The inscriptions of Ashoka Maurya are exceptionally good sources for history, being edicts issued by the emperor himself and inscribed on stone. They are the earliest of royal inscriptions in India, possibly inspired by the inscriptions of the Persian Empire of the Achaemenids, but exceptional and experimental in substance, concerned as they are with reconciling the moral principle of non-violence, coming out of the new religions of Buddhism and Jainism, with the unintended suffering visited upon non-combatants by Ashoka's conquest of Kalinga—by the elective violence of war.
The empire and the army that created it had been the work of Ashoka's grandfather, Chandragupta Maurya. We do not have Chandragupta's own account of the first formation of an India-wide empire. His empire was built upon that of Magadha, under the rule of the Nanda dynasty. It was the original of the very army whose actions in Kalinga provoked Ashoka's remorse and reconsideration.
But Chandragupta does have a surviving contemporary witness, in Megasthenes, author in Greek of an Indica. Megasthenes spent time in Chandragupta's military camp and in his capital city, Palibothra or Pataliputra, modern Patna, in the middle region of the Ganges valley.
As with any historical source there are problems of interpretation, of which the greatest is that we have Megasthenes’ book only in fragments quoted, or rather, in almost all cases, paraphrased, in the works of later writers on India, notably Arrian, Diodorus of Sicily, and Strabo. The book itself is lost, but the fragments have been collected to reconstruct the shape and substance of it as best as may be, first by E. A. Schwanbeck, then by Felix Jacoby in his great compendium of lost histories called Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker, and now in a new version of the latter called Brill's New Jacoby, in which the Megasthenes fragments have been edited by Duane Roller.Footnote 1
The eminent military historian Kaushik Roy has said that the army was the largest government employer in ancient India.Footnote 2 This is one of those statements that seem obvious when you read it,Footnote 3 and it seems correct even if we do not have budgets of ancient states from which it could be proven in detail. Given its massive cost and its largeness as a proportion of state expense, the army deserves study because of the ramifications for other aspects of India's history, well beyond battles and weapons.
Megasthenes paid close attention to understanding the Indian military, noting, as a leading example, that the soldiers were paid handsomely by the state, maintained servants, and had no peacetime duties, nor were they maintained by landholdings (as we shall shortly see). Besides the massive expenditure this entails, there is also the military livestock, consisting largely of horses, elephants, and cattle (for supply by oxcart) among other of the large domesticates, and the wages of those who feed them, train them, drive them, and tend to their ills—what, taken altogether, we might call the military-pastoral complex.
It is my proposal that we focus in on the largest sector of expense, living components of the army, consisting of the men, horses, elephants, and oxen, in the fragments that remain of Megasthenes’ book in the expectation that we will find much that helps explain Chandragupta's success. To be sure, this will not be a comprehensive examination of all the fragments—for which we have the excellent study by Romila Thapar,Footnote 4 and several works by Shriram Goyal.Footnote 5 Nor will it engage with all aspects of the founding of the Mauryan Empire. But we will get what the surviving Megasthenes fragments can best deliver, because it concerns just those matters with which Megasthenes was most engaged. And we will lay the groundwork for more. By making visible this component of the political work of warfare at an important turning-point in Indian history we may shift analysis of it toward an environmental perspective, toward political ecology.
Of the thirty-four Megasthenes fragments, we will examine only those that speak to these issues, falling into three groups: Megasthenes’ testimony on the war elephant, the military administration, and the social-organizational groups concerned with soldiers and military livestock. Then we will take up the role of military livestock in the treaty relations of Chandragupta and Seleucus, and the environmental structuring of India by developments of this kind.
MEGASTHENES 1. THE WAR ELEPHANT
Diodorus’ overall treatment of India is largely from Megasthenes.Footnote 6 The theme is the fecundity of the Indian soil, or as Grant Parker calls it, India's abundance.Footnote 7 This is due to the many large rivers and the summer rains of the monsoon. Irrigation makes possible an intensive agriculture based on double-cropping, of winter wheat and summer rice and millets, providing two crops a year and banishing famine because if one crop fails the other will surely come through. Even the plains, that is, the land between rivers as opposed to cultivation along riverbanks where irrigation can be resorted to, is highly productive because of the summer rains.Footnote 8 In addition to the fruitfulness of cultivation, Diodorus continues, the earth of India is filled with productive veins of minerals, of which silver, gold, copper, iron, and tin are named, “and whatever else is useful for adornment, necessities, and preparations for war.” Humans are tall and strong. India is “full of every type of animal” notable for their size and strength, elephants of India being the supreme example. India “produces an abundance of the largest elephants” due to plentiful forage; “because of this the animals greatly surpass in strength those produced in Libya.”
The Indians capture many elephants and train them for war, in which they are “especially effective in turning the balance toward victory.” The sentiment is expressed in Indian texts in virtually identical terms, across a thousand years.Footnote 9 Diodorus continues: “Thus no foreign king has ever conquered this territory, since all foreign nations fear the number and strength of the beasts.”
This theme, with its highly favorable portrait of India, certainly goes back to Ctesias, a century earlier, and perhaps in part to Herodotus, contemporary with Ctesias, as well, on some of the particulars such as double-cropping, and India constituting the wealthiest province of the Persian Empire, paying a large tribute in gold. Ctesias, physician to the Persian emperor, wrote a book of the name which Megasthenes also used, Indica, but he wrote from the vantage of the Persian Empire, never having traveled to India. For Ctesias India is a land of treasure guarded from foreign invasion by the war elephant, as in Megasthenes, who completes the logic by connecting the elephant to the fecundity of the land by the idea that the bigness of the Indian elephant comes from the luxuriant forage the land spontaneously affords.
As to Alexander, however, Diodorus’ account has on this very point a passage it is difficult to believe came from Megasthenes:Footnote 10
[The Ganga] is 30 stadia in width and flows from north to south, emptying out into the Ocean, marking the boundary of the tribe of Gandaridai toward the east, which has the most and largest elephants. Thus no foreign king has ever conquered this territory, since all foreign nations fear the number and strength of the beasts. Even Alexander of Macedonia, having conquered all Asia, spared only the Gandaridai from warfare. Coming down to the Ganges River with all his forces after reducing the other Indians, he learned that the Gandaridai had 4,000 elephants equipped for war and thus resolved not to make an expedition against them.
