Scene Four
Antigonus broke the balance, but only after two victories—both captained by his son Demetrius—had clearly demonstrated that he was the most powerful of the five. The first of these was the invasion of Athens in 307. Cassender, like Antipater before him, had been not only king of Macedonia but also the overlord of Greece. Demetrius marched into Athens and drove Cassender’s men out of the city; and then he directed a naval battle against Ptolemy’s ships which took place at Salamis. The Ptolemaic fleet was defeated.
After this, Antigonus—having triumphed over both Cassender and Ptolemy—took the title of king. Lysimachus (still in Thrace) and Seleucus (in Babylon) decided not to anger the one-eyed monster. Rather than allying against him, they began to call themselves kings as well. So did Ptolemy and Cassender. The death of Alexander IV, still unspoken, was now taken for granted.
Scene Five
All five kings then began to jostle at each other’s borders, a process that reached its climax at the Battle of Ipsus in 301 BC. Ptolemy, whose power was concentrated in the south, sat this one out. But Cassander, Lysimachus, and Antigonus fought a three-way engagement which remained undecided until Seleucus arrived from Babylon with an overwhelming force and threw his weight onto Lysimachus and Cassander’s side.
Antigonus, now eighty years old, fought until he died. His troops were scattered; his son Demetrius fled to Greece and set himself up as king there, abandoning the Asia Minor lands that had been the center of his father’s empire. Lysimachus took the western part of Asia Minor for his own, adding it to Thrace; Seleucus took most of the rest. Cassander, who had done the dirty work of getting rid of Alexander IV, made very little out of the engagement; he added almost no land to Macedonia. Five kings remained (Ptolemy, Lysimachus, Cassander, Seleucus, and Demetrius), but the borders had shifted.
Scene Six
While fighting with the other successors, Seleucus had also been carrying on negotiations, with an Indian king named Chandragupta.
This king had come to power, sometime between 325 and 321, in his own small kingdom of Maurya. Not long after his accession, he had turned to make war on the last Nanda king of Magadha. The brutality of the Nanda Dynasty had long made these kings unpopular; Chandragupta found plenty of support. His capture of Magadha turned his little Mauryan kingdom into an empire.
His rise to power was partly due to the savvy of his closest advisor, Kautilya. Kautilya is traditionally given credit for writing the ancient political handbook Arthashastra; much of this text was probably set down somewhat later, but Kautilya’s principles survive in it. The ruler, Kautilya taught, had two tasks. He was to enforce internal order, by making sure that his subjects properly observed the caste system:
The observance of one’s own duty leads one to svarga [Heaven] and infinite bliss. When it is violated, the world will come to an end owing to confusion of castes and duties. Hence the king shall never allow people to swerve from their duties; for whoever upholds his own duty, ever adhering to the customs of the Aryas, and follow the rules of caste and divisions of religious life, will surely be happy both here and hereafter.31
And he was to preserve outside order, by suspecting every neighbor of planning conquest, and taking the proper precautions.32
Whether or not Chandragupta’s neighbors were planning on conquest, Chandragupta himself certainly was. He wanted to extend his own reach beyond the Ganges—but this brought him into the sphere of Seleucus, who had claimed Alexander’s Indian territories along with his other gains.
Chandragupta proposed a bargain: he would give Seleucus war elephants, if Seleucus would yield the Indian territories to him. Seleucus, powerful though he was, realized that he would not be able to defend both the far eastern and far western borders of his kingdom. He agreed, and in 299 the two swore out a peace.
Scene Seven
In that same year, Demetrius took Macedonia. Cassander of Macedonia had died the year before, and his sons fought over the succession until one of them appealed to Demetrius, down in Greece, for help. This was a mistake; Demetrius campaigned northwards, drove out both of Cassender’s heirs, and added Macedonia to Greece. The five kings had become four: Ptolemy, Lysimachus, Seleucus, and Demetrius in his father’s place.
