Pliny : Pliny the Younger (61/62-c.113), Roman administrator who left a collection of private letters in ten books intimately illustrating public & private life in the heyday of the Roman Empire. Nine of them were published in his lifetime.
... In addition to all this information let us see what, on the authority of Megasthenes, Pliny says about the Āndhras in the age of Sandrocottus - the Āndhras whom Aśoka also mentions in R.E. XIII and to whom the post-Aśokan Sātavāhanas who preceded the Imperial Guptas belonged. Sircar 2 has written: "Pliny (first century A.D.), who is usually supposed to have utilised the information supplied... comments: "This no doubt points to the large extent of the land occupied by the Āndhra people, and it is not improbable that Pliny actually received the information from a later source referring to the Sātavāhana kingdom." We may remark that it is extremely improbable that Pliny should have interpolated material from another source in his present context without any warning. For, almost immediately... in the days of the Mauryas the Āndhras were not at all the prominent people pictured by Pliny: if they had been , Sircar who accepts the usual identification of Sandrocottus with Chandragupta Maurya would not have suspected a later source than Megasthenes for Pliny's information. They could be as in Pliny the strongest power next to the Prasii under Sandrocottus - if the Prachyas under the Guptas ...
... present essay self-contained, the conclusion at which we have arrived may be summed up and whatever argument is most relevant may be briefly used to structure the summary: "On the evidence of Pliny (VI.22), 1 the Prasii, who are also called the Palibothri, are specifically the people of the city Palibothra (lying on the confluence of the rivers Ganges and Sonos [Son]). On the same evidence... Ganges - that is, on the frontiers of the Punjāb to the west of the latter river - the Gangaridai begin. "The people local to the Ganges-delta are found, on a comparison of a passage in Pliny (V.22) 1 with one in Solinus (52.7), 2 to be known as the 'Gāngārides-Calingae' - a branch of the widely diffused many-branched Calinga people - and their elephant-strength is only 700. The Ganges-delta... shown to hold no more than a part of the Gangaridai - a small one and certainly not the central which must be more westward where Xandrames stood in battle-array to meet the Macedonian. And, as the Pliny-Solinus reference assigns the 700 elephants of the Ganges-delta to the 'king' of the Gangaridai there, Xandrames with his 4,000 must be the king of the Gangaridai lying outside the Ganges-delta no ...
... multitude no less than the size of its elephants and attribute to its central stock a 1. Ibid., p. 134. fn.. 2.Pliny (VI.23); Majumdar. op. cit., p. 343. 3.Pliny (ibid.); Majumdar, ibid. , p. 344. 4.Pliny (VI.22); Majumdar, ibid., p. 342. 5.Pliny (VI.23); Majumdar, ibid., p. 344. Page 166 few piffling hundreds which barely exceed or which even... all, of the Gangetic valley constitutes it. But it would seem mainly to lie in the Middle Country in part alliance with Māgadha. 2 The next version from Megasthenes comes in Pliny. Pliny (IV.22) 2 touches on the Gangaridai after making an observation about the Ganges in mid-career: "...it flows out with a gentle current, being at the narrowest eight miles, and on the average... Vangas may have been deemed a part of the Kalingas who, as McCrindle 1 infers from Pliny, were a widely diffused race. Cunningham, as well as McCrindle and Bostock after him, is thus essentially correct in favouring the combination "Gāngāridum Calingarum" which can be established even by a mere comparison of Pliny with Solinus. Once the true name, for Megasthenes, of the people in Lower ...
... king-number. So his concurrence with Pliny about the time-span has a weight of its own. Thirdly, the extra 3 months he and Pliny mention with the years, although we may not take them literally to a day, bring a touch of scrupulous computation which cannot be easily ignored. A careful reporting of Indian information is indicated. We may safely accept the chronology of Pliny and Solinus as our basis and then... combine in favour of Pliny and Solinus. The initial one is that, as shown by the lacuna for the first republic's duration, our text of Arrian for all its more abundant detail is not free from damage which might result in either omission or mutilation. Secondly, Solinus, who is dated to 200 A.D. as against Pliny's birth in 23 A.D. and Arrian's 67 years later, is yet no copyist of Pliny or Arrian. In spite... where the Ganges, forming its delta, marks the Gangaridai off from Farther India. People of the entire Ganges-region - of what Pliny, intending to indicate an extensive unity, calls "the whole tract along the Ganges" - are the Gangaridai. Some details from Pliny (VI.22) 1 and Solinus (52.7) 2 about the Gangaridai in the Ganges-delta point us towards the internal structure, so to speak ...
