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THE SELEUCID EMPIRE. 358-251 BC. HOUSE OF SELEUCUS

CHAPTER 14.

INDIA

The realm of Seleucus and his successors did not include the Indian provinces of Alexander’s Empire; but with the princes who ruled there they had to do as neighbors, and it is therefore part of our business to inform ourselves of what was going on in this region in the century after Alexander’s death. In doing so we enter a field which has a peculiar interest for Englishmen.

In the year 326 b.c. a glitter of strange spears, a mailed line of men, issued out of the Khaibar pass into the land of the Five Rivers. These men had trodden, step by step, the whole way from the shores of the Mediterranean, and for the first time Greek and Indian looked upon each other’s face. Many things in the India discovered to Alexander and his soldiers were like the things seen in India today—the wide dusty plains, the naked ascetics sitting by the wayside. But in some respects the aspect of things was different. None of those intricate carven temples or figures of curious gods which we associate with the India of today were to be seen; the sculptured rocks were then plain; it was from this new people that the Indian would get the impulse to build and carve in stone.

No kingdom of any large dimensions existed in India. The peoples were divided into hundreds of petty principalities, often at war with one another. The two most considerable princes with whom Alexander had to do were those whom the Greeks called Taxiles and Porus. The principality of Taxiles lay between the Indus and Hydaspes (mod. Jehlarn), that of Porus farther east, between the Hydaspes and Acesines (mod. Chenab). Taxiles from the outset made friends with the strange and terrible invaders; Porus tried conclusions with them and was defeated in the hard-fought battle beside the Hydaspes. After that he also, as one brave man with another, made friends with the Macedonian king. Both Taxiles and Porus got their reward in an extension of their territories. The first effect of the Macedonian conquest in the Punjab was to break down the boundaries which divided one little kingdom from another, and create two realms of larger dimensions than India had yet known. Porus became king of all the country between the Hydaspes and Hyphasis (Beas)—containing, according to one account,5000 towns not smaller than Cos—and was only so far limited in his sovereignty that his kingdom was counted a province of the Macedonian Empire, and he himself had the standing of a satrap, with the implied obliga­tion of paying tribute. But no Macedonian troops seem to have been stationed in his sphere. Taxiles, who also had his territory enlarged, was more directly subject to Macedonian control. A Macedonian satrap, Philip, remained at his side, and his capital, Taxila, was held by a garrison.

On the lower Indus, below the confluence of the Acesines, the native princes, who had shown themselves untrustworthy, were not left in possession. Here an Iranian nobleman and a Macedonian chief, Pithon the son of Agenor, ruled side by side. To this satrapy certain regions on the west of the Indus which had belonged to the Persian Empire (the Gandava region ?) were attached, their population probably being Indian, not Iranian.

Alexander, of course, rooted Greek civilization here as in other parts of the East by a line of new cities along the course of the Indus.

We distinguish thus three Indian provinces: (1) that of the upper Indus to its junction with the Acesines, governed by Taxiles and Philip; (2) that of the lower Indus, governed by Oxyartes (?) and Pithon; and (3) that of the country beyond the Hydaspes, governed by Porus.

The troops settled by Alexander in India seem, in part at any rate, to have been, not Macedonians, but Greek mercenaries; and just as in Bactria a national Greek movement against the Macedonians took place, so in India, soon after Alexander left it, there was a conspiracy of the Greek captains against the Macedonian Philip, which culminated in his assassination. But the conspirators were killed and the insurrection suppressed by the Macedonian guards. Soon afterwards Pithon had taken the place of Philip, and the province of the lower Indus had been added to the realm of Porus, which thus reached the sea. This is the situation at Alexander's death (323).

The rivalries which then convulsed the Empire reached to India. Eudamus, who had held command of a Thracian con­tingent  in the province of the upper Indus, now came to the front. Like the satraps of Further Iran, he embraced the royalist cause in 317, whilst Pithon the son of Agenor is found as an adherent of Antigonus. Eudamus seems to have formed the design of creating a yet larger Indian realm by uniting all the provinces under his own hand. Pithon had probably fled to join Antigonus, and Porus was entangled in the snares of Eudamus and murdered. Eudamus was now supreme in the Punjab, master of a force of the elephants which were held to be the strength of the Indian armies. But in 317 he left India to join the united satraps with Eumenes, and he never returned. He was put to death by Antigonus.

But the fever with which India, from its contact with the disturbed area of western Asia, had been infected still worked. The idea of the great kingdom was in the air. It had been in part realized. The old order had been confounded and the old landmarks trampled down. It was the sort of chaos which gives the strong man his opportunity. And the strong man appeared in a native Indian, Chandragupta, who had not read the signs of the times in vain.

The origin of a great personality gathers quickly about it in India a rank growth of legend. The real Chandragupta has ceased to be distinguishable at all in the myths as they are set down in later Indian books. In our classical sources the process is only in its earlier stages; the stories were such as were told to Greek travelers a generation or two after the great man’s time. Chandragupta, according to their account, was of a low caste, the prototype of Sivaji the Mahratta. As a boy he had seen Alexander, the invincible splendid man from the West. Later on, when he became a great king, Chandragupta worshipped Alexander among his gods. Like Sivaji and many others who have risen to power in India, Chandragupta began his rise as a captain of marauders. He had offended the king of the district where he lived, Nanda or Nandrus, and had taken to the jungle. A lion, it is recorded in the legend as given by Justin, had come upon him when sleeping outworn, and licked him without doing him any hurt. He flung himself into the chaos which prevailed in the Punjab after the death of Eudamus in 316. If a great king was to arise in India, he might be a native as well as a Macedonian. Chandragupta presented himself as a national leader. Successes surrounded him with a superstitious halo. It was believed that the elephant he rode was a wild one which had knelt of its own accord to receive him upon its back. The Macedonian dominion in the land was broken. But its work in doing away with the little principalities stood. The Punjab was one great kingdom. A new power had arisen in India also out of the ruins of Alexander’s Empire.

