Ashoka: The Search for India's Lost Emperor by Charles R. Allen Page B
Authors: Charles R. Allen
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nowhere with his biblical correlations, Jones turned to the classics of his childhood. He knew his Herodotus, his Strabo, and his Megasthenes; he had read Arrian’s
Anabapsis
, Ptolemy’s
Geographia
and Quintus Curtius Rufus’s
Historiae Alexandri Magni
in the original Greek and Latin – and much else besides. He now subjected these texts to the closest re-examination for any light they could throw on early Indian history, particularly with regard to the Indian kings encountered by Alexander the Great in the course of his invasion of India and by Alexander’s Macedonian successors in the east. He was convinced that hidden in these accounts was the key that would provide the missing synchronicity: a name or event common to both the Greeks and the Indians that could be identified and by doing so would unlock the past.
4
Enter Alexander
A silver coin issued by Alexander the Great
c
.324 BCE on his return to Babylon to celebrate his victories in India. On the obverse (left) Nike, goddess of victory, holds a garland of laurels over Alexander, clad in full armour and Persian helmet. This is the only known image of Alexander to survive from his lifetime. On the reverse (right) a horseman engages in battle with two men mounted on an elephant showing the moment in the battle of Hydaspes when the Indian king Poros was wounded by a Greek Cavalryman. (British Museum)
Alexander’s invasion of India had begun in the winter of 327–326 BCE . Over the preceding twenty months he had destroyed Darius, the last Achaemenid emperor, and proclaimed himself king of kings in his stead. He had hunted down and executed the rebel Bactrian satrap Bessos, who had killed Darius. Wherever he set foot he had planted new cities named after himself, including Alexandria in Arachiosa (modern Kandahar, more properly Iskandahar), Alexandria under Kaukasos (modern Begram, south of the Hindu Kush), and Alexandria
Eschate
, or ‘Furthest’ (in modern Tajikistan). But it was not enough, and his thoughts had turned to India – according to the historian Herodotus, the most populous nation in the known world and the richest.
No army had ever been so well educated as that which marched to Alexander’s drum, particularly those cavalry officers known as the Companions who commanded the royal wing and the eight other squadrons of horse, and the infantry commanders known as the Shield-Bearers who spearheaded the right phalanx of Alexander’s army. Some had been friends of Alexander since childhood and had attended the school at Mieza at which the philosopher Aristotle of Stagira had presided over Alexander’s education, tutoring him from the age of thirteen in philosophy, morals, logic, science, mathematics, medicine and art. At Mieza Alexander had learned that what distinguished Greeks and Macedonians from other men was the spirit of enquiry. But his education had been cut short when his father King Philip went away to wage war against Byzantium. From that time onwards Alexander had been too busy either defending or enlarging Philip’s kingdom to give much thought to Aristotelian ethics.
There was nothing morally uplifting about Alexander’s extraordinary advance into Asia but it did at least accord withAristotle’s assertion that ‘All men by nature desire to know’. No less than sixteen of those who accompanied Alexander are known to have written accounts of that extraordinary journey eastwards. None of these eyewitness accounts have survived in the original but enough material was still accessible in the days of late republican and imperial Rome for Greek and Roman historians to plunder them for their own versions of Alexander’s eastern adventure, of which five survived to be read by Sir William Jones, together providing a detailed, if contradictory, account of Alexander’s invasion of India. 1
Having made his decision to press on, Alexander had sent envoys to all the local rulers calling on them to submit to his authority. Those whose
Anabapsis
, Ptolemy’s
Geographia
and Quintus Curtius Rufus’s
Historiae Alexandri Magni
in the original Greek and Latin – and much else besides. He now subjected these texts to the closest re-examination for any light they could throw on early Indian history, particularly with regard to the Indian kings encountered by Alexander the Great in the course of his invasion of India and by Alexander’s Macedonian successors in the east. He was convinced that hidden in these accounts was the key that would provide the missing synchronicity: a name or event common to both the Greeks and the Indians that could be identified and by doing so would unlock the past.
4
Enter Alexander
A silver coin issued by Alexander the Great
c
.324 BCE on his return to Babylon to celebrate his victories in India. On the obverse (left) Nike, goddess of victory, holds a garland of laurels over Alexander, clad in full armour and Persian helmet. This is the only known image of Alexander to survive from his lifetime. On the reverse (right) a horseman engages in battle with two men mounted on an elephant showing the moment in the battle of Hydaspes when the Indian king Poros was wounded by a Greek Cavalryman. (British Museum)
Alexander’s invasion of India had begun in the winter of 327–326 BCE . Over the preceding twenty months he had destroyed Darius, the last Achaemenid emperor, and proclaimed himself king of kings in his stead. He had hunted down and executed the rebel Bactrian satrap Bessos, who had killed Darius. Wherever he set foot he had planted new cities named after himself, including Alexandria in Arachiosa (modern Kandahar, more properly Iskandahar), Alexandria under Kaukasos (modern Begram, south of the Hindu Kush), and Alexandria
Eschate
, or ‘Furthest’ (in modern Tajikistan). But it was not enough, and his thoughts had turned to India – according to the historian Herodotus, the most populous nation in the known world and the richest.
No army had ever been so well educated as that which marched to Alexander’s drum, particularly those cavalry officers known as the Companions who commanded the royal wing and the eight other squadrons of horse, and the infantry commanders known as the Shield-Bearers who spearheaded the right phalanx of Alexander’s army. Some had been friends of Alexander since childhood and had attended the school at Mieza at which the philosopher Aristotle of Stagira had presided over Alexander’s education, tutoring him from the age of thirteen in philosophy, morals, logic, science, mathematics, medicine and art. At Mieza Alexander had learned that what distinguished Greeks and Macedonians from other men was the spirit of enquiry. But his education had been cut short when his father King Philip went away to wage war against Byzantium. From that time onwards Alexander had been too busy either defending or enlarging Philip’s kingdom to give much thought to Aristotelian ethics.
There was nothing morally uplifting about Alexander’s extraordinary advance into Asia but it did at least accord withAristotle’s assertion that ‘All men by nature desire to know’. No less than sixteen of those who accompanied Alexander are known to have written accounts of that extraordinary journey eastwards. None of these eyewitness accounts have survived in the original but enough material was still accessible in the days of late republican and imperial Rome for Greek and Roman historians to plunder them for their own versions of Alexander’s eastern adventure, of which five survived to be read by Sir William Jones, together providing a detailed, if contradictory, account of Alexander’s invasion of India. 1
Having made his decision to press on, Alexander had sent envoys to all the local rulers calling on them to submit to his authority. Those whose
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