1.7: The honesty of ambassadors

Hello and welcome to the History of India podcast. This is episode 1.6, the Honesty of Ambassadors. Down the street where I used to live, there was a little wine shop. It was called back in Nalia. And outside in the small car park, there was a mural of a fat and merry man and he had a bottle of wine in each hand. And he was surrounded by swirling ivy. And this merry character was supposed to be back us, the Greek God of wine and merry making and fun. He's also known as Dionysus, which is what I'm going to call him for now. And that's how we tend to picture Dionysus as merry, fat, and harmless, a Greek God of fun. But if that's how you think about Dionysus, then you might be surprised about how the ancient Greeks thought of him. Take the Euripides play, the Bacchilles. Is that how you pronounce it? I don't know. In any case, the Bacchilles is this play. And it's the story of Bacchus coming to the city of Thebes and persuading Thebes to worship him as a God. And in this play, Bacchus is not a merry fat clown. He's instead a jealous and brutal God. At the climax of the story, he's got into the head of the Queen of Thebes. And he makes her get her son and tie her son's arms down to a tree stump on the floor. And then get a great big pine tree and flex it down, bend it down, and tie her son's legs to the top of the pine tree. And then when she lets go, the pine tree swings back under its own elastic force and her son gets torn in two. And that's the character Bacchus is. He does this because the people of Thebes won't worship him. Bacchus is a kind of vicious and jealous God. So surprise number one is that for the ancient Greeks, Dionysus isn't a harmless God at all. But there's another surprising feature of Dionysus in many of the later Greek sources. Not only is he not a harmless Greek God. He's also not a Greek God at all. Even according to Euripides' play, he's a new God from the east. He's trying to earn himself a place on Mount Olympus. So when he first comes to the city Thebes, he announces himself to the people there. He says, "I have left the wealthy lands of the Lydians and the Frigians, the sun-parched plains of the Persians, and the Bacchian Afghanistan, and the Wintry land of the Meeds, and blessed Arabia, and all of Asia which lies along the coast of the Salt Sea with its beautifully towered cities for the Greeks and barbarians mingling together. And I've come to this Greek city first, having already set those other lands to the east to dance and establish my mysteries there, so there might be a God manifest amongst men." So the story here is as someone from the east of Forrana trying to establish his place in Greek mythology. Other stories explicitly say that Dionysus was born in India, and many more stories have him conquering India systematically. So for example, according to the first century, was the second century Macedonian historian, Polyanius, Dionysus conquered India, 6451 years before Alexander the Great ever dipped his toe into its shores. The story goes that Dionysus wants to conquer the cities of India to get inside their great wars, so he takes his army and he dresses them up in mufti, non-military clothes, soft white linen, and deer pelts, and he wraps their spears in ivy and fennel, so they look more like walking staffs than spears. And so disguised, he leaves the army into the cities and gets the inhabitants drunk as a great big festival with them, and then when they're all sufficiently drunk, with a clash of symbols, he signals his troops through reveal themselves and the city is his. And the story goes on that after some success in India, Dionysus says, "Army just couldn't handle the extreme heat." So they did what many Indians do and they went up to the hills for the summer, and they found a three peaked mountain with fruit and fresh springs of cool water. And they stayed up on the hills there for quite some time, waiting for the enemy just to come into the valley below, and then they would pounce, men would pop out for the undergrowth and fire arrows, others would charge down the mountains surrounding and beating the enemy. And Dionysus has got a bunch of different tricks for beating the Indian armies. He uses women fighters to coax people into attacking, and so forth, and so on. I sometimes wonder whether there might be something to all this Dionysus in India talk. I mean, not that Dionysus was a historical character or anything like that, but it seems pretty likely to me that there's some influence from India on the tales about Dionysus. Because another feature of Dionysus is that he's called "Twice Born." No other Greek god to my knowledge is given that title. And the Greek tale was have an explanation for this, and the story is supposed to go that Dionysus was born prematurely. And he would have died, he was so premature, but Zeus took him and cut his thigh open and put the fetus Dionysus into his thigh, and then sewed it up again, and Dionysus was going to matured in Zeus' thigh. And that's why he was