Page:History of India Vol 9.djvu/100

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THE PRACTICE OF SUTTEE

so difficult to stamp out. An occurrence so recent as that helps to lend colour to the accounts which are here presented, covering a period of fully two thousand years, from classic to mediæval and modern times. The first selections are from Greek and Latin writers.

LORD WILLIAM C. BENTINCK, UNDER WHOSE ADMINISTRATION SUTTEE WAS ABOLISHED.

The Greek historian Nikolaos Damaskenos, who wrote toward the close of the first century B.C., explicitly states in his "Paradoxical Customs" that "when the Hindus die, they cause to be burned with them the most devoted one of their wives; and there is great rivalry on the part of the wives themselves, as well as of their friends, each striving to gain the day."[1] Plutarch, in the first century A.D., reiterates

  1. ↑ Nikolaos Damaskenos, Paradoxon Ethnikon Synagoge, Fragm. 143.
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