The name Gandaridai is in common use among the Alexander-historians, but it does not have an obvious referent in Indian sources. The reading “Gangaridai,” doubtless indicating a people of the Ganga region, which makes better sense, occurs in some manuscripts.Footnote 11 But if that were the original reading, it is hard to explain how it got displaced by the other version, which seems connected with the Indian name for the province of Gandhara. But it is far to the northwest.
The other name for these people is Prasioi (Latin Prasii), in what looks like an ethnonym but is the Indian word for easterners (Sanskrit Prācyāḥ), as viewed from the Indian northwest, and is attested in many Indian sources. The Prasioi and Gandaridai sometimes appear together, as if they were two neighboring peoples, but they are probably two names for a single people. The proper Indian name is Magadha, territory of a people, the Magadhas, but we do not find these names in the Alexander-historians. The current rulers of Magadha were the Nandas, known to one of the Alexander-historians, Justin, under the form Nandrus.Footnote 12 Megasthenes has to have known that Chandragupta had overthrown the Nandas and that Pataliputra had been their capitol before he made it his own, and although these facts are not stated in the surviving fragments, we must suppose they appeared in his book. Megasthenes has to have known that Chandragupta overthrew the largest military power of India, and that his military would therefore have been of comparable size.
It is an additional perplexity that the Ganga is given here a north-to-south course, as in the later maps of early printed atlases, attributed to the geographer-astronomer-astrologer Ptolemy, in Egyptian Alexandria, ca. 150 CE, in which the Ganga separates “India within the Ganga” from “India beyond the Ganga.”Footnote 13 How could Megasthenes have acquired such a view at Pataliputra, where the Ganga flows eastward until it takes a right-angle turn south to the ocean? He could not have. The Grand Trunk Road in ancient times followed the Ganga at this point, and it was only in British times that this stretch was shortened by the New Military Road (1781) that was laid along the hypotenuse.Footnote 14
The passage in the middle of Diodorus’ abridged rendering of Megasthenes appears as a foreign body, raising doubts for which answers are not forthcoming.
But one aspect of that testimony is profoundly true and well-supported by Indian sources, that Magadha and its region had “the most and largest elephants” within India, which in turn had the most and largest (captive, trained) elephants of the ancient world. In that world, Magadha and its kings, from Bimbisara and his son Ajatashatru, to the empire-building Nandas and Chandragupta Maurya, had the most and largest elephants in relation to the other Indian polities that lay in the path of their territorial ambitions. This is the nub of the matter, in that it attests to the great advantage held by Chandragupta and indeed all the prior kings of Magadha, against all the countries to the west. Here, in a single phrase, we are given a key to the rise of Magadha into an all-India empire under the Mauryas.
The other mention of elephants in the Megasthenes fragments is quite different, in its greater detail, and the sense one has that it may be an eyewitness account, of a method aimed at capturing adult male elephants to be trained up for war. It appears in Arrian and Strabo; that of Arrian is the more detailed.Footnote 15
They choose a hot and level plain and dig a ditch around a circle of land large enough for the camp of a large army. Within are stationed three or four (tame) females as a lure. They leave a bridge as the only entrance to the enclosure. The elephants approach at night and, hearing the voices and catching the scent of the females, they go around the moat until they come upon the bridge to the enclosure and cross it. The men quickly remove the bridge and summon villagers, who mount tame elephants and, when the captive elephants are feeling the effects of hunger and thirst, enter by the bridge, which has been restored, and defeat the captured elephants in a fierce battle. They tie together the base of their feet. Strabo's account says that it is done in the following hair-raising manner: “When (the captive elephants) are exhausted, the most courageous of the drivers dismount secretly and slip under the belly of their own riding animals and then dart under the wild animal and tie its feet together.”
Arrian's account continues: “Standing by them, they throw nooses around their throats and mount them as they are lying down. So that the riders will not be thrown off or any other reckless acts are committed, they cut around the neck with a sharp knife and tie the noose around the cut, so that the wound keeps their head and neck still. If they were to turn around recklessly, the wound under the rope would rub them. Thus they keep still and submit, and are led away, roped to the tame ones.” Young captives or those in poor condition are let free; it is evident that what is wanted is the adult males, who are war elephant material.
The captives are led off to the villages and are given green reeds and grass, but they do not eat because of their despondency. “Thus the Indians stand around them in a circle singing and beating drums and cymbals and lulling them to sleep.”
The description is vivid, and credible. Comparing it with Indian sources of the ancient and the recent past, we find much that confirms Megasthenes here, and some points on which he gives information not otherwise known.Footnote 16 The use of females as lures is certainly well attested, and signals that it is war elephants that are wanted, and not elephants for riding or for other kinds of work; but the use of a ditch and a single bridge is not otherwise recorded. As to the process itself, the use of hunger and thirst to subdue the captive, alternating with provision of food (and water), is standard for what commences after capture, at all times and under all methods. The skill and danger to the first man to hobble the feet (or, often, to first tie a hind leg to a tree, and then bind the two hind feet together) appears in ancient and modern sources. The cutting around the neck to increase the degree of control exercised by the rope reinforces the sense of the immense dangers, to humans and elephants, of the entire process.
Finally, the elephant leaves the forest and is driven to the village. This transition has many aspects, beginning with introducing the elephant to unfamiliar foods including cultivated crops, in addition to the more familiar grass and browse brought by the grass cutter, as humans take on the responsibility for satisfying the appetite of the largest land animal of the era. Indian texts consider that elephants are essentially “of the forest” (āraṇya) or the moist habitat (anūpa) and not “of the village” (grāmya) or the dry habitat (jāṅgala), as are horses, cattle, sheep, goats, and humans, so that capture and training involve moving from the one state to the other.Footnote 17 Indian writers frankly recognize the suffering that is inflicted in the process of capture, and that the elephant retains fond memories of its free state into its captivity, and with it a sadness that can only be mitigated by kindness on the part of its keepers, but is never entirely extinguished.Footnote 18
The captive elephant is sung to. The training begins.