But Chandragupta’s possession of the Indian provinces was, of course, challenged when Seleucus, between 312 and 302, established his authority in the East. Once more a great Macedonian army pushed victoriously into the Punjab. But it was at the moment when the situation in the West was coming to a crisis, and Seleucus was needed to throw his weight into the scale against Antigonus. He had no time to ground his dominion in India. So he agreed with Chandragupta quickly. The new Indian king was left in possession, and he on his part promised alliance, if not allegiance. A marriage cemented the two houses, and Chandragupta furnished Seleucus with 500 elephants to be used in Asia Minor. Those regions on the west of the Indus, which had been detached by Alex­ander from the Iranian province to which they had belonged, Seleucus now ceded to the Indian king. Thenceforward the relations of the house of Seleucus and that of Chandragupta seem to have been of the friendliest.

But the tendency towards the formation of a great realm, which the Macedonian conquest had set in motion, was not yet arrived at its completion. Chandragupta passed from the Punjab into that more eastern India watered by the Ganges and its tributaries, and carried all before him. His conquest reached to the Bay of Bengal. From the Indus to the mouth of the Ganges was now a single empire, whose centre and seat of government was fixed by the conqueror at Pataliputra (mod. Patna).

And wherever Chandragupta ruled, there the influence of Alexander could be traced. We have seen that the new Indian realm sprang directly out of Alexander’s Empire, and that Chandragupta acknowledged its origin in his worship of the Macedonian king. At the altars which Alexander built beside the Hyphasis when he turned back westward it was long the custom for the kings who ruled on the Ganges to offer periodic sacrifices according to Greek rites. Intercourse between the court of Pataliputra and the Greek courts of the West was maintained. Megasthenes resided for a time at Pataliputra as the ambassador of Seleucus to Chandragupta, and left the standard work on India to later generations of classical antiquity. Deimachus of Plataea went as ambassador to the son and successor of Chandragupta, Bindusara Amitraghata, and also put the information which he gathered on record. An ambassador of Ptolemy II to India, Dionysius, is mentioned as a third authority.We may presume that Hindoo envoys were likewise to be seen at the Seleucid and Ptolemaic courts even before Asoka sent his missionaries.

Intercourse between far separated branches of the human family must have been advanced in an altogether new degree when the whole length of Asia from the mouth of the Ganges to the coasts of the Mediterranean was occupied by two friendly empires! And it must be remembered that a Greek merchant­man would not now come into India as into an altogether strange land. In the Punjab also under the Indian king he would find the Greek population settled by Alexander. Greek was perhaps widely diffused as a language of commerce in western India and Afghanistan. Of the movements in the commercial world—what we should now so like to know of the mingling of nationalities at the great centres, the life of the road-side and the khan, our authorities tell us nothing. They see nothing outside the courts and camps. But even at the courts we discover a curiosity of Hellene and Indian with regard to each other’s worlds. We hear of the strange drugs sent by Chandragupta to Seleucus, and of the letter of Bindusara to Antiochus asking to be furnished for a price with the sweet rich drink which one of the Greek processes of wine-making produced, with a quantity of dried figs for which Asia Minor then as now was famous, and with a teacher of Greek learning, a “sophist.” “The figs and the wine,” Antiochus wrote back,  “shall be sent, but a sophist is not, according to the custom of the Greeks, an article of sale.”

But how far-reaching in its effects the Macedonian intervention in India was destined to be began to be seen when the third king of the new Indian realm, Asoka the son of Bindusara, embraced Buddhism. The teaching of Gautama Sakyamuni, after having been for some 200 years the doctrine of one of the innumerable Indian sects, was now lifted to a position of world-wide importance. The creation of a single great kingdom in India had made possible the extension of a single religion. To the Macedonian conquest therefore the rise of Buddhism in India and the subsequent conquest by Buddhism of Central and Further Asia was in the first instance due. When we hear so often the cheap wisdom uttered with an air of profundity, which depreciates all “Western” influence upon the East as essentially transitory and evanescent, it is interesting to observe the opinion of one who speaks with authority— that “upon the institutions brought in by Alexander the whole subsequent development of India depends”

King Asoka was ardent to propagate the Doctrine in all the earth. In the Greek cities of the West, as far as Cyrene and Epirus, one might have had glimpses of dark men, with the monkish tonsure and the long yellow robe, who were come to roll onward even here the Wheel of the Kingdom of Righteousness. Perhaps the kings themselves—the wine-sodden Antiochus II, the literary and scientific dilettante Ptolemy Philadelphia, the grave Stoic Antigonus — were summoned by the envoys of Asoka to walk in the Eightfold Path—right belief, right will, right word, right deed, right life, right effort, right thought, right self-withdrawal—and to receive the Four Truths concerning the pain in the world and its taking away. “Open your ears, ye kings, the Redemption from death is found”. The record of the sending out of these missionaries is established by Asoka himself, graven on the rocks of India; it is a pity that we have no western account of the impression which they made They must have trodden the same roads which three hundred years later were trodden by the apostles of another Faith and another Redemption.