Age of the Nandas and Mauryas c11.s1.15

c11.s1.15

Bindusāra seems to have been perfectly pacific abroad. He maintained the relations of friendship with the Hellenic world that had been established in the later days of his illustrious father. Diodorus testifies to the great love of the king of Palibothra (Pāṭaliputra), apparently an early Maurya monarch, for the Graeccians. The policy was reciprocated by the Greek contemporaries of Bindusāra. Strabo refers to the sending of Deimachos to the court of "Allitrochades, son of Sandrokottos"². We learn from Pliny that another envoy named Dionysius came from (Ptolemy II) Philadelphus, king of Egypt (285—47 B.C.)³ The name of the monarch to whom he presented his credentials is not stated. The Egyptian king appears to have been a contemporary of both Bindusāra and Aśoka. The silence of Greek and Latin writers regarding Aśoka, when contrasted with repeated references to Chandragupta and Amitraghāta makes it probable that the monarch in question was Bindusāra, rather than his great son. Athenaeus, a Greek writer of the third century, tells us on the authority of Hegesander, that Amitrochates, king of the Indians, wrote to Antiochus (I of Syria) asking that monarch to buy and send him sweet wine, dried figs and a sophist. The Syrian king replied "we shall send you figs and the wine, but in Greece the laws forbid a sophist to be sold¹".