Nicholas Lainé, who did fieldwork on elephant capture and training for small-scale timber operations among the Khamti in the Indian northeast, notes that the new captive is introduced to knowledge of fire, by means of torches which singe the hair-ends of the elephants, in which the divinities of the forest reside; and are sung to so that its “forest heart” may be changed into “village heart.”Footnote 19 He rightly notes the similar use of singing in the account of Megasthenes, a remarkable instance in which the cultural logic of the capture-and-training process is attested across a period of more than two millennia.
MEGASTHENES 2. THE MILITARY ADMINISTRATION
Strabo's Geography alone records the one surviving fragment of Megasthenes that speaks of the three administrative divisions of Indian government.Footnote 20 The first two could be called the civil administration, under magistrates (archons) called agoranomoi and astyonomoi, respectively, concerned with the city and the country. The third division, which interests us here, is led by those in charge of the military (stratiotikoi).
Strabo describes the third administrative branch thus:Footnote 21
In addition to the astynomoi there is a third joint administration, concerning military affairs, which is also divided into six groups of five. One of these is stationed with the naval commander, and another with the ox teams, which carry implements and food and the other necessities for the army. They also provide for the servants, drum beaters and bell carriers, as well as the grooms, engineers and their subordinates. They send out foragers to the sound of bells, and through reward and punishment they establish speed and safety. The third cares for the infantry, the fourth for the horses, the fifth for the chariots and the sixth for the elephants. There are royal stables for both horses and the animals, and the armory is also royal. The soldier hands over his equipment to the horse stables, and the animals likewise. The chariots are drawn by oxen on the road, but the horses are led by halter so that their legs are not chafed by rubbing and their eagerness with the chariots not be dulled. There are two men in the chariot in addition to the driver, but the driver is the fourth on the elephant, as there are also three archers.
We begin with the last four groups, concerned with infantry, horses, chariots, and elephants. We recognize at once that they are the divisions of the four-limbed army, chatur-anga-bala, the conception of a replete military in ancient India. This formation came about long before Chandragupta. It emerged after the techniques of elephant-capture and training them for war had been invented and consolidated, in the late Vedic period, in or after 1000 BCE.Footnote 22 At that point war elephants were added to threefold armies of that period which had elements of foot, horse, and chariot. That armies should be fourfold ones appears in the early Buddhist texts of the Pali Canon in or after 500 BCE.Footnote 23 In the historians of Alexander troop strengths are regularly reported so. Thus, at the Battle of the Hydaspes (Jhelum) the Indian king Porus had an army composed of such units: four thousand horses, three hundred chariots, two hundred elephants, and thirty thousand foot-soldiers. The reported size of the army of the Easterners (Prasioi) or Gandaridai in these divisions is so very large that the Macedonian army refused to advance against them, and the return of Alexander's army to Babylon was set in motion.Footnote 24 As I have said, these Easterners were the Nanda dynasty of the kingdom of Magadha in the middle Ganga valley, whose growing empire was overtaken by Chandragupta Maurya and further expanded by him, moving up the Ganga and into the Indus valley. The reports of Nanda army strength in Greek and Latin sources purvey what their Indian sources told them, enumerations of the four divisions. We can have every confidence, therefore, that this division into four of the military administration reflects the Indian situation and not Greek or Macedonian presuppositions.
These four administrative groups are preceded by two others, that with the naval commander and that of ox-teams. These two, because they are part of the military administration, have clearly to do with military supply and logistics, by water and by land. We know very little about logistics in ancient India, so this short passage of Strabo is important for the addition it makes, small as it is, to what we have from other sources.
But before getting to the details, speaking about the six groups as a series, I do not believe it has been previously noticed that the rubrics taken altogether correspond to a series of topics, prakaranas, in the Arthashastra, in which the four units of the army are preceded by two topics on the overseers of shipping and of cattle:Footnote 25
nav-adhyaksha the overseer of shipping
go-’dhyaksha the overseer of cattle
ashva-adhyaksha the overseer of horses
hasty-adhyaksha the overseer of elephants
ratha-adhyaksha the overseer of chariots
patty-adhyaksha the overseer of foot-soldiers
We see that the titles of these topics are formed with the word adhy-aksha, meaning overseer, appended to the object of that supervision.
I have discussed this set of prakaranas with Mark McClish, whose recent book on the history of the Arthashastra has advanced our understanding of this invaluable text immensely. He observes that it belongs to the adhyakshapracara, “Duties of overseers,” mid-level officials of the state. It is the name given to Book 2 of the present text, but once was a self-contained treatise that was probably the core around which the present text was formed. The set of six prakaranas in question may have begun with the four topics of shipping, cattle, horses, and elephants, which we can presume are part of the original text, as the other two (chariots and foot soldiers) deviate from the introductory formula that governs the prakaranas in the received text of the Arthashastra (x adhyaksha … optative verb) and may therefore have been added at a later time. However that may be, that the set matches Megasthenes on the military administration is an important fact and cannot be a coincidence. McClish believes it confirms that we can trust Megasthenes more than some are inclined to.Footnote 26
These departments in the Arthashastra are organized very nearly as those in Megasthenes, except by individual overseers rather than groups of them. The supply departments come first, those by water and those by land; then the four arms of the army, that differ only in that the foot-soldiers come first in Megasthenes, and last in the Arthashastra. When we examine the contents of these topics in the Arthashastra, however, the first two concern non-military matters, and the overseer of cattle, in particular, is devoted to the letting-out of the king's own herds to cattle-herders on contract or by shares, for milk, ghee, and other products, not for transport.
From the first department in Strabo's version of Megasthenes we learn that boats were used for military supply, as a simple inference from its inclusion of the naval commander in the military administration, in the context of the seven castes (discussed in the next section). Megasthenes, in Strabo's rendition of the fourth class or caste of craftsmen, says that those making boats are paid and fed by the king and work solely for him; and the naval commander hires out boats to sailors and merchants as well. That being so, it appears that shipping, built for the king, is used by the military but is also let out for civilian purposes such as trade. This passage narrows the gap between the wholly civil aspect of the topic of shipping in the Arthashastra, and the military but also civil aspect of Megasthenes on the same.
