Age of the Nandas and Mauryas c9.s34.1.3

c9.s34.1.3

Lastly, Strabo has this : ‘The whole of the land belongs to the Crown, and the husbandmen till it on condition of receiving as wages one-fourth of the produce.’ We notice marked differences in these extracts from Megasthenes by the three writers. Arrian is silent on state ownership and says that the payment for land was of the same order in monarchies and in free cities (republics), which should be deemed enough to silence all attempts to restrict the application of our texts to the royal domain; Diodorus mentions the payment of a quarter share of the produce to the state in addition to the tribute, while Strabo says that three-fourths were given up to the state, only a quarter going to the cultivator as wages. It may well be doubted whether these differences in the rate of land tax or rent may be properly explained as due to differences in the conditions under which cultivation was carried on under a sharing system, the landlord contributing only the land in some cases, but cattle, plough, manure and so on in different degrees in other instances. The *Arthaśāstra*, however, knows these differences, and Breloer has argued that the Mauryan polity was based on a close supervision and regulation of all agriculture and industry in the land by government agency¹. In Taxila alone soldiers outnumbered husbandmen, as the king was at war with two of his neighbours, as he told Alexander².