THE GREEKS (AND ROMANS) WHO WROTE

Kautilya and Ashoka were not the only writers of the Mauryan period who wielded their pen, so to speak, in a prolific manner. The works of Megasthenes, the Greek ambassador to Chandragupta’s court (mentioned earlier), and later Graeco-Roman writers who appraised and abstracted his text, deserve closer scrutiny not just because of their content but also, more enchantingly, on account of the sarcasm and annoyance that routinely pervade the latter. This is one of the first instances in the world of historical evidence of a dual commentary—of Megasthenes noting down what he saw and heard, and of his ilk later analysing his comments. In the process, much of ancient Greek attitudes towards history writing, as also the Indian subcontinent, are revealed in tantalising layers.

So why was Megasthenes sent to Chandragupta Maurya’s court in the first place? And why did this Greek feel impelled to write his Indica? Let us take those questions in sequence. To understand who Megasthenes was, we have to move backwards to the invasion of the north-west of India by Alexander of Macedon (327–326 BCE, alluded to earlier; his dates were c. 356–323 BCE), that most intriguing and exciting character who might very well have taken over the entire world if destiny had allotted him more years to live. As it was, he died ridiculously young, at the age of thirty-three, but managed to make himself gloriously famous even so. There is, in fact, an interesting story of a meeting between Chandragupta and Alexander but more on that later.

In the power struggle that ensued for Alexander’s empire, Seleucus Nikator, who inherited the eastern provinces of Alexander’s empire, and proclaimed himself the king of Mesopotamia and Persia in 305 BCE, decided to reclaim Alexander’s territories beyond the Indus, which had gone back into Indian hands. In doing so, he seems to have clashed with Chandragupta Maurya (Androkottus or Sandrocottus, ‘king of the Indians’, in Greek accounts; as also Sandrokoptos, the most accurate version). This run-in probably happened in around 301 (305?) BCE and the treaty that followed indicates that Seleucus had clearly bitten off more than he could chew, reinforced by the Greek historians being unusually coy on its details, with Pliny alone admitting to the loss of Greek territory.

So Chandragupta, in return for five hundred (of his nine thousand) elephants, secured the territories of Arachosia (the Kandahar region of south-east Afghanistan), Gedrosia (south Baluchistan) and Parapomisadai (the area between Afghanistan and the Indian subcontinent). If these names seem wildly unfamiliar, it is because they are the Greek equivalents of the actual ones—and as we are talking about Greeks, it is only appropriate to use their terms. Also, Chandragupta might or might not have made a marriage alliance as part of this treaty. The world of popular media would like to think so whereby much is made of his Greek wife in serials and stories but there is no conclusive proof of her identity. Equally, the treaty could also be interpreted as having paved the way for inter-marriage between the Greeks and the Indians, and Chandragupta could very well have decided to be the first beneficiary, in this regard, marrying the daughter of Seleucus by his Persian wife, Susa. And it is also possible that a Mauryan princess was given to the Seleucid house.

Megasthenes now slips into the historical limelight as he happened to be the representative of Seleucus Nikator at the court of Sibyrtios, the governor of Arachosia, one of the territories that Chandragupta obtained. Much in the fashion of present-day diplomats being peremptorily uprooted and transplanted by their masters, Seleucus included Megasthenes in his treaty with Chandragupta. (Interestingly, Seleucus’s son and successor, Antiochus, whose sister would have been a queen or princess at the Mauryan court depending on whom she married, also sent his envoy to the Mauryan court—Deimachus, when his turn came.) And so, Megasthenes left Arachosia and arrived in Pataliputra, presumably aching to record his new adventures in a new land.

And thus, the Indica was born, documenting all that this important Greek saw and experienced during his sojourn at the Mauryan court. Ironically and inexplicably, though, this ancient travel memoir speedily vanished in its entirety—and there is a whole detective story there, waiting in the wings. For our purposes, suffice it to say that the Indica lives on in a highly fragile and tenuous manner—in fragments preserved in later Greek and Latin works, particularly in the works of Diodorus, Strabo, Arrian and Pliny.