Tradition attributes the Arthashastra to the time of Chandragupta and its author, Kautilya, is identified with Chandragupta's chief minister, Chanakya. But in my opinion, it belongs to the first century CE in the form we have it, because of several post-Mauryan features.Footnote 27Nevertheless, it comes out of a body of texts on niti that are certainly pre-Mauryan in origin. Mark McClish has shown conclusively that it was subject to a major redaction after its first writing, including imposition of chapters and chapter-ending verses. The organization into prakaranas, however, belongs to the text prior to the redaction.Footnote 28
One could wish that Megasthenes had written more, or that Strabo had relayed more of Megasthenes, on the work of the naval commander. Megasthenes and the Alexander-historians regularly speak of the many navigable rivers of India, showing high interest on the part of the writers; and as water transport will have been cheaper than transport on land by oxcart, we suppose Indian armies of the time would have resorted to them when they could. We know that the early kings of Magadha moved their capital from Rajagriha, a well-defended inland location, to Patali-grama or Patali-village, later the city Pataliputra, on the south bank of the Ganga, presumably to command, and take advantage of, the major east-west waterway of North India.
As to land-based logistics, it is clear from the use of the expression “ox-teams” (tōn boikōn zeugōn) in Strabo's account of Megasthenes that we are dealing with carts pulled by pairs of oxen under yoke, and not pack-animals. Oxcarts imply roads or tracks across relatively level ground, and not difficult, narrow mountain trails, where pack animals would have to have been used, possibly mules or donkeys traveling, moreover, in single file. The ox-teams are carrying implements, food, and other necessities for the army, and so they constitute a supply train. This department also provides for paramilitary personnel: servants, drum beaters, and bell carriers; grooms, engineers, and their staff. “Foragers” doubtless corresponds to the grass-cutters accompanying armies in India in all ages, who gather grass and browse for the horses, elephants, and oxen, in war as in peacetime.
We learn from the closing lines of the paragraph that chariots are drawn by oxen while on the march, so as not to gall the legs of their horses, nor diminish their excitement when hitched for battle. I suspect another factor is involved. Lefebvre des Noëttes long ago taught us that the horse-drawn chariot is an adaptation of the plan of the ox cart, made swift by the invention of the spoked wheel; but that the long, exposed windpipe of the horse is not ideally suited, as the harness which secures the yoke tends to choke the horse, while the massive shoulders and the short neck and throat of the ox obviates that problem.Footnote 29
We further learn that chariots have two fighters and a driver, but elephants have a driver and three archers. While in Indian representations chariots usually have one fighter, the three archers on the back of a war elephant, plus the mahout “at the shoulder,” is well-attested. It agrees with the taking up of the war elephant in the Hellenistic period. Goukowsky shows that in that period, more especially among the Ptolemys of Egypt, the driver comes to be called “the Indian,” while the three Greek or Macedonian archers atop are given a “tower” (thōrakion) as a steady platform from which to shoot. As I suppose, the Macedonians were not trained to keep their seat on a charging elephant as Indian warriors were. The tower is certainly, as Goukowsky claims, a Hellenistic invention.Footnote 30
Finally, perhaps the most important information this passage gives is that there are royal stables for horses and elephants, and a royal armory, to which the soldier hands over his mount and his arms after battle. In the next section I will give more about this under the treatment of the warrior class; for the moment we note that soldiers did not own their mounts and weapons; they were owned by the king.
MEGASTHENES 3. FARMERS AND SOLDIERS; HERDSMEN AND CRAFTSMEN
The seven castes are a famous crux of the Megasthenes fragments, the crux being that there is no seven-fold division of the social whole in Indian sources which would corroborate this schema.Footnote 31 The seven castes are, (1) philosophers or sages; (2) farmers; (3) shepherds and herdsmen; (4) craftsmen; (5) soldiers; (6) overseers and those who take counsel for public issues; and (7) the royal advisors, administrators, and judges. The schema is caste-like because one may not marry a person of another class, or take another occupation, “such as a soldier becoming a farmer or a craftsman a sage.”Footnote 32
Our interest here is not the “castes” as an ensemble, but the three of them that are involved with the military and its domestic animals, the soldiers, herdsmen, and craftsmen, plus the farmers, who are completely free of military duties and form, with the soldiers, a pair of opposites.
Farmers and Soldiers
The farmers (geōrgoi), who are the second class, are by far more numerous than the other classes. This is a capital fact, upon which all three who preserve this fragment of Megasthenes agree. Arrian presents this as true of India generally: farmers are “the most numerous of the Indians,” and that they work the land and pay taxes to the kings and the autonomous cities.
Moreover, the farmers are exempted from war and other public duties, so that they are entirely engaged in cultivation. Arrian adds that they have no military weapons: the farmers have been thoroughly demilitarized according to Megasthenes. At many points in Indian history there have been farmer-soldiers, recruited during the off-season by competing powers.Footnote 33 This is a striking deviation from that pattern.
An enemy does not disturb a farmer working the land but considers him a common benefactor. Armies do not disturb the crops. The inviolability of farmers and of cultivation is confirmed by Strabo and Arrian, both of whom indulge in a bit of word-painting. Strabo says, “[I]t often happens that when some are drawn up in battle and under risk from the enemy, [farmers] are plowing or digging without danger, with the others fighting in front of them.” Arrian says, “If war occurs between the Indians, it is illegal to attack the land of these workers or to devastate the land itself; and while some are making war and killing each other as opportunity serves, others nearby are quietly plowing or harvesting or pruning or reaping,” substantially the same, but in other, and more, words.
Diodorus says that the farmers live on the land with their children and wives, and completely avoid going to the city, but Strabo and Arrian do not confirm this point, so it is suspect as a statement coming from Megasthenes.
Finally, all three agree that the farmers pay a tax upon the land to the king, since all India is royal property, and no private person is allowed to own land. In addition to the rent of land they pay a fourth part of the produce to the royal treasury. Strabo adds, “All the land is a royal possession, and it is worked for rent, a fourth of the produce,” which seems to posit a tax upon the land itself, plus a royal share of one-fourth of the crop. As mentioned above, Arrian says only that they pay taxes to the kings or autonomous cities, without specifying what those taxes are.
