A History of India, Third Edition

THE GREAT ANCIENT EMPIRES

Sanchi before ascending the throne. This was reported by the great poet
Kalidasa, several centuries later. Towards the end of the second century BC
the Greek ambassador, Heliodorus, who represented King Antialkidas,
erected a tall Garuda pillar at Besnagar, very close to Vidisha. In his
inscription on this pillar, Heliodorus calls himself a follower of the
Bhagavata sect of the Vaishnavas and mentions a king by the name of
Bhagabhadra who seems to have been a member of the Shunga dynasty. So
Vidisha was probably still under the control of the Shungas, but they had
obviously lost Ujjain, the old provincial capital situated about a hundred
miles further to the west. The last king of the Shunga dynasty was
murdered around 73 BC by a slave girl and, it is said, instigated by the
king’s Brahmin minister, Vasudeva.
The short-lived Kanva dynasty, which was founded by Vasudeva after
the Shunga dynasty, witnessed the complete decline of Magadha which
relapsed to its earlier position of one mahajanapada among several others.
The political centre of India had shifted to the northwest where several
foreign dynasties struggled for supremacy. In 28 BC the last Kanva king
was defeated by a king of the Shatavahana (or Andhra) dynasty of central
India. This fact not only signalled the end of the Magadha after five
centuries of imperial eminence but also the rise of central and southern
India which continued throughout the subsequent centuries.

Greek rulers of the northwest

When the Maurya empire was at the height of its power it could thwart all
attempts of the Seleukids to claim Alexander’s heritage in India.
Chandragupta had repulsed Seleukos Nikator at the end of the fourth
century BC and a later king of the same dynasty, Antiochos III, who tried
to conquer the Indian plains about one century later was equally
frustrated. But this was due less to the efficacy of Indian resistance than to
the great upheavals which had occurred in Bactria, Persia and southern
Central Asia in the meantime.
Around 250 BC the Parthians, under King Arsakes, had won their
independence from the Seleukids. After a century of tough fights against
their former masters and against Central Asian nomadic horsemen, they
had established hegemony over Western Asia. Until their final defeat about
AD 226 they remained the most dangerous enemies of the Romans. At
about the same time that Arsakes won independence from the Seleukids,
the viceroy of Bactria, Diodotos, did the same and established a kingdom
of his own. But only the third Greek king of Bactria, Euthydemos, was able
to get formal recognition from the Seleukid king, Antiochos III, when he
was on his Indian campaign which has been referred to above.
The history of the Greek kings of Bactria became a part of Indian
history when the successors of Euthydemos once again tried to follow