This should have been enough to treat it as a valuable source for the Mauryas, yet one is always told to treat this work with extreme caution, a veritable hot potato in the fingers of an evidence-hunter. So what exactly did Megasthenes say? What did he deem worthy of inclusion in his work? He seems to have started with the usual, run-of-the-mill recordings of India, its shape and size (as discernible to his largely untrained eye), its rivers, soil, climate, flora and fauna, its administration and society. And some of its stories, of course. These, along with a few wildly-implausible tales that he seems to have dreamt up rather than seen, make his work a page-turner—or would have if it had existed in its full form!

We could consider many illustrative examples but, perhaps, a few would suffice. Here is an enchanting one: Megasthenes’s description of men living on a mountain called Nulo who had particularly arresting feet in that not only did they turn backwards but each foot had no less than eight toes. Trying to allocate a factual match for this would confound any scholar! Consider, too, the accounts of men living on other mountains who were, essentially, hunters and fowlers, but who had heads like dogs and conversed through barking. And then, there were the gold-digging ants who apparently occupied the mountains in the north-west.

If you are feeling a trifle dizzy on reading this, think of historians from the ancient times to the present grappling with the text and wondering whether Megasthenes merely had a keen sense of the absurd or was so enamoured of the sights and sounds around him that his fevered imagination conjured up fantastical images visible only to him. The alternative is too awful to contemplate—people with rotating feet and/or canine heads, barking at each other as they went about their work, carefully avoiding the ants and their gold-rush frenzy, all the while. A sojourn in the hills would take on impossibly sinister meanings, in that case! You can understand, therefore, why historians are somewhat wary of using the Indica as an impeccable source for Chandragupta Maurya and his times.

Nevertheless, let us turn to those who got the Indica hot off the press, so to speak—the ancient Greek and Roman scholars who cited it in their own works, although they differed in the extent to which they used it to buttress their own. Diodorus Sicilus, for instance, a historian from Agyrium in Sicily (as his name implies!) wrote in a prolific manner in the second half of the first century BCE. Of his forty books, only a few have survived but these describe Alexander’s India campaign, as well as the country in general, based on the Indica and other sources. Here is where Diodorus differs somewhat from his Megasthenes-quoting peers: he refrains from making any nasty, snide remarks about the Greek but he definitely leaves out some of the latter’s weird observations and stories about India and its people.

Meanwhile, Strabo, a geographer and historian from Pontus in West Asia, wrote seventeen books at around the same time as Diodorus, of which the fifteenth deals with India and Persia. This man was, among other things, a pastmaster at criticism and sarcasm. Poor Megasthenes wouldn’t have stood a chance against him had there been an actual confrontation between the two! Behold his scathing indictment: ‘Generally speaking, the men who have hitherto written on the affairs of India were a set of liars—Deimachus holds the first place in the list, Megasthenes comes next, while Onesicritus and Nearchus, with others of the same class, manage to stammer out a few words (of truth)…No faith whatever can be placed in Deimachus and Megasthenes. They coined the fables concerning men with ears large enough to sleep in, men without any mouths, without noses, with only one eye, with spider legs, and with fingers bent backward…Both of these men were sent as ambassadors to Palimbothra—Megasthenes to Sandrocottus (Chandragupta), Deimachus to Amitrochades (Bindusara), his son—and such are the notes of their residence abroad, which, I know not why, they thought fit to leave.’ The ancient equivalent of a modern literary review that completely pans the book! Strabo also notes that both these Greek writers accused each other of lying and observes: ‘… they all frequently contradict one another. But if they differ thus about what was seen, what must we think of what they report from hearsay?’

