchis; and when Metellus Celer was pro-consul in Gaul, fifty-nine years before Christ, the famous Ariovistus, king of the Suevi, made him a present of some Hindoos, who had been shipwrecked on the German coast. These were merchants, whose adventurous spirit had carried them to that distance from their country.

It is known that numerous embassies were sent from India to the emperors of Rome and Constantinople, down to the seventh century; but after that time, the Mussulman power, swelling and rolling on like an ocean tide, became an insurmountable obstacle to such communications.

The most famous of these embassies was that sent to Augustus by Porus, who boasted in his letter of having six kings under his authority. The object of this mission was to form an alliance with the Roman Emperor, and as he happened to be at that time in Spain, the ambassadors followed him thither; but as they did not on that occasion succeed in their object, others were