Page:The Ganas or Republics of Ancient India.pdf/3

Rh galleys of thirty oars and transport vessels.

Two other nations came to have close touch with the troops of Alexander. These are the Agalassoi and the Nysaians. The former as Curtius says, put up a strong resistance to the Greek invaders, and may be taken to have been the first historic protagonists of Hindu Bushido or Kshatriyaism. For when they were defeated by the enemy, these gallant patriots preferred death to dishonor and national humiliation. Accordingly they "set fire to the town and cast themselves with their wives and children into the flames." $20$  Thus in the pride of nationalism, fostered also on the occasion of Moslem invasions in the Middle Ages, has to be sought one of the feeders of the custom that in subsequent ages came to be practised exculsivelyexclusively [sic] by women, viz., the satee or the self-immolation of widows on the funeral pyres of their husbands.

The Nysaians $21$  are described by Arrian as a free commonwealth. They had a president, but the government of their state was entrusted to the aristocracy. This aristocratic element was represented by the council of three hundred wise men. One hundred of these Senators were called for by Alexander. "How, O King!" was the reply of the president of the Nysaian Republic to this suggestion of the Macedonian, "can a single city, if deprived of a hundred of its best men, continue to be well governed?" The reply was characteristic of the political mentality of the republican Hindus of the Punjab and North-western India who presented single or united fronts against Alexander's Indian adventure (B. C. 327-324). $22$

This cluster of republics represented evidently the survival of a type of polity that had been more or less uniformly distributed throughout the Hindu world. An older link in the chain of India's political evolution is furnished by the clan-commonwealths of the fifth and sixth centuries B. C. And it is to the eastern and central regions of Northern India, roughtly [sic] speaking, to the modern province of Bihar, that we have to turn our eyes for these oldest historical specimens of Hindu republics.

These republican peoples are generally enumerated as ten. $23$  In regard to seven of them there is hardly any information of political importance. The Bhaggas had their headquarters in Soomsoomara Hill, the Boolis in Allakappa, and the Kalamas in Kesapootta. Pipphalivana was the territory of the Moriyas, and Ramagama of the Koliyas. There were two branches of the Mallas, one with sovereignty in Koosinara, and the other in Pava. The most important of these ten nations were the Sākiyas of Kapila-vastu, the Videhas of Mithilā and the Lichchhavis of Vesali. The last two were amalgamated and went by the name of the Vajjians.

No republic in mankind's ancient history can surpass the Sākiya republic in the magnitude of its influence on world-culture. It had authority over a region which has for two thousand and five hundred years been the Jerusalem of Buddhism, the Tenjiko of the Japanese, and the Tien-chu (Heaven) of the Chinese. Shākya the Buddha (or Awakened) was, as the name implies, a citizen of the commonwealth of the Sākiyas. His father and brother were archons of this state. The common tradition that Shākya renounced princedom is erroneous. For he was not a prince at all, but only the son of a president.

The Sākiyas numbered one million strong. Their territory lay about fifty miles east to west and extended thirty or forty miles south from the foot of the Himalayas. The administrative and judicial business of this republic was carried out in a public assembly. The civic center of Kapila-vastu the capital, as that of other cities of the nation, was the mote-hall. The young and old alike took part in the deliberations as to the government of the country. The chief was elected by the people. He used to preside over the sessions. The title of the president was rājā (literally king). $24$  It corresponded in reality to the consul in Rome and the archon in Athens. And if the emissaries that Pyrrhus of Epirus sent to republican Rome (B. C. 280) could not describe the