twice born. But that's a really odd story. It's rather pointless. It doesn't tell us anything special about the character of Dionysus, and it doesn't mix well with the idea that he's a new god on the scene. There's another possible explanation for backers being called "Twice Born." Because twice born is the title given for the upper three varners in India, and it's at least very tempting to think that some of the myths about Dionysus were injured myths transported over, and the Greeks didn't really understand what the ideas were. And so they made up their own backstories. Anyway, why am I talking about a doubtful connection between a mythical Greek god, an India? Because in this episode, we're going to talk about some real connections between Greece and India. We're going to talk about the Greek ambassadors who travel to Indian lands, and how they saw India. But it's going to be a two-way exchange. Too often, we're interested only in what the Greek text tells us about India, and most of this episode's going to be about that. But it's important to remember that India can tell us about the Greek text too, just as they could help us make sense of the Dionysian myths. Today, we're going to look at the Greek ambassadors to India. First, Megastones, who went to the court of Chandragutta, Moria in India. We look and see whether the tales he told in return of fact or fiction. And then two more ambassadors who traveled to the court of Chandragutta's son, Bindasara. So Megastones, a Greek. Probably an Ionian Greek, someone from the coast of modern day Turkey. But Megastones is no longer living in the Mediterranean world. He's living in Afghanistan. He said to be a close companion of Salukas. Salukas was one of Alexander's generals who took over after he died. And Salukas took charge of the eastern portion of Alexander's empire, including modern day Afghanistan, where Megastones was living. So Megastones is living in Afghanistan with a satrap there. And he's asked to take a trip to the Emperor of India, Chandragutta, Moria. And some historians guess that Megastones was given the authority to make a deal with Chandragutta Moria. That his mission was to get Chandragutta Moria to not attack the Salukas territory. And the deal was that Salukas will give up Afghanistan and a bunch of other stuff, including his own daughter. And Chandragutta Moria will agree not to attack and will also send over 500 elephants. That contract we've heard about in earlier podcasts. There's no real evidence that this was what Megastones' mission was about, beyond the fact that Megastones went to the Court of Chandragutta Moria and the contract also went to the Court of Chandragutta Moria too. With or without a contract, Megastones left the satrap and travelled towards India. He enters India by the Punjab, the five rivers, and he crosses the first of those great rivers, the Indus itself. Ond gyd sem haw 달 I'n ymwch yn ymfwch i'n ambwch i'n amdud. I'n amdud yn amdud yn amdud yn amdud yn amdud yn amdud yn amdud. Felly yn amdud yn amdud yn amdud yn amdud yn amdud yn amdud yn amdud. I'n amdud yn amdud yn amdud yn amdud yn amdud ymfwch i'n amdud. Felly bod yn amdud yn amdud ymfwch i'n amdud. Ond ymwch i'n amdud ymfwch i'n amdud yn amdud, But after many days journey, he would have come at last to the Great River the Ganges. And the road might be more busy now with merchants and wagons and sages. But he follows the road on down the course of Ganges, through the Upper Ganges, through that territory that once longed to Kassala but has now firmly part of the Morian Empire. And eventually he came in all likelihood to our city, the capital, unutali Putra itself. And there he came into the presence of the Emperor Chandra Guttamoria. Megastani says that he visited the Emperor several times. I wonder what they talked about. Sooner or later, Megastani's leaves the Emperor and travels back home to the West. And he brought with him stories of what he himself had seen in India and also some tales he'd heard along the way. And back home, he writes these in a book which comes to be called The Indika. A bit of bad news, the book is now lost. A bit of good news, we have lots of quotes or paraphrases from the book, summaries of it. And we find these in the historians of the first century AD. But they're based on Megastani's own work, perhaps even directly quoting it at parts. Actually, this is only mildly good news, really. Because these first century texts, they're pretty unclear on exactly what is Megastani's himself or what is quoting from another writer on Ancient India and what's just been made up on the spot by these first century authors themselves. So reading Megastani's through these first century authors is a bit like reading the work of Jane Austen, only never actually having read a Jane Austen novel, only reading the essays of English students of our own day, talking about Jane Austen's novels. And these English students have varying degrees of care and imagination. Okay, let's give Megastani's or at least the version