United States or Mayotte ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Shortly afterwards he sent as his ambassador to the court of Pataliputra a Greek named Megasthenes who resided there for a considerable time and wrote an account of the country still extant in a fragmentary form. His Empire extended from Afghanistan almost to Madras and was governed with benevolent but somewhat grandmotherly despotism.
Such conquests have value in this world and in the next. Later Chandragupta destroyed the Macedonian garrisons left in India, defeated the invading Greek army of Seleucus in the Punjab, and then received at his Patna court the Hellenic ambassador Megasthenes.
Moreover, we meet with a confirmation of what Berosus says in the archives of the Phoenicians, concerning this king Nabuchodonosor, that he conquered all Syria and Phoenicia; in which case Philostratus agrees with the others in that history which he composed, where he mentions the siege of Tyre; as does Megasthenes also, in the fourth book of his Indian History, wherein he pretends to prove that the forementioned king of the Babylonians was superior to Hercules in strength and the greatness of his exploits; for he says that he conquered a great part of Libya, and conquered Iberia also.
Several Bacchic groups have however been discovered in Gandhara and also at Muttra and Megasthenes recognized Dionysus in some Indian deity.
We must eke out the scientific treatises of Aristotle and Pliny by help of the fragments which remain of the works of such naturalists as Speusippus or Alexander the Myndian; add to the familiar stories of Herodotus the Indian tales of Ctesias and Megasthenes; sit with Athenaeus and his friends at the supper table, gleaning from cook and epicure, listening to the merry idle troop of convivial gentlemen capping verses and spinning yarns; read Xenophon's treatise on Hunting, study the didactic poems, the Cynegetica and Halieutica, of Oppian and of Ovid.
Accepting the Greek identifications, and placing the Mauryas where we do in time you shall see how beautifully the epoch fits into the universal cycles, and confirms the teaching as to Cyclic Law. So, provisionally, I shall accept them, and tell the tale. First a few more items from Megasthenes as to India under Chandragupta.
I am speaking of the India Megasthenes saw, and as it had been then for dear knows how long. It had made concessions to human weakness, yes; had fallen, as I think, from an ancient unity; it had not succeeded in abolishing war. It was open to any king to make himself a Chakravartin, or world-sovereign, if he disposed of the means for doing so: which means were military.
Word Of The Day