Histories

When Darius was king, he summoned the Greeks who were with him and asked them for what price they would eat their fathers' dead bodies. They answered that there was no price for which they would do it.

Then Darius summoned those Indians who are called Callatiae,[*](Apparently from Sanskrit kala=black.) who eat their parents, and asked them (the Greeks being present and understanding through interpreters what was said) what would make them willing to burn their fathers at death. The Indians cried aloud, that he should not speak of so horrid an act. So firmly rooted are these beliefs; and it is, I think, rightly said in Pindar's poem that custom is lord of all.[*](no/mos o( pa/ntwn basileu\s qnatw=n te kai\ a)qana/twn; quoted in Plato's Gorgias from an otherwise unknown poem of Pindar.)