of Megastani's that we get from his students, a close examination. Let's mark him on accuracy. Megastani's talks about the landscapes of India. It's rivers, the mountains and the monsoon. He talks about the five rivers of the Punjab, and he describes them correctly. He talks about the Himalayas, and he gets all of this right. That's one easy mark for Megastani's. He talks about wildlife too, lions and monkeys who roll stones from cliffs down on people invading their territory and huge strutting peacocks, the symbol of the Morian emperors and parrots who talk and tour choices. Another easy point for Megastani's. But hold on, because Megastani's is actually not very good on other animals. Megastani's talks about Indian dragons, serpents, one meter long with membranous wings, which fly, and as they fly they drop acid poo. And if you are lucky enough to be standing beneath them and get some acid poo on you, beware, because Indian dragon poo will burn through your skin in no time. Yeah. Megastani's talks about Indian unicorns too. Apparently they had a curly pig's tail, yellow fur and legs that bend in the same way the elephant legs do, and a sharp black horn in the middle of their head. Oddly enough, no fully grown specimens as Megastani's had ever been caught on account of the fact that they're extremely aggressive. Yeah. Don't you expect this one to be turning up in downtown Delhi anytime soon? That's mark deducted from Megastani's. So far we've got two marks from Megastani's aunt and one deducted. Megastani's talks about the great city, Patali Putra too. "The walls are made of wood," he says, "and interspersed with tall towers, and the walls go on for miles. This is a really huge city. In fact, it's twice the size of Rome at its zenith. It's shaped as a parallelogram, 80 stadia long and 15 white, and there are 570 towers dispersed over those walls, and 46 gates by which the people come and go. And when they come and go, they have to get over the ditch that surrounds the walls. It's very deep. It's 30 qubits wide. This is a pretty remarkably pretty astonishingly big city. It will be surprising if a city that big existed. With 340 hectares and possibly more than a million people within its walls. And when Megastani's visit sit, it's not even reached its peak yet. This is only the city of the first emperor to make their home there. And other emperors with bigger empires are still to come. So this city's presumably going to grow. All this is rather disconcerting. When I was a child, I was raised to think of Rome as the greatest, biggest city of the ancient world. It was never put exactly explicitly. No one ever said, "Look, Rome was the biggest city." But there was always that implicit assumption. So it's disconcerting to find ourselves in a world where there are bigger cities that the better of other equally important empires. Once perhaps we barely heard of as children. But even if Megastani's stories about Patali put to us surprising and disconcerting, they might well be true. There's some evidence backing Megastani's up here. Archaeologists haven't dug up the whole of Patali Putra yet by any means. But the parts they have dug up have towers at the right spacing for Megastani's size and number of towers. And the wooden walls are there and many other features that we'd have every reason to expect to find in Patali Putra are in Megastani's account. And anyway, ancient India seems to have been much more populist than ancient Italy. So perhaps we shouldn't have been that surprised if there actually were much larger cities there. I think we should award Megastani's half a mark for this one. Megastani's has got a lot to tell us about life in ancient India too. The harsh punishments lie and you'll get your hands cut off. Hits someone and not only do you get wounded in exactly the same place that you hit them, you also get your hand cut off. There must have been a lot of people without hands. Hits an artisan in the eye or in the hand, not only do you lose a hand, you die. Commit fraud, you die. Harsh stuff. The people, he says, were divided into groups, each with a specific role and none of them allowed to change their group or into marry with anyone else from another group. So there's a huge number of husbandmen who never leave the villages but they pay the king the tax. And then we have the shepherds and the hunters living in tents. And then we have the artisans, the armors, blacksmiths and all those guys. They are exempt from tax or even paid for by the king. And there are huge number of soldiers, again paid for by the king spending most of their time just lounging around. And then we have the class of Overseas, the eyes of the king amongst the people and the much smaller class of the king's counsellors. But there aren't any slaves. That's how my gas and he's described society. And aside from all of these groups, we have the philosophers. And these come in two flavours, the Brahmins and the Sramanas, kind of philosophers and sages, if you like. The philosophers says, "Megathani's