Person · Greek ambassador & author · Greece
Megasthenes
Also known as Megasthenes, Indika
Seleucus's ambassador to Chandragupta Maurya at Pataliputra, and the author of an Indika that is lost but quoted at length by Strabo, Arrian, Diodorus and Pliny. It is the earliest sustained foreign description of India and the only eyewitness account of the Mauryan capital.
- Date
- -350–-290
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Confidence
- Not assessed
- Location
- 25.612, 85.158
Worth knowing
He wrote that he had seen the great cities of the east, Susa and Ecbatana among them, and that none matched Pataliputra: fourteen kilometres of timber wall with five hundred and seventy towers and sixty-four gates. He also reported that India had no slavery and no famine, which later writers have variously called observation, flattery and error.
About the place
Placed at Pataliputra, the Mauryan capital he was resident ambassador at and wrote his account of.
Connections (3)
- Imperial administration ofSeleucus I Nicator
Seleucus sent Megasthenes to Pataliputra as resident ambassador after the settlement, and the Indika he wrote there is the earliest sustained foreign account of India. The book is lost and survives only in quotation, which is why the same passages are reproduced by Strabo, Arrian, Diodorus and Pliny with small differences that scholars have argued over for two centuries.
- Imperial administration ofPātaliputra
Megasthenes wrote that he had seen the great cities of the east, Susa and Ecbatana among them, and that none of them matched Pataliputra: a timber wall fourteen kilometres long with five hundred and seventy towers and sixty-four gates, on the Ganges and Son confluence. The palisade has since been excavated, which is the one point where his description can be checked against the ground.
- Imperial administration ofBabylon
Seleucus sent him from Babylon as resident ambassador after about 303 BCE, and Antiochus I later sent Deimachus to Bindusara on the same footing. Two generations of Greek envoys lived at Pataliputra, and between them they are the reason anything is known about Mauryan administration from outside its own inscriptions.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Megasthenes”. The fragments of the Indika collected in E.A. Schwanbeck (1846) and J.W. McCrindle, Ancient India as Described by Megasthenes and Arrian (1877); Strabo, Geography XV.
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