The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c26.256

v1.c26.256

Under all of these kings, including Antiochus II, the friendly relations originally established with the Maurya empire remained unbroken. The indications of this, if few, are sufficient. Athenaeus (I, 32, 18 D) has preserved a story of certain strange drugs sent as a present by Chandragupta to Seleucus I. And it is to the same writer (XIV, 67, 652 F and 653 A) that we owe an anecdote of how Chandragupta’s son, Bindusāra—or Amitrochates, to give him his Greek name¹,—wrote to Antiochus I, asking him to buy and have conveyed to him some sweet wine, some figs, and a sophist to teach him to argue. Antiochus replied, forwarding the figs and the wine, but explaining that sophists were not a marketable commodity among the Greeks. Nor was the intercourse between the courts confined to such occasional civilities. We know from Strabo and others that Megasthenes repeatedly—πολλάκις is Arrian’s word (V, 6, 2)—visited Chandragupta’s capital as an envoy of Seleucus, thereby acquiring a mass of information which made his writings on India an invaluable storehouse for later geographers, and that Daïmachus of Plataea also went on a mission or missions from Antiochus I to Bindusāra, likewise embodying his experiences in a book. Other Hellenic states must have been drawn into the circle of amity, for Pliny (*N.H.* VI, 58) speaks in the same breath of Megasthenes and of a certain Dionysius who (he explains) was despatched as an ambassador to India by Ptolemy Philadelphus. As Philadelphus reigned from 285 to 246, the Maurya emperor to whom Dionysius was accredited may have been either Bindusāra or his more famous son Açoka, whose attempt to convert the Hellenistic kings to Buddhism (see p. 502) is justly regarded as one of the most curious episodes in early Indian history.