Journey
Megasthenes — Seleucia to the Mauryan court (c. 302 BCE)
Seleucus sent Megasthenes to Chandragupta Maurya after the two kings settled their war with five hundred elephants and a marriage. His Indika survives only in quotation by Strabo, Arrian and Diodorus, and Pataliputra is the only Indian place securely tied to him, so the road there is drawn lightly and the rest is inference.
Stops (5)
- Babylon · home · c. 305 BCE
Seleucus ruled the eastern satrapies from Babylon and Seleucia, and it is from here that he marched against Chandragupta, lost, and sent an ambassador instead. The embassy is the settlement's second clause: the elephants and the marriage alliance came first, and a resident Greek at Pataliputra followed from them. Appian and Strabo both record the treaty and neither says whose daughter married whom.
- Takshashilā / Taxila · the road in
The Seleucid road into India ran through Takshashila, the crossing-point of the north-west that Seleucus had just ceded. Whether Megasthenes passed through it himself is not recorded, which is why this stop is drawn lightly: Pataliputra is the only Indian place his surviving fragments securely attach him to, and everything else is inference from the route.
- Pātaliputra · resident · c. 302–298 BCE
Resident at the Mauryan court. He described a city nine miles long behind a timber palisade with five hundred and seventy towers and sixty-four gates, a bureaucracy of overseers, seven castes, no slavery and no famine, and wrote that he had seen Susa and Ecbatana and that neither matched it. The palisade has since been excavated.
- Megasthenes · the Indika
His book is lost and survives only in quotation by Strabo, Arrian, Diodorus and Pliny, which is why the same passages appear four times with small differences that scholars have argued over for two centuries. It is still the earliest sustained foreign description of India and the only eyewitness account of the Mauryan capital.
- Chandragupta Maurya · the court he was sent to
Chandragupta had taken Magadha, then the Indus provinces Alexander's successors held, and fought Seleucus to the settlement that produced this embassy. Greek writers call him Sandrokottos, and that identification is the single anchor tying the whole early Indian chronology to a datable year. Megasthenes was resident at his court for several years and is the only foreigner to have described his administration from inside it.