which occurs in Plato's Cratylus. Was that borrowed from the East? Or take the fable of the weasel changed by Aphrodite into a woman who, when she saw a mouse, could not refrain from making a spring at it. This, too, is very like a Sanskrit fable, but how then could it have been brought into Greece early enough to appear in one of the comedies of Strattis, about 400 b.c.[1]? Here, too, there is still plenty of work to do.
We may go back even further into antiquity, and still find strange coincidences between the legends of India and the legends of the West, without as yet being able to say how they travelled, whether from East to West, or from West to East. That at the time of Solomon, there was a channel of communication open between India and Syria and Palestine is established beyond doubt, I believe, by certain Sanskrit words which occur in the Bible as names of articles of export from Ophir, articles such as ivory, apes, peacocks, and sandalwood, which, taken together, could not have been exported from any country but India[2]. Nor is there any reason to suppose that the commercial intercourse between India, the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea and the Mediterranean was ever completely interrupted, even at the time when the Book of Kings is supposed to have been written.
- ↑ See Fragmenta Comic. (Didot) p. 302; Benfey, l. c. vol. i. p. 374.
- ↑ Science of Language, vol. i. p. 186.
sent by his master into a cornfield to feed. In order to shield him he puts a tiger's skin on him. All goes well till a watchman approaches, hiding himself under his grey coat, and trying to shoot the tiger. The donkey thinks it is a grey female donkey, begins to bray, and is killed. On a similar fable in Æsop, see Benfey, Pantschatantra, vol. i. p. 463; M. M., Selected Essays, vol. i. p. 513.
