The Early History of India, from 600 B.C. to the Muhammadan Conquest, including the Invasion of Alexander the Great c29.19

c29.19

When his fighting days were over he employed a learned poet, skilled in the technicalities of Sanskrit verse, to compose a panegyric of his achievements, which he caused to be engraved on one of the stone pillars set up six centuries before by Asoka and incised with his edicts.² Samudragupta, an orthodox Hindu, learned in all the wisdom of the Brahmans, and an ambitious soldier full of the joy of battle, although he had been interested as a young man, at his father's bidding, in the doctrine of Vasubandha, the Buddhist sage, made no scruple about setting his own ruthless boasts of sanguinary wars by the side of the quietest moralizings of him who deemed 'the chiefest conquest' to be the conquest of piety.