No one should impeach the personal testimony of this
conscientious author had he been himself an eye-witness instead of
Megasthenes. But when a man comes to know that he wrote his accounts
upon the now lost works of Aristobulus and Ptolemy; and that the latter
described their data from texts prepared by authors who had never set
their eyes upon one line written by either Megasthenes or Nearchus
himself; and that knowing so much one is informed by Western historians
that among the works of Arrian, Book VII. of the "Anabasis of
Alexander," is "the chief authority on the subject of the Indian
invasion--a book unfortunately with a gap in its twelfth chapter"--one
may well conceive upon what a broken reed Western authority leans for
its Indian chronology. Arrian lived over 600 years after Buddha's
death; Strabo, 500 (55 "B.C."); Diodorus Siculus--quite a trustworthy
compiler!--about the first century; Plutarch over 700 anno Buddhae, and
Quintus Curtius over 1,000 years! And when, to crown this army of
witnesses against the Buddhist annals, the reader is informed by our
Olympian critics that the works of the last-named author--than whom no
more blundering (geographically, chronologically, and historically)
writer ever lived--form along with the Greek history of Arrian the most
valuable source of information respecting the military career of
Alexander the Great--then the only wonder is that the great conqueror
was not made by his biographers to have--Leonidas-like--defended the
Thermopylean passes in the Hindu Kush against the invasion of the first
Vedic Brahmins "from the Oxus.
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