Page:History of India Vol 9.djvu/100

 72 THE PRACTICE OF SUTTEE so difficult to stamp out. An occurrence so recent as that helps to lend colour to the accounts which are here presented, covering a period of fully two thousand years, from classic to mediaeval and modern times. The first selections are from Greek and Latin writers. The Greek historian Mkolaos Damaskenos, who LORD WILLIAM C. BENTINCK, UNDER WHOSE ADMINISTRATION SUTTEE WAS ABOLISHED. wrote toward the close of the first century B. c., ex- plicitly states in his " Paradoxical Customs " that " when the Hindus die, they cause to be burned with them the most devoted one of their wives; and there is great rivalry on the part of the wives themselves, as well as of their friends, each striving to gain the day." 1 Plutarch, in the first century A. D., reiterates 1 Nikolaos Damaskenos, Paradoxon Ethnikon Synagoge, Fragm. 143.