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The Geographica is an ancient Greek Encyclopedia, thought to have been written around 2,000 years ago by Strabo.

An English language translation, The Geography of Strabo, was written by Horace Leonard Jones around 1917.

In Book XV, Chapter 1, Section 39 it states:

He says, then, that the population of India is divided into seven castes:⁠ the one first in honour, but the fewest in number, consists of the philosophers; and these philosophers are used, each individually, by the people making sacrifice to the gods or making offerings to the dead, but jointly by the kings at the Great Synod, as it is called, at which, at the beginning of the new year, the philosophers, one and all, come together at the gates of the king; and whatever each man has drawn up in writing or observed as useful with reference to the prosperity of either fruits or living beings or concerning the government, he brings forward in public; and he who is thrice found false is required by law to keep silence for life, whereas he who has proved correct is adjudged exempt from tribute and taxes.

Source

Did any such punishment exist in the Mauryan Empire?

Please note that term 'philosophers' here may be incorrect because I have seen descriptions of these 7 castes in which the term 'philosophers' is not used.

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  • @Oddthinking Indica by Megasthenes is very notable description of India subcontinent under Mauryan Rule . Could you pls tell how is it not notable and how to make this question reopened? Commented Nov 19 at 8:00
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    If the linked article is to be believed, then Megasthenes' original writings about the Mauryan Empire have been lost to time, which means it's going to be difficult to prove that he ever even made that claim in the first place, let alone whether it's true or not. Commented Nov 19 at 8:02
  • @PokemonMaster what I said seems to be typical of ancient civilizations in China, Rome and Greece too: that one would be excluded from speaking at court, or from giving public opinions. This sort of thing is mentioned in Kautilya's Arthashastra too, for example one passage states that a counsellor who demonstrates incapacity or unreliability may be: "barred from future deliberations". Commented 2 days ago
  • @Pokemon: You have edited it to include a better reference, thank you. The link to Megasthenes is less clear now, but it doesn't matter whether he made the original claim. This is likely to be a difficult one to answer. Commented 2 days ago

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As Oddthinking wrote, this is a slightly inappropriate question for Skeptics since the claim is too old for us to verify. However I wanted to show what sort of research you can do to develop a hypothesis about a claim like this. I hope this can help you develop your own research skills and thinking.

I typed "Megasthenes Mauryan" into Google Scholar and searched around until I found some authoritative historical essays on Megasthenes's writings on the Mauryans (as quoted by Strabo). Here are some conclusions I derived from these historians.

  1. Otto Stein, Megasthenes und Kauṭilya, Osterreiche Akademieder Wissenschaften philosophisch-historiche Klasse, Sitzungsberichte, 1915 [Vienna, 1921], 119-232
    • This is a monograph comparing Megasthenes to the text Arthashastra. Stein observes that the "philosopher" caste is divided into brachmanes and garmanes by Strabo. He proposes that this refers to the Brahmins and śramaṇas, which means Jains, Buddhists, etc. Of course, in modern Hinduism, śramaṇas are part of the Brahmin varna.
  2. Romila Thapar, “Megasthenes: Text and Context” in The Mauryas Revisited (Calcutta and New Delhi, 1987), 32-60.
    • This is an essay about why Megasthenes said there were seven castes in India, which is obviously wrong information. Please check out the book yourself if you'd like to read Thapar's theory on how Greek and Indian ideas may have been jumbled together to produce "seven castes." Thapar agrees with Stein that this discussion of the "philosophers" counts Brahmins and śramaṇas separately. Thapar quotes not only this Megasthenes paraphrase by Strabo, but also another Megasthenes paraphrase by Arrian who mysteriously used a different Greek word for "caste." It emphasizes that Megasthenes was trying to adapt what he heard to Greek models.
  3. B. C. J. Timmer, Megasthenes en de indische maatschappij (Amsterdam, 1930)
    • Basically this book says that Megasthenes had Brahmin informants but made broad generalizations.
  4. Andrea Zambrini, "Gli ‘Indika’ di Megastene," Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, III, 12 (1982)
    • Zambini proposes that Megasthenes’ account of India is written to parallel Hecataeus of Abdera’s lost account of Egypt. We know that Hecataeus explained Egypt as a model ancient empire, a trade power, and the origin of all culture. Megasthenes seems to have been contrasting his knowledge with Hecataeus when he emphasizes that India had become colonized and had not developed foreign relations across the Indus River. Zambrini briefly mentions the “lifelong silence” claim in order to pooh-pooh someone else's idea that Megasthenes based his model on Plato's Republic.

Conclusion

On this StackExchange we like to write a simple "true" or "false" conclusion. The conclusion to be drawn here is more complex. Historians do not believe Megasthenes was completely manufacturing stories, but he frequently misunderstood what he was hearing and tried to map stories from his informants onto a mental model, which included Greek writers who liked to write about foreign statecraft. While the historians I read did not address this claim of a criminal "required by law to keep silence for life," it seems likely to be the result of such a misunderstanding. Maybe another article in German or Italian directly says this--I do not care to look further as it is annoying to search in languages I cannot read.

My hypothesis

Megasthenes may have heard a story about a yogi or śramaṇa taking a lifelong vow of silence, and due to his bias towards trying to map and describe India as a political entity, this got transformed into describing silence as a political tool, enforced by an inward-facing Indian regime that failed to exercise cultural influence.

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