Thus the farmers. On the soldiers, who are the fifth class, Diodorus and Arrian, though not Strabo, say that they are second in quantity, coming, then, right after the most numerous farmers. All agree that they are supported by the treasury, so generously that they are utterly at leisure during peacetime and can afford servants to attend them. As Strabo puts it, the warriors “otherwise pass their lives at leisure and drinking, supported by the royal treasury so that their expeditions—when necessary—are made quickly, since they provide nothing of their own other than their bodies.” This signals that the king supplies the rest, as Strabo confirms when discussing the class of the shepherds and hunters: “Horses and elephants cannot be kept by private persons, as possession of either is a royal privilege, and there are those who tend them.”
Arrian largely confirms. He says,Footnote 34 “They [the warrior class] are experienced only in the activities of warfare. Others make their weapons for them and provide for their horses, and others serve in the camps, caring for the horses and cleaning their weapons and driving the elephants, and also preparing and driving the chariots. When they must fight, they fight, but they are cheerful in peacetime, and are paid so much from the community that they easily support others.”
Taking the farmers and soldiers together, it is a compelling picture. Let us start with the scale of these two classes. The farmers constitute the largest sector of the population and are singularly devoted to cultivation. This means they are the largest source of revenue to the polity, and it remains the case for almost all Indian polities until recent times. Arrian represents it as true of India generally, and not just of Chandragupta's realm, when he says that the taxes are paid to kings or to autonomous cities, in the two-fold classification of polities he employs, answering to the rajya and the sangha or gana of the Indians. But he is unsupported by Diodorus and Strabo in this, and I am inclined to think this is Arrian's interpretation, not Megasthenes’. The taxes are of two kinds (so Diodorus), a ground rent paid to the king as owner of all land, and a share of the crop, in the amount of one-fourth. Thapar suggests these answer to the bali and bhaga, respectively in Indian sources, including the near-contemporary inscriptions of Ashoka. She notes that the royal share of one-fourth in Megasthenes is very much higher than the usual rate of one-sixth, in Indian sources.Footnote 35
If the farmers are the largest class, which is entirely acceptable, the soldiers being the second largest is certainly a significant claim, especially as they are paid out of the treasury and are not themselves a landed class of farmer-soldiers as is so common in other periods of Indian history. It confirms the view of Roy, previously mentioned, that because the military is so large the ancient Indian state is the largest employer. As we have just seen, soldiers, horses, and elephants used in war are paid for by the treasury. Another way of saying this is that the military is the largest revenue sink of the premodern state in India, the civil side of government being devoted to the revenue-generating side, and the military to the revenue-consuming side, in large measure.
Of the farmers we may say that the picture is of Village India—of an India most of whose people live in agrarian villages, engaged with ox-drawn plows and the cultivation of permanent fields, a formation which by this period is complete. What it has transitioned from is the more mobile community of the Vedic period, which also constituted the war band (called grāma), in whose way of life pastoralism loomed larger and cultivation was more limited. This pattern developed into the agrarian village (the later meaning of grāma) by a two-fold process, of an enlargement of the cultivation component in comparison to that of pastoralism, which promotes sedentarization of the grama, on the one hand, and, on the other, the demilitarization of the farmers, who in Megasthenes’ account have no military obligations and own no military weapons.
Diodorus’ statement that farmers stay in their villages and do not come to the city is unsupported by the others. Even if it is true, the village and the city at this period are conjoined and, we may say that what the archaeologists call the “second urbanization” at this time (second to the urbanization of the Indus civilization) must be understood as tied to a second formation of agrarian villages whose surplus feeds the cities. As the archaeologist Andrew Sherratt argued, the invention of the oxcart makes cities possible, and as such is one of the most important elements of what he calls the Secondary Products Revolution that emerges in the aftermath of the domestication of the large animals.Footnote 36 If farmers did not venture into cities, the cities must have been supplied from the villages by traders having oxcarts at their disposal. Under this interpretation the emergence of urban India presupposes the emergence of village India.
Turning now to the soldiers, they are practically the reverse of the farmers, in that they are separated from the land and from farming, being neither an aristocratic class of agrarian landlords, nor are they cultivator-farmers, engaging as warriors in the slack season of the agrarian year. They have only military duties and no other, so that in time of peace they are utterly at leisure and, because the treasury pays them well, they can maintain personal servants. They constitute a permanent paid military force. But horses, elephants, and arms are owned by the king, and are returned to the stables and armory of the king after battle. The regime of royal ownership extends to the means of warfare, and only the king may own horses and elephants, by explicit statement of Megasthenes, and perhaps arms as well. The peacetime soldier was unarmed, as was the farmer.
Herdsmen
Of the first of these DiodorusFootnote 37 says, “The third group consists of the shepherds and herdsmen, in general all those pastoralists who do not live in a city or village, but pass their lives in tents. These are also hunters who cleanse the land of birds and wild animals. Trained and skilled in this, they are civilizing India, although it is full of many and varied wild beasts and birds that eat the seed of the farmers.” Strabo confirms and adds to the information of this group, which he calls shepherds and hunters, that this class is “the only one allowed to hunt, keep cattle, and purchase and rent teams of oxen. In return for freeing the land from wild beasts and birds that pick up seeds, they are allotted grain from the king, undergoing a wandering tent-living existence.” Arrian puts it much the same but with slight differences: those of this class, “the herdsmen, who are shepherds and tenders of cattle”: “They do not live in cities or villages; they are pastoralists and live in the mountains. They pay taxes on their herds, and hunt birds and wild animals throughout the land.”
The class of herders is specialized in pastoralism (and hunting), especially of cattle and sheep, are tent-dwelling nomads, and are not employed by the state and so must pay tax on their herds, selling and renting out the animals they tend. Horses do not come into the account of this class, and the Megasthenes fragments do not tell us about the supply of horses; evidently India had nothing to show about the supply of horses that was sufficiently different to interest Greek readers. We note that cattle are owned privately and, probably because of their great abundance, were not subject to a royal monopoly. It seems probable that the ox teams needed in time of a major military mobilization might often be hired from these specialist breeders and trainers.
