THE GREAT ANCIENT EMPIRESAt any rate Chandragupta seems to have usurped the throne of
Magadha in 320 BC. He used the subsequent years for the consolidation of
his hold on the army and administration of this empire. There are no
reports of his leading any military campaigns in this period. But in 305 BC
Seleukos Nikator, who had emerged as the ruler of the eastern part of
Alexander’s vast domain, crossed the Hindukush mountains in order to
claim Alexander’s heritage in India. Chandragupta met him at the head of
a large army in the Panjab and stopped his march east. In the subsequent
peace treaty Seleukos ceded to Chandragupta all territories to the east of
Kabul as well as Baluchistan. The frontier of the Maurya empire was thus
more or less the same as that of the Mughal empire at the height of its
power about 2,000 years later. Chandragupta’s gift of 500 war elephants
appears to be modest in view of this enormous territorial gain. But this
Indian military aid is supposed to have helped Seleukos to defeat his
western neighbour and rival, Antigonos, in a decisive battle some four
years later.
European knowledge about India was greatly enhanced by the reports
which Seleukos’ ambassador, Megasthenes, prepared while he was in
Pataliputra at Chandragupta’s court. The originals have been lost but
several classical authors have quoted long passages from Megasthenes’
work and, therefore, we know a good deal about what he saw while he
was there. Two parts of his report have attracted special attention: his
description of the imperial capital, Pataliputra, and his account of the
seven strata of Indian society which he observed there.
He reported that Pataliputra was fortified with palisades. This
fortification was shaped like a parallelogram measuring about 9 miles in
length and about 1.5 miles in breadth and it had 570 towers and 64 gates.
The circumference of Pataliputra was about 21 miles and thus this city was
about twice as large as Rome under Emperor Marcus Aurelius. If this
report is true, Pataliputra must have been the largest city of the ancient
world. There was an impression that Megasthenes may have exaggerated
the size of the capital to which he was an ambassador in order to enhance
his own importance. But the German Indologist D.Schlingloff has shown
that the distances between the towers or between a tower and the next gate
as derived from Megasthenes’ account closely correspond to the distance
prescribed for this kind of fortification in Kautalya’s Arthashastra (i.e. 54
yards).
Megasthenes’ description of the society of Magadha seems to be equally
accurate. As the first estate, he mentioned the philosophers, by which he
obviously means the Brahmins. The second estate was that of the
agriculturists. According to Megasthenes, they were exempt from service in
the army and from any other similar obligations to the state. No enemy
would do harm to an agriculturist tilling his fields. For their fields they
paid a rent to the king because ‘in India all land belongs to the king and no