Herodotus believed that the Indians’ gold was dug up by gigantic ants, larger than foxes; and with Ctesias we are in a fairy-tale world akin to that portrayed by Hieronymus Bosch.
[…]
In his Indica Ctesias describes men with tails and dogs’ heads, and that fearful anthropophagous beast the martichora, and pygmies whose penises hang down to their ankles, and eight-fingered archers with ears large enough to shade them from the sun, and a tribe where the babies are born sans anus, only acquiring this essential feature later, at puberty – all those weird tales, in fact, which later turn up rechauffé in the Travels of Sir John Mandeville.
Source:
Green, Peter. “The Quest for Ocean.” Alexander of Macedon: 356-323 B.C.: A Historical Biography. Univ. of California Press, 2005. 380. Print.
Further Reading:
Κτησίας (Ctesias) / Ctesias the Cnidian or Ctesias of Cnidus
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