The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c25.6

v1.c25.6

The rājas of Takshaçilā must therefore have long lent an ear to the rumbling of wars and rebellions which came across the western mountains. They may indeed have known next to nothing of what went on at the further extremities of the Persian Empire; for the same realm which at its utmost extension eastward touched the Indus reached at its other end the Aegean and Black Seas; and the great monarchic Empires of the east are conglomerations too loosely organised for the troubles of one province to be necessarily felt in the more distant ones. The Indian princes may therefore have been ignorant of the fact that the Persian king at the other end of his realm had come into contact with a singular people settled in a quantity of little republics over the southern part of the Balkan Peninsula, along the coasts of Asia Minor, and in the intermediate islands, the people whom the Persians called collectively Yavanas (Ionians). We do not know whether it even produced any considerable shock on the banks of the Indus, when a century and a half before 334 B.C. the Persian king had led his armies to disaster in the land of the Yavanas, although those armies included Indian tribesmen torn by Persian officers from the frontier hills, whose bones were destined to find their last resting-place on the field of Plataea thousands of miles away. Of the long struggle which went on for generations after that between the Yavana republics, especially the one called Athens, and the western satraps of the Great King perhaps no rumour was brought down the Kābul valley to Takshaçilā.