The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s2.2

c10.s2.2

G REAT changes had taken place in India since Alexander's day. He had found a number of disconnected states and peoples in the North-West, and had had no relations with, even if he had heard of, the most powerful of the Indian kingdoms, that of Magadha on the Ganges. Soon after his death the Maurya Chandragupta had seized the crown of Magadha, and, perhaps by 312, had extended his rule to embrace all India north of the line of the Vindya mountains and the Nerbudda river. He was succeeded first by his son Bindusāra and then by his grandson Asoka, under whom the Mauryan empire was expanded to include a considerable part of peninsular India; but the southern conquests were only temporary and were apparently lost after Asoka died, and the empire was essentially a North Indian empire; the capital was Pātaliputra on the Ganges. The Seleucids and the Mauryas were always on friendly terms, and Greeks knew a good deal about the Mauryan empire as it had been under Chandragupta through the account of it given by Megasthenes, Seleucus' ambassador at his Court; probably they knew as much about it as they had known about the Persian empire in Xenophon's day, while Indians in turn knew a certain amount about the Greeks of the Seleucid East, whom they called Yavanas or Yonas (p. 417). It is however of some importance to the subsequent story to note that the Mauryan empire as most Greeks knew it was that of Chandragupta and not that of Asoka, that is, it was an empire of Northern India. Asoka made one other very great change in India. He became a convert to Buddhism, and through his encouragement and missionary efforts that religion attained a position in India such as it never held again, though Brahmanism remained strong; in particular, he successfully evangelised a good deal of the North-West. Had the Mauryan empire continued powerful it might perhaps have done something to create a sense of Indian nationality in the loose complex of subordinate states and peoples which went to form it, but after Asoka's death it began to suffer the common lot of Oriental empires and gradually to decline; little however is really known of his successors, and it is not even certain whether the whole empire remained in one hand, or whether the two extant lists of names mean that the dynasty had divided into two lines,¹ one ruling in Pāṭaliputra and one in the North-West, or merely reflect the fact that one list is Brahman and one Buddhist. Certainly the Sophagasenos whom Antiochus III met in the Paropamisadae (p. 101) was no local rajah but a Maurya,² a powerful ruler³ with whom he renewed the traditional friendship of the two houses. It was the ultimate break-down of the Mauryan empire which gave Demetrius his opportunity.