2G7 
1874.] Rajendralala Mitra —The Yavanas of Sanskrit Writers. 
the means of transportation by modern ships are infinitely more convenient 
than travelling across wild and inhospitable countries was two thousand years 
ago, we may unhesitatingly conclude that at the time of Greek supremacy in 
North-Western India, the number of Greek women in this country or its 
neighbourhood was extremely limited; and that, like the latter, the Greeks 
during the three centuries immediately preceding the era of Christ, associated 
largely with the women of their conquered country. And such having been 
the case, there could not have been such an abundance of Greek women as to 
afford a perennial source from which Hindu kings could draw their sup¬ 
plies, and, whether for recruits for their Amazonian guards or as odalisques, 
the women of Scythia, Bactria, Persia, and Afghanistan, the latter particular¬ 
ly, were always, comparatively, more easily available, and doubtless did yield 
their quota, and these it may fairly be presumed, passed under the name of Ya¬ 
vanas. According to the Institutes of Bodhayana “ he who partakes of beef, 
speaks much and that which is forbidden, neglects the established rules of con¬ 
duct and of religious duty, is a Mlechchha,”* and as the word yavana is a 
synonymous term, the women aforesaid would very properly be called by that 
name. It is not to be denied that in one instance a Greek lady was accepted as 
a bride by a Hindu sovereign. Megasthenes tells us that when Seleukos 
Nikator found that he was not in a position to overcome Sandrocotus 
whom he had come to assail, and concluded a treaty for peace and a present of 
five hundred elephants by ceding a part of his kingdom to the west of 
the Indus, he gave his daughter away in marriage to Chandragupta; but 
it was quite exceptional, and cannot be adduced as a proof in support of any 
general premiss on the subject. 
There is a passage in the Malavikagnimitra in which the hero of 
the piece Agnimitra, king of Vedisa, one of the Mauriya sovereigns of Maga- 
dha, states that a horse, which his father Pushpamitra had let loose, 
preliminary to the celebration of a grand sacrifice, had, while roaming 
under the care of a hundred princes headed by Vasumitra, crossed the 
Indus, and that while grazing on the right bank of that river, a body of 
Yavana horsemen had attempted to seize it, and a sanguinary battle was 
the consequence.”! Dr. Weber takes this to be a clear indication of the 
Greeks, who occupied the country after the invasion of Alexander; but there 
is no valid reason to suppose that the aggressors were really Greeks, and not 
one of the various marauding tribes who dwelt and still dwell on the right 
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