Its combination of herders with hunters is interesting. Possibly Megasthenes has conflated nomadic pastoralists with hunter-gathers who are the “forest people” (āṭavika) of Indian texts. But the latter are quite different from tent-dwelling specialist pastoralists.
Craftsmen
The craftsmen are the fourth class. Didorus is cryptic.Footnote 38 He says, “Some of these are armorers and others make products of service to farmers and certain others. They are not only exempt from taxes but receive an allowance from the treasury.”
Strabo is clearer: “Some of these pay taxes and provide prescribed public services, but those who make weapons and build ships are given pay and sustenance by the king, and work for him alone. The commanding officer provided weapons for the soldiers, and the naval commander rents the ships to sailors and merchants.”
Arrian: “They are public servants and pay taxes on what they have received from their work, except for those who make military weapons, who receive pay from the community,” adding that “the shipbuilders and the sailors who sail on the rivers” belong to this class.
We see that there are those who work for the public, and those who work for the king, the former paying a tax, the latter being paid by the state and, we infer, are exempted from tax. Such craftsmen include the shipbuilders and sailors, and the whole discussion shows a strong royal interest in shipbuilding, but both a civil and military side to shipping.
MEGASTHENES AND NEARCHUS ON THE OWNERSHIP OF HORSES AND ELEPHANTS
Strabo conveys a fragment of Nearchus, companion of Alexander and admiral of the fleet by which he navigated the Indus and explored the little-known coast on the way back to Babylon. But he draws attention to its conflict with another report:Footnote 39 “Nearchus says that a chariot drawn by elephants is considered a very great possession, and that they are drawn under yoke like camels; and that a woman is highly honoured if she receives an elephant as a gift from a lover. But this statement is not in agreement with that of the man who said that the horse and elephant were possessed by kings alone.” That man is Megasthenes, whose passage, as we have seen earlier, Strabo renders to the effect that no private person may own horse or elephant, ownership of which is a royal privilege.
The contradiction is readily resolved when we recognize that Nearchus is speaking of the India he knew when he served with Alexander; that is, the northwest of India (essentially the Punjab) and the valley of the Indus; while Megasthenes knew the India of just a few years later, that of Chandragupta, coming out of the valley of the Ganga, far to the east. The difference reveals the revolutionary character of Chandragupta's policies.
Arrian renders the testimony of Nearchus on this matter in somewhat more detail:
The animals used by the common sort for riding on are camels and horses and asses, while the wealthy use elephants—for it is the elephant in India which carries royalty. The conveyance which ranks next in honor is the chariot and four; the camel ranks third; while to be drawn by a single horse is considered no distinction at all. But Indian women, if possessed of uncommon discretion, would not stray from virtue for any reward short of an elephant, but on receiving this a lady lets the giver enjoy her person. Nor do the Indians consider it any disgrace to a woman to grant her favour for an elephant, but it is rather regarded as a high compliment to the sex that their charms should be deemed worth an elephant.
In the time and place of Nearchus’ India the elephant carries royalty but ownership of it is not denied to others, for the wealthy use elephants. Horses are ridden on by the common sort, but the chariot and four ranks more highly. This will have seemed noteworthy to the Macedonians, whose leader and officers rode horses, and who brought no chariots with them. By contrast, in India the greater honor of the chariot is strongly marked, as in the Mahabharata, in which all the great named fighters are chariot warriors, maha-ratha.
The statement that being drawn by a single horse is no distinction at all is confirmed by a passage from the Rig Veda, affirming the superior value of the two-horse chariot and denigrating the one-horse vehicle, the sthuri: There is nothing that, when drawn by a single animal, has traveled in the right way. Relying on oneself alone will not bring fame; seek Indra as helper and yokemate.Footnote 40
And, the elephant being the supreme gift, the logic of giving an elephant to a woman by her lover is evident.
Megasthenes shows the differing regime of the ownership of horse and elephant to be innovations coming out of the east; and true, not of India as a whole, but of the regime of Chandragupta. This is true as well of the other features: the higher-than-usual rate of the tax upon crops, one-fourth as against one-sixth; the demilitarization of the cultivators; the separation of the warrior class from land ownership, and their support by the treasury which, given the great size of the warrior class, second only to the farmers, implies that they were the largest expenditure of the state.
Thus, although the Megasthenes fragments are often rendered in the mode of describing India as a whole, as in that prior Indica of Ctesias and the later Indica of Arrian, what is being described is the experimental and unprecedented policies of the growing empire of Chandragupta, coming out of eastern, that is, Gangetic, India. It is impossible to take some features of this picture as true of all India, especially the well-paid army, idle in peacetime, and having no connection with landownership and farming, and the contradiction between Megasthenes and Nearchus over royal monopoly versus private ownership of horses and elephants shows that royal ownership was later and eastern in origin, not general among Indian states.
Some of the traditions about the Gangetic kingdom Chandragupta overthrew and replaced, that of the Nandas, show them distinguished by their higher taxation; and as their army was the largest in India of its day, according to the Alexander-historians, we may be inclined to think that the soldiers were the main object of that larger taxation.Footnote 41 We may also think a tendency toward royal monopoly of horses and elephants may have been developing during Nanda times, as it expanded its nascent empire northwestward through the elephant country of the valley of the Ganga and into the valley of the Indus, the country of horses. It will in any case have had the advantage in elephants, as Megasthenes explicitly says.
Nearchus’ contrasting testimony offers one other benefit. We infer from it that while eastern kings could experiment with royal monopoly of horses and elephants, they could acquire superior numbers of elephants at home and deny them to others, and yet continue to acquire horses from the northwest, as they were in private ownership there.