claim that everything is an illusion. They guard their secrets very carefully. They don't even tell their wives about their secret knowledge." The sages, on the other hand, live in forests. They dress themselves in bark and they eat tree leaves and stuff like that. Megathani's seems to be giving a pretty good picture of life here. Some of the different groups he mentions are recognisable as ancient varners or jutties, casts. And Megathani's has it right that people are not, at least in theory, allowed to marry outside of their varner or juttie. And they're not allowed to change them at will. Still, Megathani's gets the wrong number of varners, and he perhaps confuses different ways of carving up society. Mae'r gael i'n gael ar ymdyn. that Vanna and Jati weren't as important in Morin India as you might have thought. So that the distinction breaks down and isn't so clear, and you could be easily confused by the number of the different groups. But more on the importance or otherwise of Vanna and Jati in a special episode to come. Magassini's does seem to be wrong when he says there are no slaves in India. There were slaves in India, but it's possible that there were very few or none at all in the capital city, Patali Putra, and on the region that Magassini's passed through on the way there. The picture of the philosophers and sages that Magassini's gives is startling the accurate, though. Even his wording seems right. It closely matches the phrase found on later inscriptions in the Morin Empire about Brahmanas and Sramanas. And Sanskrit literature very often talks of sages living on wild fruits, roots, and leaves. The phrase is found all over ancient India. He lives on roots, roots, and leaves. This chap went into the forest and lived on roots, roots, and leaves. And almost exactly the same phrase is found in Magassini's too. So I think that's two marks from Magassini's. He's doing quite well. But predictably enough, Magassini's goes too far. He tells stories about people beyond the capital in the distant reaches of the empire. He talks about one tribe of people 27 inches high, who live high in the mountains, and they have a constant yearly battle with the cranes, the birds. Each year, these little dwarf people find goats and rams, and they ride them like horses. And they ride these fine steeds down from the mountains into the valleys. They're armed with bows and arrows, and they go in search of the cranes eggs. And when they find the cranes, they destroy them. And they flee back to the mountains before the cranes can rally an attack. And they're always every year managed to kill just enough cranes eggs to survive another year's assault, because the cranes come and attack them in their mountain stronghold. But they never managed to attack enough of the cranes eggs to wipe out the cranes entirely. Other tribes have no noses, says Magassini's, or no mouths, or have huge ears that droop all the way down to the floor, and that they curl up in and sleep in at night. Cozy. One first century historian says that Magassini's is backed up with a great philosopher and scientist Aristotle here. But I think we can safely deduct some marks. So how are we going to grade Magassini's overall? Magassini's actually does very well on the things he's seen with his own eyes, the geography of Northern India, the capital city, Patali Putra, the philosophers, the class system, the features of everyday, day-to-day life such as punishments, and even the official administration, which I haven't mentioned. So top marks A star for Magassini's, on what he's already seen, what he's actually seen with his own eyes. He might be good on things he's seen, but Magassini's is pretty terrible on things he hasn't seen, the dragons, the pigmies, the lack of slaves. Plainly, he was told these stories by people he met on his trip, and he just swallowed them wholesale. And you can kind of imagine the people of Chandra Gupta's court having a good laugh at Magassini's expense. Oh, did you hear me tell that Greek about the people living their own ears? He actually believed me, yeah, great one. But perhaps these tales were sincerely held, and he took them seriously too. The tale of the mountain pigmies feels like a folk exmanation of why cranes fly over the Himalayas every year. So it seems then that Magassini saw a bunch of staff hurt a bunch of tailors and came straight home without bothering to check any of the tails he heard. Perhaps he was heading back to Ted's master about the 500 elephants that he had just successfully negotiated for. So Magassini's is chronicling his, let's give him a C overall, but by ancient Greek standards, that's pretty damn reliable. Those standards are pretty low. About a century before Magassini set out, there's a Greek doctor working in Persia. He wrote another account of India, and it's so full of tall tails and obvious nonsense that it makes Magassini's look like a modern-day stickler for truth historian. According to this, this doctor, India is a land where it never rains, where