Syrictæ

Also Known As: also Syrictae; Latin Sciritae, Sciritas, Sciratae; Greek Skiritai
Region/Culture: South Asia
Mythos: Greek Mythology, Roman Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: They breathe through bare holes in the face rather than through a nose, in the manner of snakes.
Role in Mythos: They occupy one line in the Greco-Roman catalogue of strange peoples said to live at the far edge of the known world, among the nomads of India.
Relation to Humans: No source describes them meeting, fighting, helping or harming anyone. They exist entirely as a thing reported about distant strangers, never as a thing encountered.

The plain runs flat and pale to the horizon, and the herds raise a dust that hangs at knee height in the heat before it settles again. The people driving them walk with their legs bowed outward, rolling slightly with each step, and when they breathe there is no soft flare of a nostril, only air moving through two bare holes above the mouth. That is the whole of what anyone claimed to know about them. It is also, four hundred years later and two thousand miles away, exactly what a Roman admiral wrote down in a book about the natural world.

The sentence sits in the seventh book of Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, in a stretch of prose that gallops through the marvels of India without pausing for breath. In Latin it reads: *Megasthenes gentem inter Nomadas Indos narium loco foramina tantum habentem anguium modo, loripedem, vocari Sciritas.* Megasthenes is his authority for a people among the Indian nomads who have only holes in place of nostrils, like snakes, and are *loripedes*, a word the dictionaries give as strap-footed or bandy-legged. Then Pliny moves on. There is no myth, no encounter, no king who fought them and no traveller who ate at their fire.

Megasthenes had at least been there. He served Seleucus I as an envoy to the court of Chandragupta Maurya, spent time at Pataliputra on the Ganges, and wrote a book called the *Indica* which is now lost except for the pieces other authors quoted. What survives of it is a strange mixture: careful observation of Mauryan administration sitting alongside people with ears long enough to sleep in. The Syrictæ come to us through that filter, then through Pliny’s compression, then through the copying of manuscripts by hands that had never heard the name and had no way to check it.

The copying shows. The word appears as *Sciritas* in the standard Latin text and as *Syrictas* in other witnesses, and when Philemon Holland put Pliny into English in 1601 he printed it as Syrictæ, adding a flourish of his own: after the manner of snakes they have their legs and feet limmer, he wrote, wherewith they crawle and creepe. The crawling is Holland’s, not Pliny’s. Our headword is therefore a Jacobean printer’s version of a Roman scribe’s version of a Greek diplomat’s report, and the spelling that reached the modern internet is the one that survived that chain rather than the one an editor would choose.

There is a further confusion worth clearing away. A real people called the Sciritae lived in Skiritis, a hard upland district on the Laconian border with Arcadia, and Sparta used them as an elite corps of light infantry, six hundred men who held the extreme left of the battle line and stood watch ahead of the camp at night. Thucydides and Xenophon both describe them. They had ordinary noses. The two groups share a name in transliteration and nothing else, and any account that merges them has quietly invented a Spartan regiment of snake-faced skirmishers.

Look at what surrounds the Syrictæ in Pliny’s paragraph and the shape of the thing becomes clear. Immediately before them stand the Struthopodes, the sparrow-footed, whose women have feet so small they earned the name. Immediately after come the Astomi at the headwaters of the Ganges, mouthless, living on the scent of roots and apples and killed by a bad smell. Nearby are the men with one leg who lie on their backs and use the foot as a parasol, the dog-headed hunters who bark instead of speaking, the pygmies who ride goats to war against the cranes. Each is a single defect or excess of the human body, catalogued like a specimen. The Syrictæ are the nose entry.

Strabo, writing at roughly the same period, reports the same detail from the same source and does not name them: people without nostrils, having merely two breathing orifices above the mouth. He also files Megasthenes, along with Onesicritus and Deimachus and Cleitarchus, among the writers of fable. That is the closest thing to a debate the record contains. One Roman wrote it down as natural history, one Greek geographer shrugged, and nobody ever went to check.

What powers do they have? None. This is the honest and rather startling answer. The record grants them no magic, no strength, no venom, no prophetic gift, nothing that would make them useful in a story. Their entire endowment is anatomical, and even that is limited to the face and the legs. Whatever advantage a snake’s breathing apparatus might confer, no source claims it, and to supply one would be to write fiction and call it folklore.

Their weaknesses are the same shape. Nothing kills them, because nothing in the sources ever tries. The real fragility is textual: they exist on the strength of one sentence, in one author, resting on a lost book, under a name the surviving witnesses spell several ways. Their neighbours in that paragraph went on to great careers, painted onto the Hereford map, carved into cathedral tympana, argued over by theologians wondering whether a dog-headed man could be baptised. The snake-nostrilled people mostly stayed on the page. They were never illustrated into fame, never given a moral, never made to stand for anything.

Which leaves the plain, and the dust, and the bowed legs, and that thin sound of air drawn through a hole where a nose should be. Somebody told Megasthenes something. He wrote it down, Pliny copied it, and it has been sitting there in Book Seven ever since, waiting for a reader who will take it seriously enough to wonder what was actually being described.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who are the Syrictæ?

The Syrictæ are a legendary people of Greco-Roman geography, said to live among the nomads of India with holes in place of nostrils, like snakes, and with bandy or strap-shaped legs. They are known from a single sentence in Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, Book 7, where Pliny credits the Greek envoy Megasthenes as his source.

Are the Syrictæ the same as the Sciritae?

Syrictæ, Sciritae, Sciritas and Skiritai are variant spellings of the same Indian people in Pliny’s text, and the form Syrictæ comes from Philemon Holland’s 1601 English translation. They are not the same as the historical Sciritae of Skiritis, a real Arcadian-descended people who served Sparta as elite light infantry and are described by Thucydides and Xenophon.

What do the Syrictæ look like?

Pliny gives only two features: two bare openings in place of a nose, compared directly to a snake’s, and legs described by the Latin word loripes, meaning strap-footed or bandy-legged. Nothing else is recorded, no height, no colouring and no clothing, and later descriptions that add crawling or creeping are drawing on Holland’s 1601 English wording rather than on Pliny.

Did anyone in the ancient world doubt the Syrictæ existed?

Strabo repeats the same detail from Megasthenes, describing people without nostrils who breathe through two orifices above the mouth, but he classes Megasthenes among writers of fable rather than reliable reporters. That scepticism was recorded at roughly the same period as Pliny’s account, so the tradition carries its own doubt from the beginning.

What powers do the Syrictæ have?

None are recorded. Unlike most legendary races, the Syrictæ are given no magic, no unusual strength, no venom and no role in any myth or encounter; the sources describe only their anatomy and then move on to the next people in the catalogue.