# Ancient India as described by Megasthenês and Arrian/Frag. XXX.

Fragm. XXX.
Plin. Hist. Nat. VII. ii. 14-22.
Of fabulous races.
According to Megasthenês, on a mountain called Nulo there live men whose feet are turned ​backward, and who have eight toes on each foot; $^2$while on many of the mountains there lives a race of men having heads like those of dogs, who are clothed with the skins of wild beasts, whose speech is barking, and who, being armed with claws, live by banting and fowling. [$^{2b}$Ktêsias asserts on his own authority that the number of these men was upwards of 120,000, and that there is a race in India whose females bear offspring but once in the course of their life, and that their children become at once grey-haired.]
$^3$Megasthenês speaks of a race of men among the Nomadic Indians who instead of nostrils have merely orifices, whose legs are contorted like snakes, and who are called Scyritæ. He speaks also of a race living on the very confines of India on the east, near the source of the Ganges, the Astomi, who have no mouth; who cover their body, which is all over hairy, with the soft down found upon the leaves of trees; and who live merely by breathing, and the perfume inhaled by the nostrils. They eat nothing, and they drink nothing. They require merely a variety of odours of roots and of flowers and of wild apples. The apples they carry with them when they go on a distant journey, that they may always have something to smell. Too strong an odour would readily kill them.
​$^4$Beyond the Astomi, in the remotest part of the monntaias, the Trispithami and the Pygmies are said to hare their abode. They are each three spans in height—that is, not more than seven-and-twenty inches. Their climate is salubrious and they enjoy a perpetual springs under shelter of a barrier of mountains which rise on the north. They are the same whom Homer mentions as being harassed by the attacks of the cranes. $^5$The story about them is—that mounted on the backs of rams and goats, and equipped with arrows, they march down in spring-time all in a body to the sea, and destroy the eggs and the young of these birds. It takes them always three months to finish this yearly campaign, and were it not undertaken they could not defend themselves against the vast flocks of subsequent years. Their huts are made of clay and feathers and egg-shells. [Aristotle says that they live in caves, but otherwise he gives the same account of them as others.] . . . .
[$^{5b}$ From Ktêsias we learn that there is a people belonging to this race, which is called Pandore and settled in the valleys, who live two hundred years, having in youth hoary hair, which in old age turns black. On the other hand, others do not live beyond the age of forty,—nearly related to the Macrobii, whose women bear offspring but once. Agatharchidês says the same of them, adding that they subsist on locusts, and are swift of foot.] $^6$Clitarchus and ​Megasthenês call them Mandi, and reckon the number of their villages at three hundred. The females bear children at the age of seven, and are old women at forty.
* ↑ V. L. Nullo.
* ↑ Called by Ktêsias Κυνοκέφαλοι, and in Sanskṛit Śunamuchâs or Śvâmuchâs.
* ↑ Possibly we should read Pândai, unless perhaps Megasthenês referred to the inhabitants of Mount Mandara.
* ↑ Conf. Fragm. L. 1, LI.