CHAPTER XVIII
EXPANSION OF THE HINDUS
THE history of India received a new light in the Age of Laws, or Philosophic Period, when the Greeks visited India and also compiled accounts of it from report. The first two epochs of Hindu history receive no light, therefore, from Greek literature, but in this third era India began to be known to Greece. Not to mention the philosopher Pythagoras, who is supposed by some scholars to have come under Indian influence, we may refer to the allusions to India in Herodotus, the Father of History, who lived in the fifth century before Christ.
Herodotus never visited India, but he gives from report valuable accounts of the Hindus, although he mingles them with legends and stories, and often confounds Hindu customs with those of the uncivilized aborigines who still inhabited large tracts in India. He tells us that the Indians were the greatest nation of the age, that they were divided into various tribes and spoke different tongues, that they procured great quantities of gold in their country, that India abounded
197