This was a temporary victory for Demetrius. A face from the past appeared: Pyrrhus, grandson of the king of Epirus, whose kingdom Philip had absorbed decades before. Pyrrhus was the son of Olympias’s brother, and so the first cousin of Alexander the Great himself. As royalty in exile, he had had an unfortunate childhood (handed from relative to relative in an attempt to keep him out of harm’s way), and he had an unfortunate face: Plutarch says that it had “more of the terrors than of the augustness of kingly power,” since “he had not a regular set of upper teeth, but in the place of them one continued bone, with small lines marked on it, resembling the divisions of a row of teeth.”33 He was also rumored to have magical powers and could cure spleens by touching his right foot to the stomach of the afflicted person (his right big toe contained the magic).
Despite his personal disadvantages, Pyrrhus had made a smart marriage, to the stepdaughter of Ptolemy himself. He asked his father-in-law for help in getting his old kingdom of Epirus back again; Ptolemy was more than happy to attack Demetrius, who now had hold both of Greece and Macedonia. With Egyptian forces behind him, Pyrrhus took back Epirus. By 286, he had overrun the rest of Macedonia as well and driven Demetrius out.
Demetrius fled into Asia Minor and then, in an excess of hubris, decided to attack Seleucus in the east. He was likely an alcoholic and either suicidal or delusional by this time; Seleucus swatted him like a fly and put him under house arrest, where he drank himself to death.34
Pyrrhus’s rule of Macedonia lasted for all of two years before Lysimachus came down from Thrace and drove him out. (Lysimachus, Plutarch says, “had nothing else to do.”) Pyrrhus withdrew to Epirus, which Lysimachus—perhaps out of respect for Alexander’s cousin—allowed him to keep.
The four kings had now become three: Ptolemy, Seleucus, Lysimachus. The satrapies had become three kingdoms: the Ptolemaic, the Seleucid, and the much smaller combined Thracian-Macedonian domain.
THE FOOTNOTE to the Wars of the Successors took place over in Italy. Rome, carrying on its dreary annual campaigns against its neighbors, was attacking the city of Tarentum, a Greek colony in the south. Tarentum sent messengers to Greece, asking for help; the call was answered by Pyrrhus, who was penned up in Epirus with no other chance of extending his power or winning any glory.
Pyrrhus left Epirus and sailed for Tarentum. Once there, he bought and borrowed war elephants (probably from Carthage) and mercenaries (largely Samnite) for the defense of the city. When the Romans attacked, Pyrrhus inflicted heavy losses on them; they had never seen elephants before. Then he drove them back to within forty miles of the city of Rome itself.
In the following year, 279, he tried to follow up on this with another pitched battle, this one fought at Asculum. He won this encounter too, but in such hard fighting that he lost as many men as the Romans. When another soldier congratulated him on the victory, he answered, “Another such victory will utterly undo me.” “He had lost a great part of the forces he brought with him,” Plutarch says, “and almost all his particular friends and principal commanders; there were no others there to make recruits…. On the other hand, as from a fountain continually flowing out of the city, the Roman camp was quickly and plentifully filled up with fresh men.”35 By 275, Pyrrhus had had enough campaigning against Rome. He left Tarentum to its own problems and went back to Greece.
Three years later, the Romans finally managed to conquer and sack Tarentum. In that same year, Pyrrhus—still looking for glory—was fighting in a nasty little Spartan civil war when an old woman threw a tile at him from a rooftop and knocked him unconscious. He was at once killed by his opponent, and his corpse was burned. Only the magical big toe survived.
Chapter Seventy-One
The Mauryan Epiph
any
In India, between 297 and 231 BC, the king pays more attention to dhamma than to conquest,
and his kingdom falls apart
IN 297, CHANDRAGUPTA MAURYA abdicated his throne in favor of his son, the Mauryan prince Bindusara. Chandragupta had become a follower of Jainism; according to tradition, he then joined a group of monks and starved himself to death in an extreme demonstration of aparigraha, detachment from all material things.
