Megasthenes

Megasthenes was the Seleucid ambassador to the Mauryan court and wrote the first substantial Greek account of India, which survives only in quotations. He was sent by Seleucus I some time after 305 BC, when the Seleucid attempt to hold the Indian satrapies ended in a treaty that ceded them to Chandragupta Maurya in exchange for five hundred war elephants - elephants that were used at Ipsus and helped decide the succession to Alexander. He spent time at Pataliputra and travelled, and his Indika described the city as some nine miles long, walled in timber, with sixty-four gates and five hundred and seventy towers and a moat; excavation has confirmed the timber palisade. He described the caste system as seven classes rather than four, recorded that there was no slavery in India - which was wrong, or was true of what he was shown - and set out the administration, the road system with distance markers, and the army. He also relayed a good deal of nonsense about men with ears large enough to sleep in and gold-digging ants, which damaged his reputation among later Greeks; Strabo called him a liar while quoting him extensively. The book is lost and is known through Diodorus, Strabo, Pliny and Arrian, who preserve enough for it to be the principal external source on Mauryan India and the main check on the Arthashastra. He may also have served as an envoy in Arachosia before the Indian mission. The Indika was reconstructed from fragments by Schwanbeck in 1846 and that edition is still the basis of modern study. Later Greek writers on India largely copied him rather than travelling. Nothing in his account can be checked against a Mauryan text, because none survives from the period except the edicts.

• Lived: 350 CE – 290 BCE
• Nationality: Greek
• Roles: writer