Let us also consider the views of Arrian (c. 96–180 CE), a curious mix of statesman, soldier, philosopher and historian, from Nikomedia in Bithynia. Not only did he write the Anabasis on Alexander’s Asian campaigns but also unabashedly borrowed the title of Indica for the continuation of his work. Of this, the first part describes India, using the accounts of Megasthenes and Eratosthenes as sources, the latter being a formidable Greek polymath and chief librarian at the library of Alexandria in the third century BCE. Arrian trusts Megasthenes slightly more than his fellow-writers, although still critical of him, and manages to couch his criticism in refined terms. Consider the following statement: ‘…Megasthenes, so far as it appears, did not travel over much of India, though no doubt he saw more of it than those who came with Alexander… for, as he tells us, he resided at the court of Sandrocottus, the greatest king in India, and also at the court of Porus, who was still greater than he.’

Arrian goes on to note that despite this, ‘…we have no real knowledge of the country: since this is the sort of account which Megasthenes gives us of an Indian river: Its name is the Silas; it flows from a fountain called after the river, through the dominions of the Silaens, who again are called after the river and the fountain; the water of the river manifests this singular property—that there is nothing which it cannot buoy up, nor anything which can swim or float in it, but everything sinks down to the bottom, so that there is nothing in the world so thin and unsubstantial as this water…’ Convoluted, indeed—and one can imagine Arrian shaking his head in dignified grief at Megasthenes’ wild surmises.

Gaius Plinius Secundus (c. 23–79 CE) or Pliny the Elder, the much-quoted Roman scholar, is another prolific writer who frowns upon Megasthenes and his ramblings. His tome, Naturalis Historia, consisting, in turn, of thirty-seven books on diverse subjects, such as geography, ethnography and zoology, uses the Indica as a source, although—as he himself asserts—it is a clearly dubious one. Here is his succinct observation: ‘India was opened up to our knowledge…by other Greek writers, who, having resided with Indian kings—as for instance Megasthenes and Dionysius—made known the strength of the peoples of the country. It is not, however, worthwhile to study their accounts with care, so conflicting are they, and incredible.’

Then they all go slightly berserk while describing the Mauryan king’s public appearances, culled from the Indica, clearly. Strabo holds forth on royal processions that featured elephants adorned with gold and silver, attendants bearing vessels of gold (some with goblets of six feet in breadth, if you please!), a profusion of precious stones cleverly woven into sundry garments, and wild beasts and birds (apparently leopards ambled along with buffaloes), so that the impression conveyed is one of extreme colour and exotic sounds and general magnificence. Or sample Curtius’s description of Chandragupta Maurya’s public face wherein he sat in a golden-and-pearl palanquin, robed in purple and gold, while his attendants bore silver censors and perfumed incense all down the roads that he chose for his promenade, as it were. Bodyguards brought up his rear, some of whom carried branches of trees on which birds perched, ‘trained to interrupt business with their cries’.

And let us not forget the unbearable excitement caused when the king ceremonially washed his hair on his birthday during which he apparently liked to receive presents of birds and beasts; the wilder, the better. So deer and rhinos and panthers huddled, so to speak, by his feet, along with cranes and geese and wild pigeons. How much hair was washed, in the process, and what sort of order was required to keep the live gifts away from the king and his ablutions is a matter for conjecture. Also, what Kautilya thought of this strange mix of flora and fauna and humans and tresses and general chaos is not clear. So is this an entirely fanciful rendition of events? That, too, isn’t clear.

There is a lot more besides but this is, more or less, the salient narrative. So there you have it—study the Indica at your peril. But is this work really so useless? The answer is a resounding no. These ancient writers who quoted Megasthenes were targeting an educated Greek audience who sought to learn about new lands, and their aim was not only to educate but also to entertain. So the parts that were culled from the Indica were those that would amuse and interest their readers the most. Consequently, the parts that were left out, owing to their presumably dry nature, might have been of immense value to historians. There is, therefore, a sameness to their works—despite being separated by time, interest and style—in that they talk about aspects that were common to India and Greece, as well as those that were markedly different. The parts that lay between these two discourses were clearly and unceremoniously dropped from the narrative—and these were, in retrospect, the truly valuable bits.