CHANDRAGUPTA AND SELEUCUS
In 305 BCE the armies of Chandragupta and Seleucus, former general of Alexander and competitor with the other of the “Successors,” clashed in the Indus valley and then composed their differences with a treaty of peace. Paul Kosmin considers what he calls the Treaty of the Indus a formative moment for the emerging Seleucid conception of the new international order of bordering peer kingdoms that was emerging out of the ruins of the Achaemenid and Alexandrine conception of boundless universal empire.Footnote 42 The terms of the treaty included a marriage alliance of some kind and an exchange of substantial assets. Seleucus gave Chandragupta four provinces of Alexander's conquests, amounting approximately to the present-day Afghanistan, comprising the (former Persian) Arachosia, Gedrosia, Parapamisidae, and Aria. Chandragupta gave Seleucus five hundred war elephants, a huge number. We must assume these elephants had Indian mahouts to tend to their needs and drive them back to Babylon. With these elephants Seleucus succeeded in consolidating his hold upon the remaining territories of Alexander's eastern empire against his Greek and Macedonian rivals. The Seleucids at Antioch in Syria and the Mauryans at Pataliputra on the middle Ganga ruled their respective empires for the next two centuries, and there is evidence on both sides of continuing relations between the Mauryans and the Hellenistic kingdom of the Seleucids, the Ptolemys of Egypt, and other western kingdoms of the era.
Arrian says that Megasthenes “was sent” to the court of Chandragupta. By whom was he sent? Very little is known of Megasthenes’ life, but Clement of Alexandria said that he was a companion (symbebiōkōs) of Seleucus Nicator.Footnote 43 Scholars have long assumed that he was sent to Chandragupta by Seleucus, which makes sense given continuing relations between the Mauryans and the Seleucids.
As against the scholarly consensus A. B. Bosworth has argued very ably for a different scenario. Arrian himself says, in an earlier passage, “Megasthenes, who lived with Sibyrtios, satrap of Arachosia, often says that he visited Sandrakottos (Chandragupta) the Indian king.”Footnote 44 According to Arrian's history of Alexander, Megasthenes often said he visited Chandragupta, greatest king of India, and Porus, greater even than he, a perplexing text that has long seemed corrupt. Bosworth, however, proposed that it could be true, early in Chandragupta's career while his empire was yet growing, and after the death of Alexander, when Porus’ authority “in theory extended from the Indian Ocean to Kashmir.”Footnote 45
Bosworth argues that Megasthenes was sent by Sibyrtius as his ambassador. This would have to have been earlier than proposed by the existing consensus, that he was sent by Seleucus, after 305 BCE, for the very good reason that Arachosia was one of the four provinces that Seleucus ceded to Chandragupta at that date. The Bosworth thesis is the most significant contribution to the study of Megasthenes in many decades and is the culmination of close study of Arrian and the history of the eastern conquests of Alexander, especially as concerns India. I will not reprise the arguments he has made so ably, referring readers to the article in which he made them.Footnote 46
I find the argument convincing—except for this central contention that Megasthenes was sent by Sybertius. The fact that Megasthenes attended Chandragupta at Palibothra/Pataliputra shows that the latter had by that time defeated the Nandas, as he occupied their capital city, which had been the capital of Magadha for a long time before. The Nanda army was the largest in India according to figures given in the Alexander-historians, provoking the mutiny of Alexander's men and aborting his plan to advance to the Ganga valley. Chandragupta's army would have to have been of comparable size, and Megasthenes partially confirms this when he writes of the largeness of his capital city and of his army camp. It is hard to believe that at that time or any subsequent time Porus had a larger army, and much reason to think the opposite. For example, when Eudamus assassinated Porus he came away with only 120 elephants, a pittance compared to the five hundred Chandragupta gave Seleucus. Chandragupta would have retained many more for himself, numbering in the thousands, to judge by the war elephant figures for the Nandas whom he defeated.Footnote 47 The very fact that Pataliputra belonged to Chandragupta at the time of Megasthenes’ embassy shows that he had overthrown the army of the Nanda king. That being so, it is hard to see how the Bosworth thesis, in spite of its great originality and learning, can be sustained.
Nevertheless, Bosworth's reading of the state of the eastern satrapies after Alexander's death is excellent, showing the continuing scramble there for more of India's war elephants. It supports my view that war elephants were a leading objective of Megasthenes’ embassy—and for traveling all the way east to the Ganga valley to get them, even though he was almost certainly acting not for Sibyrtius but for Selecus, who was also eager for elephants to use against rival powers also using war elephants, namely those two hundred elephants Alexander had brought back from India. I see, also, continuing value in Bosworth's article as it relates to Sibyrtius’ satrapy, Arachosia.
Arachosia is the environs of modern-day Kandahar (“Alexandria”) in Afghanistan. Arachosia in the Greek sources is a scarcely recognizable version of Old Persian Harahuvatish, which is cognate with Sanskrit Sarasvati, the name of a great river and its region in India. The name evidently goes back to more ancient times before languages of India and Iran had split off from a common stock, called Indo-Iranian by the linguists. Arachosia was a notable administrative center of the Persian Empire communicating with its Indian possessions, Gandhara and Hindush, and perhaps others, if we follow Vogelsang.Footnote 48 Kingdoms in India were paying tribute to Arachosia even after the demise of the Persian Empire, when Alexander was there. After the mutiny of his troops Alexander was obliged to abandon his ambition of marching down the valley of the Ganga to the ocean, and instead returned down the Indus to Babylon, along the coast, to explore it, dividing his army between a naval and a land force, which latter suffered terribly while going through the hardest desert conditions at some points. But the war elephants he had collected in India were sent under Craterus, a personal friend of Alexander, by the more favorable route, through Arachosia, probably to ensure that their formidable daily requirements of water and forage could be met. The success of the anabasis of Alexander's elephants by this route gives us reason to think that those five hundred elephants of Chandragupta may have been taken back to the same destination (Babylon) along the same route, through Arachosia, which had now become Chandragupta's. We know that Mauryan possession of this territory continued at least to the third generation, from the existence of Greek and Aramaic inscriptions of Chandragupta's grandson Ashoka, found at Kandahar in the 1950s, discovery of which silenced the doubters about the astonishing westward extent of Chandragupta's realm.Footnote 49
Seleucus would have had a hard time holding Arachosia and neighboring satrapies, and his interests and worries focused upon the Mediterranean end of his large empire, not the turbulent eastern region. The following centuries show glimpses of a continuing interest of the Seleucids in India and its elephants, and continuing relations with the Mauryans. Ashoka's inscriptions mention several Hellenistic kings, including Antiochus.Footnote 50 Strabo and Pliny mention continuing relations, probably of the Seleucids, and certainly of their rivals, Ptolemy Philadelphus, Greek king of Egypt.Footnote 51 The latter, cut off from overland access to India and its war elephants by the interposition of the Seleucids, developed a capture-and-training operation to generate its own supply, from among the wild elephants of North Africa. As Goukowsky has shown, it was at this time that the Greek sources begin to call the driver on the neck of the elephant, “the Indian,” as he remains in Greek and Latin thereafter.Footnote 52 It is clear that Indian personnel were involved in the Ptolemaic elephant force, as they were with the Seleucid, embodying a substantial transfer of Indian military knowledge.Footnote 53
THE RELIABILITY OF MEGASTHENES
In this article we have focused in upon what Megasthenes knew by virtue of being an eyewitness (Greek autopsy; Sanskrit pratyaksha) in the court and army camp of Chandragupta, and we have found it on the whole credible and trustworthy.
