The Early History of the Deccan (Parts I–XI) v1.c7.s6.14

v1.c7.s6.14

The forty-six years of rule of these three chieftains, from 230 to 184 B.C., were apparently uneventful within the frontiers of the Sātavāhana dominions. The unsettled conditions across their borders evidently exhausted all the energies of these kings in the effort to consolidate their power and to make it immune from dangers such as beset the reigns of Aśoka’s Mauryan successors. The Magadha empire was tottering to its fall owing to internal dissensions, and external invasions by the Bactrian princes of the house of Euthydemos. The empire was divided among the princes, Samprati at Ujjain, Daśaratha at Pāṭaliputra, Jalauka in Kashmir, and Virasena in Gandhāra. Even as early as 206 B.C. Antiochos the Great is stated to have renewed his alliance with Subhagasena, probably a member of the family of Virasena. This was only the beginning of intrusion, though here in a friendly form. But from 200 B.C. onward the Bactrian (Greek) invasions began in real earnest. Demetrios, Apollodotus, and Menander conquered and consolidated an Indian Empire, much richer and more extensive than even Alexander could have ever dreamt of, including the Cis-Hindukush regions, the Kābul valley, the Punjāb, and the Indus delta and the region of Surāṣṭra.¹ The eastern frontier of these extensive Indian possessions of the Yavanas was a fluid one. Most certainly they reached the Jamunā and extended east of that river. Their incursions must have been many and with only short intervals between each and the next. The Yuga Purāṇa, a chapter of the Gārgī Saṃhitā, describes an eastern invasion by the ‘viciously valiant Greeks’. They reduced Sāketa (Oudh) and the Pañchāla country that was the Gaṅgā-Jamunā doab, and established themselves firmly at Mathurā.² Patañjali’s illustrations in which he uses the imperfect tense: ‘The Yavana was besieging Sāketa: the Yavana was besieging Madhyamikā’, reveal the sore straits to which the country was reduced.³ Pāṭaliputra was itself threatened.