there are fountains of gold, where there are seas of cooking oil, and pigmies who had dressed only in their long-flowing beards and nothing else. So as a historian, Magassini's is the best of a bad bunch. After Magassini's trip and all his tails, the Greeks don't stop being interested in India. To them, it represents something mythical and exotic, and Magassini has only wetted their appetite. But they also have a strategic interest in dealing with real Indians, who, after all, are a huge power right on their doorstep. So they keep sending ambassadors to the courts of the Morian emperors. A little after Magassini's another ambassador was sent. He was sent all the way from Egypt, and his name, appropriately enough, was Dionysus. And he traveled to India, and he must have thought about how the God Dionysus had been in India so many centuries before. He didn't get to meet Chandragupta Moria, who was already dead by the time he arrived. Instead, he came to the court of Emperor Bindusara, Chandragupta's son and inheritor. Note that this Bindusara isn't the same guy as Bimbusara, who was the very first King of Magda we talked about in the very first podcast episode. This ambassador, Dionysus, also wrote an account of what he found in India. Like Magassini's book, it was known as The Indica, and like Magassini's book, it's now lost. Yet another ambassador was sent from the Greeks, from Antiochus I and Syria to Bindusara, Morian Emperor. This ambassador was called Day Marcus, which is a little less fun and appropriate than Dionysus, but hey. And he was also sent on the long road to Patali Putra. And he also wrote a book about his experience. And this book was also known as The Indica. And this book, like Magassini's and Dionysus's book, is also lost. There's a bit of a pattern being set up here of persistent Greek interest peaking into India and rushing back to tell their friends a bunch of truths and half made up tales. For his part, Emperor Bindusara returned the curiosity. He also wanted to peek over and see what was going on in the Greek lands. He sent a message back to Antiochus, asking for wine and figs, and a Greek philosopher, a sophist. Antiochus received the message and cordially sent back wine and figs. But he also sent a note saying that he couldn't send a sophist because it's a great against Greek law to sell sophists. I guess that Bindusara's tastes were just too sophisticated for him. Unfortunately, nothing's left of the work of the two ambassadors of Bindusara's court. So instead, I'll tell you a story from the Indian sources. The Indian stories have got quite a different flavor to Magassini's tales. Perhaps they've got the same mix of facts and fiction, but they haven't got that idea of trying to be a history and they don't have that incite clippity and dustiness to them. They've instead got an immediacy and intimacy. I really quite like. Anyway, this story covers a long time. It starts about the time that Magassini's the first ambassador arrives at the Emperor's Court and it ends probably about the time that the last ambassador, Dave Marcus, leaves. Remember Cotelia from the previous podcasts that cunning advisor who helped Chandragupta Moria come to power? Well, Cotelia had been with Chandragupta Moria since he was a boy. He had taught him and raised him and he'd given him the crown. Roughly at the time of the Gassini's visit, Chandragupta's wife was pregnant and at that time Chandragupta Moria had a firm control of a huge empire and he was becoming a bit paranoid. So as advisor Cotelia, advises him to take precautionary measures. Change your bedroom every night to deceive assassins in the middle of the night, get up and change bedroom. Surround yourself with bodyguards. Start making yourself immune from poisons. And Cotelia did this by secretly putting small doses of poison in the king's food. Only a little bit at first the king got slightly ill but got over it. But more and more is the king started to build up tolerance and all this was done in secret to fool any would be a assassin. Well, one day, Chandragupta's pregnant wife was passing by the dinner table and she reached out and grabbed some of her husband's food. And before anyone could do anything, she'd swallowed it whole and with it, the huge dose of poison. She soon collapsed, doctors were summoned and then Cotelia turned up. The Queen's writhing on the floor in agony, dying. And Cotelia goes over to the table, grabs a knife, and plunges it into the Queen's belly. He cuts her stomach, he cuts it open, folds it back, and reaches down and cuts out the baby boy. And he pulls the baby boy out, and as he does so, a drop of the Queen's blood spills and strikes the boy on the forehead. And the Queen's blood was so filled with poison that it burnt the boy's forehead. It left a mark there. The Queen died, but she was already doomed the moment she had taken the poison. But Cotelia had saved the baby, and Chandraguk to the Emperor called him Bindasara, which means something like "spotty" on account of his