[21] Not quite the same as Jupiter. Sakka is a very harmless and gentle kind of a god, not a jealous god, nor given to lasciviousness or spite. Neither is he immortal: he dies from time to time; and, if he has behaved well, is reborn under happy conditions. Meanwhile somebody else, usually one of the sons of men who has deserved it, succeeds, for a hundred thousand years or so, to his name and place and glory. Sakka can call to mind his experiences in his former birth, a gift in which he surpasses most other beings. He was also given to a kind of practical joking, by which he tempted people, and has become a mere beneficent fairy. [22] That is, infantry, cavalry, chariots of war, and elephants of war. Truly a useful kind of present to give to a pious hermit! [23] The power of going through the air is usually considered in Indian legends to be the result, and a proof, of great holiness and long-continued penance. So the hermit thought he would get a fine reputation cheaply. [24] Compare Mahā-bhārata, xii. 1796. [25] Fausböll, No. 291. [26] This is the well-known town in the Panjāb called by the Greeks Taxila, and famed in Buddhist legend as the great university of ancient India, as Nālanda was in later times. [27] Literally “without partiality and the rest,” that is, the rest of the _agatis_, the actions forbidden to judges (and to kings as judges). [28] The gates opening towards the four “directions,” that is, the four cardinal points of the compass. [29] Mahā Bhārata, v. 1518. Another passage at iii. 13253 is very similar. [30] Mahā Bhārata, xii. 4052. See Dr. Muir’s “Metrical Translations from Sanskrit Writers” (1879), pp. xxxi, 88, 275, 356. [31] Similar passages will also be found in Lao Tse, Douglas’s Confucianism, etc., p. 197; Pancha Tantra, i. 247 (277) = iv. 72; in Stobæus, quoted by Muir, p. 356; and in St. Matthew, v. 44-46; whereas the Mallika doctrine is inculcated by Confucius (Legge, Chinese Classics, i. 152). [32] The names are corruptions of the Indian names of the two jackals, Karatak and Damanak, who take a principal part in the first of the fables. [33] Phædo, p. 61. Comp. Bentley, Dissertation on the Fables of Æsop, p. 136. [34] Vespæ, 566, 1259, 1401, and foll.; and Aves, 651 and foll. [35] Arist. de part. anim., iii. 2; Lucian Nigr., 32. [36] Herodotus (ii. 134) makes him contemporary with King Amasis of Egypt, the beginning of whose reign is placed in 569 B.C.; Plutarch (Sept. Sap. Conv., 152) makes him contemporary with Solon, who is reputed to have been born in 638 B.C.; and Diogenes Laertius (i. 72) says that he flourished about the fifty-second Olympiad, _i.e._ 572-569 B.C. Compare _Clinton_, Fast. Hell. i. 237 (under the year B.C. 572) and i. 239 (under B.C. 534). [37] One at Heidelberg in 1610, and the other at Paris in 1810. There is a complete edition of all these fables, 231 in number, by T. Gl. Schneider, Breslau, 1812.