So, much is made by them of indications that India, too, was once inhabited by primitive tribes, and that arts and other cultural attributes were invented on a gradual basis. Similarities were spotted in the philosophical realm as well—in the views of the Brahmanas and the Greek ideas of the world and soul. Here was an ideal country where there was no slavery and no theft, no lending or borrowing of money on interest, no knowledge of writing and no drinking of wine except for sacrificial purposes—all of which, of course, flies in the face of hard evidence. Grandiose parallels were drawn with Egypt and Europe: the Ganga and the Indus were akin to the Nile and the Danube. And then, the unbelievable and wondrous inversions of nature and beast: the one-horned horses with deerlike heads; the huge snakes that could swallow stags and oxen whole; the Silas (earlier cited) in which nothing could float; the sheer captivating breadth and diversity of flora and fauna in this exciting new land.

These works had an agenda of their own, and what Megasthenes saw and heard at the Mauryan court was not, by any means, their exclusive priority. Arrian, for one, confesses that his main preoccupation was with the manner in which Alexander brought his army from India to Persia and not necessarily the manners and customs of the Indians, who should be treated ‘…as a mere episode’. It is not even clear whether these writers had direct access to the Indica or whether they had to rely on yet another secondary account of the text. It is grossly unfair, therefore, to blame Megathenes for the later whimsical paraphrasing of his work even though that is, ironically, the only way in which it lives on.

What, then, can we glean about Chandragupta and the Mauryan court from the much-maligned Megasthenes? For a start, he got several things right about the ancient city of Pataliputra (the Greek Palimbothra), the capital of Magadha and the first Mauryan rulers, and archaeological evidence—that is usually seen as a clincher in such arguments. Megasthenes describes the city as surrounded by a wooden wall with towers and openings for shooting arrows, beyond which was a moat. The exact location of Pataliputra has been hotly-debated but ancient ruins that can be connected to the Mauryas in this city have been identified at several places in modern Patna; particularly at Kumrahar, where there are remains of a pillared hall with ten rows of eight pillars each; and Bulandibagh to its north-west where remains of a wooden palisade of two parallel walls have been found. These might, quite conceivably, be the remnants of the wooden fortifications of Pataliputra as described by Megasthenes.

The environs of the palace itself have been discussed by Arrian and Claudius Aelianus (second-third century CE), a Roman scholar whose work on zoology went by an engaging title, On the Peculiarities of Animals. Arrian cites Megasthenes as claiming that the inhabited portion of Pataliputra stretched on either side to an extreme length of eighty stadia (over nine miles), its breadth was fifteen stadia (one and a quarter miles) and a ditch of thirty cubits in depth surrounded it. The wall had five hundred and seventy towers and sixty-four gates. Megasthenes either painstakingly counted and measured away or relied on official data, in this regard. Either way, it was a clearly massive and impressive city, and an immaculately guarded one besides. A very discouraging sight to potential invaders—and obviously designed for this very purpose!

Aelian, on the other hand, contents himself with describing the wonders within. He manages to paint an exceedingly charming picture of exotic birds traipsing around the palace grounds, and waxes eloquent on parrots and their virtues before moving on to the enormous, tame fish in the palace ponds, who were presumably unruffled by the Mauryan princes’ attempts to sail boats in their waters, and the magnificent plants and trees that apparently never shed their leaves, being untouched by age. While this might be an accurate rendition of the Indica’s notes, one wonders whether Kautilya, for one, would have allowed untrammelled nature to exist thus. He would have cast a jaundiced eye at the dancing peacocks and probably had their feathers examined for hidden weapons, and hauled the princes up by the scruff of their necks if they so much as dared set a toe in the water!