spotty blood scarred forehead. Anyway, by the time the later two Greek ambassadors arrived, Chandraguk to Moria is dead. It's the early 3rd century BC. Actually, Chandraguk to Moria abdicate. He leaves his palace, travels down to the south, and starves himself to death in the manner of the great Jain kings. And he passes Empire on to his son spotty, onto Bindasara. So Bindasara is the Emperor now, and he has his own advisors, but his father's old cunning advisor Cotelia is still around. One of the new advisors was called Subandu. And Subandu was an ambitious sort. He wanted to stretch his political muscles. And he thought he could pull a political dirty trick on the old dirty trick to himself Cotelia. So Subandu went to Bindasara and said, "Hey, did you hear the story about how your mother died? Did you hear about how Cotelia took a knife and plunged it into her belly while she was writhing on the floor if she died, she bled out?" And Bindasara heard this, and he was outraged. He said, "Go get Cotelia, but Cotelia has his spies in court. He's already heard about this, and he's fled for the countryside. And he stays there in hiding." "Hiding himself from Emperor Bindasara's wrath." Yeah, Bindasara wanted to know more. He was presumably outraged, and he asked around the palace to get more details on this story, on the murder of his mother. And sooner or later he got around to asking his mother's midwives. And the midwives told the king the whole story, the full truth, about how Cotelia had killed his mother only to save him and how it all been a big accident. And once the king discovers this, Cotelia hears of it and comes back, and Cotelia arranges for this would be amateur trickster, Subandu, and his teenage son to be stripped of all of their possessions, to make him a completely poor, and to be thrown out of the capital city to wander around, sorry they'd ever messed with Cotelia. Bindasara actually expanded the empire a bit into South India. There are even stories about him in the Tamil poems, the poems from right down in the very southern tip of India. They talk of the coming of the mori, the newcomers. They talk about them as a huge and seemingly unstoppable force, with beautiful chariots that cut paths through the mountains for their chariots to go on. But the poems also talk about how the mori and army came to a narrow path in the mountains on the way to South India. And they tried to fight their way through there, but they were defeated. And then they tried again, but they just couldn't make it through. So, Bindasara probably had a few setbacks, but he does seem to have expanded the empire he inherited quite considerably. And that's pretty much all we know about him. Every week we had a bit from the original sources, and this week I thought we'd have a bit from Magassini's himself, as related to us by Strabo. It's about the king and the king's day-to-day life, and Magassini's here must surely be thinking of Chandragupta Moria the Emperor. The care of the king's person is entrusted to women who are also bought from their parents. The guards and the rest of the soldiery attend outside the gates. A woman who kills the king when drunk becomes the wife of his successor. The sons succeed the father. The king may not sleep during the daytime, and by night he is obliged to change his couch from time to time, with a view to defeat plots against his life. Now the king leaves his palace, not only in time of war, but also for the purpose of judging causes. He then remains in court for the whole day, without allowing the business to be interrupted. Even though the hour arrives when he must need a tend to his person, that is when he has to be rubbed with cylinders of wood massaged. He continues here in cases, while the friction which is performed by four attendants is still proceeding. Another purpose for which he departs his palace is to offer sacrifice. A third is to go for the chase, and he departs for the chase in back-and-nalyen fashion, crowned of women surrounding him, and outside of this a circle of spearmen are arranged. The road is marked off with ropes, and it is death for a man or a woman to pass within the ropes. The men with drums and gongs lead the procession, and the king hunts in the enclosures and shoots arrows from a platform. At his stand side stand two or three armed women. If he hunts in the open grounds, he shoots from the back of an elephant. Of the women, summer in chariots, summer in horses, and some even on elephants, and they are equipped with weapons of every kind, as if they were going on campaign. [Music] Okay, that's it for this week. Next week we start on the greatest of the Morin emperors, Ashoka himself. Really looking forward to it. By the way, the podcast is now available on iTunes and www.historyofinduapodcast.com, all one word. Thanks to Cam for the music, and if you're enjoying the podcasts, please consider giving to my wife's charity. That's the Snails It To Memorial Fund details are on the website. Thanks for listening. Take care. [Music]