... least one clear sign of his conqueror's role?" Unfortunately the answer is No . For, in the time of Sandrocottus the Āndhras were an independent people, though perhaps not outside his suzerainty. "Pliny (first century A.D.), who is usually supposed to have utilised the information supplied by Megasthenes (c. 300 B.C.), speaks of a powerful king of the Āndhra country possessing 30 fortified towns... king" (ibid., p. 216). 2.Sircar, "The Sātavāhanas and the Chedis", The Age of Imperial Unity, p. 194. Page 210 tioning the conquest in his edicts or else Megasthenes and Pliny were talking of a period quite other than that of Aśoka's grandfather. That is to say, either several parts of Aśoka's empire beyond what was inherited from the Nandas need not have been acquired by... There is also the question of the Ganges-delta, what is now called Lower Bengal. Did this part of India fall within the conquests of Chandragupta? We know for certain from Megasthenes as reported by Pliny (VI.23)' that the whole extent of the course of the Ganges was ruled over by the king of the Prasii - Megasthe-nes's host Sandrocottus. Sandrocottus, therefore, was master of the Ganges-delta. But, ...
... by their machinations and manipulations" is utterly foundationless. Apart from Josephus and Tacitus, we have only the early testimony of Pliny the Younger and of Suetonius about the existence of Christians - that is, testimony independent of the New Testament. Pliny was governor of Bithynia in Asia Minor from 111 or 113 A.D. His correspondence with the Emperor Trajan includes a report on the proceedings ...
... in a comment in the Encyclopaedia Britannica: 39 "The milieu of the letter seems to reflect the time and temper of the correspondence of the emperor Trajan with Pliny the Younger, governor of Bithynia (c. 117) [in Asia Minor]. Pliny requested clarification as to the punishment of Christians 'for the name itself or for crimes supposedly associated with being a Christian. 1 Peter, chapter 4, verse ...
... rather than part of an old tradition. Even in the days of Megasthenes, the Greek ambassador to India - c. 302 B.C. - Indian history had rightly or wrongly a hoary antiquity for the Indian mind. Pliny (VI.xxl.4-5), Arrian (Indica I.ix) and Solinus (52.5), 1 reporting Megasthenes, quote the Indians as saying that the line of kings in India - before Alexander and Sandroccottus - went back by more ...
... More Poems, p. 41) And death prowls baying through the woods of life. (Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, Book IX, Canto II, p. 587) Our mortality is athirst for endless life. (Pliny) "...O grim cold death! But 1 will not like ordinary men Satiate thee with cries, and falsely woo thee, And make my grief thy theatre... O secrecy terrific, ...
... literature remains derivative and second-hand in its every fibre. We get to the heart of Roman life and character in Roman Satires, the annalistic histories of Livy & Tacitus, the Letters of Cicero or Pliny, but in the more splendid & ambitious portions of Latin literature we get only the half Greek dress in which the Roman mind learned to disguise itself. Let us suppose that all historical documents, ...
... readers with the curiousness of the barbarian people they were writing about; in other words, it was a historiographers’ cliché. The Greek historian Herodotus applied the same cliché to the Scythes, and Pliny the Roman used identical words to depict the Singhalese in Ceylon! In this way myths are born, perilous myths when they are held to be the truth by armed fanatics. One of the great German Renaissance ...
... traders by promising immense riches to them. This idea is also reflected in the name Suvarnadvīpa or Suvarnabhūmi (Land of Gold) which was used as a general designation for this vast region." 2 Pliny, 3 after quoting Megasthenes on Ceylon (called "Tapro-bane"), goes on to tell us what "we have learned from the old writers". "The island in former days ... was thought to be twenty days' sail from ...
... Ping-wang, 365 Piodasses and Prydrs, 321-4, 359 Pipphalivana, 205 Pirenne, Jacqueline, 420, 421 Pishtapuraka-Mahendragiri, 203 Pithuda/Pityndra, 85, 173, 481 Pitundra, 85 Plakshadvīpa, 57-Pliny, 15, 61, 63, 64, 98, 116, 158, 163, 164, 165, 168, 185, 187, 210, 211, 212, 238, 243, 244, 247, 375. 418, 466, 479, 551 Plutarch, 63, 64, 114, 115, 117, 155, 156, 169, ...
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