We confine ourselves to that part of the Megasthenes fragments because our interest is in the history of India. If our interest had instead been in ideas about the “edges of the earth” in Greek and Roman thought and literature, as in the fine book of James Romm, we would have focused, rather, on what Megasthenes heard from others (but of which he was not an eyewitness) about the wonders of India, in the literary tradition of what Romm calls Greek Indography.Footnote 54 This tradition begins with Ctesias, or even before Ctesias with Skylax of Caryanda, the Ionian Greek sea captain who explored the Indus valley and the coast round to the Arabian Peninsula, for Darius I of Persia in the fifth century BCE, who wished to invade India. Megasthenes was a notable participant in this tradition; indeed, it is likely that he was more famous for perpetuating and contributing to the growing list of these wonders, which, in spite of the critiques of Strabo and Pliny, were consumed long into the European Middle Ages, than for his sober eye-witness accounts of India.
In Romm's analysis it is in connection with such elements of the Hellenistic genre of paradoxography that writings about India, what Strabo calls ta indika, become objects of the harshest criticism, such that Strabo singles out Megasthenes and Deimachus (ambassador to the son of Chandragupta) as the greatest malefactors and bluntly calls them liars. For while earlier authorities (Skylax, Ctesias), who do not know better, are passing on myth rather than sober history, later ones such as Megasthenes should know better.
Among the six fantastic races of India that earn Deimachus and Megasthenes our disbelief, according to Strabo, are the people who sleep in their (very large) ears, those without mouths, those without noses, those with one eye, the long-legged people, and those with their toes on backward.Footnote 55 The Mouthless people subsist upon the fragrance of roast meat and the scent of fruits, but bad odors make them ill such that they cannot abide the stench of an army camp.Footnote 56
This is all very well, but as we follow Romm's analysis we find Strabo does not have a settled view, and although he calls Megasthenes a liar, at other times he treats him as a reliable source. And a good thing he did so, for as we have seen Strabo alone preserved Megasthenes’ (sound) testimony about the organization of government administration in India. And in identifying the contradiction between Nearchus and Megasthenes he preserved two true accounts whose difference identifies the revolutionary character of Chandragupta's policy of royal monopoly of horses and elephants.
For those interested in the history of India, then, Megasthenes is quite reliable when he is writing about things he has seen, as distinct from things of which he has only heard.
POLITICAL ECOLOGY OF INDIA
The animal component of Old World armies since the Bronze Age featured horses above all, plus animal-drawn carts or pack animals. The military pastoralism of India was especially rich as, from ancient times to the twentieth century, it also included substantial numbers of elephants for the battlefield, for sieges, for road-making, for river-crossing, and for carrying baggage. As elephants were at all periods of history captured as adults from forest and mountain populations, the political ecology of kingdoms had to include an elephant forest and the protection of elephants in the wild. The polity-making effect of its military livestock sector and the royal monopoly, partial or full, of horses and elephants has had a striking and durable effect that is seen in the political map of India to this day.
Centuries after the Mauryans, the Gupta empire (320–550 CE) took form, again at Pataliputra (Patna), and two of its kings took the name Chandragupta, gesturing toward the Mauryan Empire before them, thus showing how enduring was the legacy of Chandragupta Maurya. Ever after the dominant power of India has had its capital in the valley of the Ganga, first at Patna (Nandas; Mauryas; Guptas), then at Kaunauj (Harsha; Gurjara-Pratiharas) further up the Ganges; and then Delhi (including nearby Agra and Fatehpur Sikri) (Turkish Sultans of Delhi, Mughals) on the Yamuna, in the upper Ganga valley. These successive locations move somewhat westward up the Ganges valley through time. The logic of this pattern is given by the military pastoralism specific to India.
This geography is rooted in the complementary distribution of the drier, grassy horse country to the west, and the wetter deciduous monsoon forest and mountainous habitats that support elephants, to the east, of a line running (crookedly) north to south down the center of the country, where the grassy arid zone of the west, favorable for horses, meets the humid zone of the deciduous monsoon forest to the east, the habitat of wild elephants. Patna lies fully in elephant country, Kanauj and Delhi more in the mid-point where the two zones come together, reflecting an increasing importance of horses.
As Digby has shown, it was a maxim of the experienced military men of the country, according to Barani, who put it in the mouth of Balban, Sultan of Delhi (1265–1287), that to dominate India one had to control the flow of horses to potential competitors to the east, and elephants to the west.Footnote 57
The complementarity of horse pastures and elephant forests that Digby identified made the middle-to-upper Ganges region a strategic zone from which to dominate the movement of military supplies. It had been so since the early kings of Magadha who fortified a village on the Ganges named Pataligrama. This geography helps explain why the first all-India empire took its rise in the valley of the Ganga rather than in the Indus valley to the west, which was more exposed to the example of the Achaemenid Empire. And it helps us to understand why Megasthenes traveled all the way east to Pataliputra.
While the Megasthenes fragments reveal, as in a mirror, the Macedonian and Greek fascination with the Indian war elephant, they also reveal, as in a magnifying glass, some of the causes of Chandragupta's success, and the prior, cumulative successes of Magadha and its ambitious kings. Of these the most important are Magadha's possession of the largest, best, and most numerous war elephants, while also having access to the (privately owned) horses of the Indian northwest.Footnote 58