Bindusara seems to have spent his own reign empire-building. The only records we have of his conquests come from Buddhist texts written several hundred years later. But one of them says that Bindusara conquered “the land between the two seas,” which suggests that the Mauryan empire may have spread down south into the Deccan, as far as Karnataka.197 Apart from this, little is known about Bindusara’s twenty-five year rule except that the Greeks called him Amitrochates, “slayer of enemies,” a name for a conqueror.1
The Mauryan empire was centered in the north. In the south lay different kingdoms: Kalinga in the southeast, Andhra in the center of the southern peninsula, Chera to the west and a little to the south; and at the very tip of the subcontinent, the land of the Pandyas.2
We know nothing of their history before about 500 BC. But we do know that while the language of Kalinga links its people to the more northern kingdoms (a Kalinga king, Srutaya, is credited in the Mahabharata with fighting on the side of the Kauravas), the more southern kingdoms speak a language that appears to have different roots.198No one knows where these southern peoples originated, although their ancestry probably differs from that of the northern Indian rulers; possibly they were descended from intrepid sailors who made it across the Arabian Sea from Africa millennia earlier.
71.1 Mauryan India
Kalinga resisted the spread of the Mauryan rule to the south. When Bindusara died, around 272 BC, Kalinga still remained unconquered. Bindusara’s son Asoka was left the task of subduing it.
King Asoka is known to us mostly through the inscriptions which he ordered carved all around his empire, first on rocks (the Rock Edicts) and later on sandstone pillars (the Pillar Edicts). These Edicts give glimpses of Asoka’s early life. His father sent him to Taxila, now part of the Mauryan empire, to put down a rebellion when he was a very young man. After this, he was sent to another part of the empire, called Ujjain, to govern one of the five janapada, or districts, into which the Mauryan empire had been divided.3
There he fell in love with a beautiful woman named Devi, the daughter of a merchant. He did not marry her, although he fathered two children by her; later, her son became a Buddhist missonary, which suggests that Devi also was a Buddhist.4 But if she told Asoka about the principles of Buddhism, they made no dent in his consciousness. The early years of his reign showed no impulse towards peace.
When Bindusara died, Asoka had to fight his brothers for the throne, and after a four-year struggle he had done away with his competitors. We have no proof that he had them executed, but only one of the brothers is ever mentioned again.5
Asoka reigned alone for eight more years, carrying on his father’s tradition of conquest. Then, in 260, he took an army down south to campaign against the resistant Kalinga.6 The Edict which memorializes the battle gives a bleak picture of his cruelty to the people of Kalinga: “A hundred and fifty thousand people were deported,” it reads, “a hundred thousand were killed, and many times that number perished.”7
This horrific violence seems to have preyed on Asoka’s mind until it brought about a conversion. “Afterwards,” the Edict continues, “I felt remorse. The slaughter, death and deportation of the people is extremely grievous…and weighs heavy on the mind.”8
From this point on, his reign shifts and grows oddly unpolitical. He seems to have spent his time, not in administration, but in the pursuit of dhamma: the Way, the Rightness, the Duty, the Virtue (it is a concept notoriously difficult to define). “I very earnestly practiced dhamma, desired dhamma, and taught dhamma,” the Kalinga Inscription says, and a little later in the same Edict, “Any sons or great-grandsons that I may have should not think of gaining new conquests…delight in dhamma should be their whole delight, for this is of value in both this world and the next.”9
This was a bequest to a royal line like none ever seen in the west. The princes were not to follow on their father’s conquests and do their best to outdo him in war; instead they were to refrain from war and choose heavenly delights instead. “As long as the sun and moon shall endure,” Asoka’s final Edict says, “[so] men may follow dhamma.”10
Asoka’s greatest achievements after the conquest of Kalinga were religious, not political. Most lasting was his calling together of a Buddhist council to reassert the principles of dhamma; this Third Buddhist Council, held around 245 in the city of Pataliputra, gave birth to one of the books of the Pali Canon. At the council’s end, Asoka’s son Mahinda was sent to the large island off India’s southeast coast (modern Ceylon) as a missionary.11 Other missionaries were sent out to Greece, under Asoka’s sponsorship.
