Chandragupta Maurya and the Treaty with Seleucus
Chandragupta Maurya built the first empire to cover most of the Indian subcontinent and gave it up to starve himself to death. His origins are obscure and every tradition gives a different social class. The opportunity was Alexander. The Macedonian invasion of the Punjab in 327 BC destroyed the local kingdoms and then withdrew, leaving a vacuum, and the Nanda dynasty at Magadha in the east was unpopular and rich. Chandragupta, advised by the brahmin Kautilya, took the north-west and then Magadha itself around 321 BC. The confrontation with Seleucus in about 305 BC produced a settlement remarkable on both sides: Seleucus ceded the eastern satrapies including Gandhara and Arachosia, and received 500 war elephants, which he used six years later at Ipsus to decide the succession wars. A Greek ambassador, Megasthenes, was resident at the capital and wrote a description of it that survives in fragments — a city of wooden walls with 570 towers, a bureaucracy divided into departments for irrigation, markets and foreigners, and a road with milestones running 2,600 kilometres to the north-west. The Arthashastra, attributed to Kautilya, is a manual of statecraft of the utmost realism, covering espionage, taxation, famine reserves and the conditions under which a treaty may be broken. He is said to have abdicated in favour of his son, become a Jain ascetic, and died by ritual fasting in Karnataka. His grandson was Ashoka. The empire he founded is also the reason Indian historians can date anything at all before the common era. The Greek references to him and to his successors supply fixed points, and everything in early Indian chronology is calculated outwards from them.
- Year: 305 BCE
- Category: Political