Furthermore, Megasthenes, as noted by Strabo, also reveals some interesting aspects about the king’s routine—and these tie in neatly with Kautilya’s strictures, which we will come to later. That the king was always surrounded by women bodyguards is an exciting nugget of information that assumes pivotal importance given that the throne was initially fragile but managed to root itself firmly in Mauryan hands after its slightly shaky start—and these women must have contributed to this in no small measure. When the king hunted, for instance, in a fenced enclosure, ‘shooting arrows from a platform in his chariot, two or three armed women stand beside him, and also in the unfenced hunting-grounds from an elephant; and the women ride partly in chariots, partly on horses, and partly on elephants, and they are equipped with all kinds of weapons, as they are when they go on military expeditions with men’. So the king’s care was ‘committed to women’: thus Strabo quoted from the Indica. But consider this tantalising comment, too: ‘And a woman who kills a king when he is drunk receives as her reward the privilege of consorting with his successor; and their children succeed to the throne.’ Clearly, therefore, women in the Mauryan court were both saviours and destroyers. They protected the king but he was also vulnerable to attacks by them.

However, another example of Megasthenes’s wild imaginings is his observation on the Indian people, whom he rather arbitrarily divides into seven tiers. If we combine the remnants of his remarks from Diodorus and Strabo, we can extricate these groups as philosophers, farmers, herdsmen and hunters, artisans and traders, soldiers, overseers and the king’s counsellors. Nine, in fact, but we mustn’t quibble because the categories that he lumps together are actually partners of a kind. The more critical fact here is that this motley collection of professional groups and administrative officers does not correspond to either the varnas or the jatis. The only logical assumption, therefore, is that they must have sprung out of the Greek writer’s head, although, as Upinder Singh points out, his comment might have been modelled on the redoubtable Herodotus’s classification of Egyptian society into seven similar classes.

Megasthenes goes on to claim that no one in India could marry outside their genos (a Greek word that refers to one’s clan or relationships of descent) and nor could they follow another’s occupation. To give him his due, though, he was interpreting what he saw through his Greek-specific lens—something he can hardly be faulted for!—and, as Romila Thapar notes, did manage to spot two of the crucial aspects of the caste system—hereditary occupation and endogamy, the latter being the custom of marrying only within a community/ clan or tribe. Philosophers were greatly respected, it seems, and Strabo divides them into the brachmanes (brahmanas) and garmanes (shramanas or Buddhist monks), so this ties in with what we already know.

Yet if we attempt to draw parallels between the Indica and the Arthashastra as regards the society, we immediately run into trouble. For instance, Megasthenes makes the blanket statement that Indian society did not have any slaves. Kautilya, on the other hand, talks at length about dasas or slaves: he enumerates their categories (temporary and permanent depending on their work, situations of enslavement and whether they were employed by private citizens or the state), their treatment and related penalties (those who sell a pregnant slave without maternity arrangements and/or causing her to miscarry are to be punished) and rules for their manumission (on paying money or if a dasi bore her master a son; the child would be considered the father’s legitimate heir). Much later, Ashoka’s Rock Edict  urges courteous behaviour towards dasas and other menial staff as part of dhamma or spiritual philosophy. Furthermore, where Kautilya indicates growing strictures for untouchables, such as chandalas and shvapakas (the latter refers to dog-breeders) having to live at the very edges of settlements, Megasthenes remains completely silent.

So what exactly was Megasthenes doing, veering between the factual (the description of Pataliputra, for one) and the fanciful (most of his other observations!)? As noted earlier, he was, perhaps, so overwhelmed by his surroundings that he did not stop to think through his observations or even consult a local cultural interpreter in his rush to write them down. Equally, perhaps, he was eager to show off his knowledge of a new and thoroughly (to him) exotic place to his family and compatriots, banking on their total ignorance of it. No one he knew was going to contradict or challenge him; on the contrary, admiration would envelop him wherever he went on account of his writing. Even in the Mauryan court, his erudition would be remarked upon in envious tones. Therefore, he wrote and wrote, blissfully keeping all filters at bay. His enthusiasm for the task is praiseworthy; not, though, his discernment.

And of such conflicting material are the sources of the ancient world made!