But Asoka’s preoccupation with dhamma was not a total abandonment of his empire-building ambitions. He was making a genuine attempt to find a new unifying principle, other than force, that would hold the kingdom together.12 It was the same problem Alexander had faced, in a slightly different setting. The clan system that had survived for so long in India, as a holdover from those very ancient nomadic days, was not one that lent itself easily to the establishment of empire; clan loyalties tended to pull the country apart into smaller political units, each negotiating friendship or hostility with those around it. The Mauryan conquest had temporarily united it by bloodshed, but Asoka had now turned away from that particular strategy. In place of the old clan loyalties, or loyalties enforced by conquest, Asoka tried for a third kind of loyalty: a common belief system that would make all Indians “my children” (as the Kalinga inscription puts it).13
And yet this too failed. After Asoka’s death in 231, the Mauryan empire fell apart almost as quickly as Alexander’s. The Edicts cease, no written records replace them, and a shadow falls over the next decades. Under cover of dark, Asoka’s sons and grandsons lost hold of their kingdom and it separated again into smaller battling territories.
Chapter Seventy-Two
First Emperor, Second Dynasty
Between 286 and 202 BC, the Ch’in extinguish the Zhou,
become the first rulers of unified China,
and are extinguished in turn
BACK IN CHINA, where all the dukes had become kings by fiat (not unlike the satraps of Alexander’s old empire), the time of the Warring States dragged on. After the rapid rise of the Ch’in state and Shang Yang’s dismemberment at the hands of the new Ch’in king, the Ch’in army went on fighting. So did everyone else. Qi defeated Wei soundly, after which Wei diminished in power; Chu, which had finally absorbed Wu and Yueh for good, took Wei’s place as one of the Big Three.1 Now Ch’in, Qi, and Chu seemed certain to divide the rest of China among themselves.
For some years, none of them had a clear road to the very top. But the Ch’in army, conditioned by Shang Yang, was the most ruthless of the three. In 260, the Ch’in overran the new kingdom of Chao (one of the three states formed by the Jin breakup), which had shown unwelcome signs of ambition. On the wide plains of China, numbers could clash that would not fit into the mountainous passes of Greece or the Italian peninsula. Tens of thousands died in the battle between the two states. When the Chao army surrendered, the captives were massacred in huge numbers.2
Four years later, the Ch’in invaded the Zhou territory and put an end to centuries of sacred Zhou rule. “Ch’in exterminated Zhou,” Sima Qian says, baldly, “and Zhou’s sacrifices ceased.”3 It is a measure of the total lapse into irrelevance by the Zhou that no one really noticed. Like Alexander IV, the Zhou king had been merely a name for years.
In the invasion, a catastrophe took place. The Nine Tripods, removed by the Ch’in from their sacred site, were paraded in triumph al
ong the river, but one of the tripods fell into the water and all attempts to get it back out again failed. Only eight tripods remained. The sign of the king’s divinely bestowed power was marred, forever incomplete.4
IN 247, A NEW KING came to the Ch’in throne: the young Cheng. His father Chuang-hsiang had died before his time, after a two-year reign, and Cheng was only thirteen years old. His country was run for him by commanders, a chancellor, a magistrate, and various generals.
He was more fortunate in his guardians than other young kings had been. These officials took their task seriously; on Cheng’s behalf, they beat off attacks from Ch’in’s neighbors, including an attempt by a five-state coalition to wipe out Ch’in before Cheng could reach his majority.
At twenty-two, Cheng took full control of Ch’in.5 He was planning the conquest not just of his neighbors, but of all China. By 232 he was raising an army larger than ever seen before; by 231, he was, as Sima Qian says, ordering “the ages of boys recorded” for the first time, which more than likely indicates a draft. And in 230, the other states of China began to fall, one by one. Han surrendered in 230; Chao, two years later. The crown prince of Yen, worried about the swelling size of Ch’in, sent an assassin, disguised as an ambassador, to Cheng’s court, hoping to get rid of the western menace before it reached his borders. Cheng discovered the false ambassador’s real purpose and had the man dismembered. The following year he marched into Yen, captured the crown prince, and beheaded him.
This ruthlessness would characterize the rest of Cheng’s reign. It also led him to a peak of power which no other king of China had ever climbed. The states continued to fall to him: Wei in 225, Chu in 223, Qi, reluctantly, in 221. By the end of 221, a quarter-century after his father’s death, Cheng was lord of the entire country. “Twenty-six years after Cheng, the King of Ch’in, was enthroned,” writes Sima Qian, “he unified the world for the first time.”6
The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome Page 63