poots.29 At any rate their customs were of a Rajpoot CHAPTER IV. character.29 They had a Spartan admiration of strength and beauty. They chose the handsomest man to be their king; and although it is difficult to accept this statement as a well-ascertained fact, yet Porus is said to have been more than six feet high and of excellent proportions. They subjected every child to a public examination when it was two months old; in order that the presiding magistrate might decide whether it was handsome enough to live, or whether death was to be its doom. To this day the crime of infanticide is almost universal Infanticide. amongst the Rajpoots, but it is confined entirely to females. The Rajpoots confess that their daughters are murdered to avoid the difficulty of procuring suitable husbands, and to escape the inordinate expense of marriage ceremonies; and it is impossible to say how far the existing custom has been borrowed from the ancient usage. Marriages amongst the Kathæi were guided by the mutual choice of the bride and bridegroom; in other words, they were a form of the ancient Swayamvara; 30 but according to the Rajpoot custom, known as Satí, the sati. living wife was burnt alive with the deceased husband.31

28 In modern vernaculars the Kshatriyas are called Kattris. The Kathæi, however, have been identified with the Chatties of Kattagwar in Guzerat.

29 Strabo, India, sect. 30.

30 See ante, p. 24.

31 According to the Greek authorities (Strabo, India, sect. 30) the Satí was instituted to check a practice of the women to poison their husbands for the sake of a younger lover. This statement does not harmonize with the assertion that the marriages were based upon mutual affection. Satí might have proved a check to poison in days when girls were compelled to accept old men as their husbands; but nothing was to be feared from loving wives. The latter, however, obeyed the ordinance, from being imbued with an unquestioning faith that they would thereby join their husbands in a heaven of felicity.

CHAPTER IV.

Alexander had invaded the Punjab during the rainy season of B.C. 327, and reached the Indian Ocean about the middle of B.C. 326. Meantime Philip remained at Taxila as his lieutenant or deputy, and commanded a garrison of mercenaries and a body-guard of Macedonians.32 When Alexander was marching through Beloochistan on his way to Susa, the news reached him that Philip had been murMutiny of the dered by the mercenaries, but that nearly all the murderers had been slain by the Macedonian bodyguards. Alexander immediately despatched letters directing the Macedonian Eudemos to carry on the government in conjunction with Taxiles, until he could appoint another deputy; and this provisional arrangement seems to have been continued until the death of Alexander in B.C. 323.33

Indian mer

cenaries.

Death of Alexander, B.C. 323: political an

archy.

The political anarchy which followed this catastrophe can scarcely be realized. Alexander was not thirty-three, and the conquests which he had already completed were sufficient to fire the imagination of every true soldier throughout all time. Yet his busy intellect had continued to form new schemes of empire and glory. He would circumnavigate Africa and explore the Caspian. He would conquer Arabia, Italy, and Carthage. He would create a universal dominion which should be bounded only by the ocean, and Babylon should be its capital. But these ambitious dreams had vanished in a moment. A drinking bout had been followed by a mortal fever, and the would-be demigod was lifeless clay. The ghastly tidings must have caused universal consternation. The vast empire of Alexander

was held together by no political tie whatever be- CHAPTER IV. yond the mere terror of his name. The appointment of a successor was thus of urgent and paramount importance; but there was literally no one to succeed, excepting a bastard half-brother who was hopelessly imbecile, and an unborn babe by an Asiatic wife, who might by chance prove to be a son. Ultimately the idiot and the infant were placed upon the throne as puppets; and the generals of the deceased Alexander hastened to the provinces to prepare for wars against each other which were to deluge the world with blood.3

35

the Greeks from

rokottos.

Meantime India was forgotten. Eudemos took Expulsion of advantage of the death of Alexander to murder India by SandPorus; but was ultimately driven out of the Punjab with all his Macedonians by an adventurer who was known to the Greeks as Sandrokottos, and to the Hindús as Chandragupta. This individual is said to have delivered India from a foreign yoke only to substitute his own. The notices of his life, however, are of considerable interest, as he is the one Indian Raja who is known at once to Greek history, Hindú tradition, the Buddhist chronicles, and the Sanskrit drama.

of Sandrokottos.

According to classical writers, Sandrokottos was Greek accounts at the city of Taxila when Alexander was there at the commencement of his Punjab campaign. He was an exiled prince from the great kingdom on the

34 Alexander had two Asiatic wives, Roxana and Stratira. Roxana was the daughter of a Baktrian chief on the upper Oxus, who had attracted his admiration, and whom he had accordingly married. Stratira was a daughter of Darius, and was treacherously murdered by the jealous Roxana after the death of Alexander. Roxana and her semi-Asiatic son were not likely to be held in much esteem by Greek generals; it is not therefore surprising that both were treated as puppets and ultimately murdered.

35 Diodorus Siculus, xix. 1; Justin, xv. 4.

CHAPTER IV. lower Ganges, said to be about eleven days' journey from the Punjab.36 He was bitterly hostile to the reigning sovereign, named Aggrammes, and denounced him as a weak king of mean extraction, who permitted his dominions to be overrun by banditti.37 Sandrokottos stated that Alexander could easily conquer the kingdom on the Ganges; but at the same time the Indian exile had so exasperated the great Macedonian by his impertinence, that he only saved his life by a speedy retreat from the Punjab. This impertinence probably consisted in exaggerated notions of his own importance, and a pertinacious assertion of his own claims to the throne of Aggrammes, which would be irritating to a conqueror who respected no claim but that of the sword. After Alexander left the Punjab, Sandrokottos experienced a strange run of good fortune. By the aid of banditti he captured the city of Patali-putra, and obtained the throne; and then drove the Greeks out of India, and established his empire over the whole of Hindustan and the Punjab.38

Thirteen years after the death of Alexander, the political convulsions which had shaken the civilized world to its centre began slowly to subside. The vast empire was dismembered into four great provinces; and although the whole area was the theatre

36 It was called the kingdom of the Gangaridæ and Prasii, and probably corresponded to Magadha and Kosala, the modern Behar and Oude. The name of Prasii seems to linger in that of Prasa-najit, king of Kosala. See ante, p. 138.

37 The father of Aggrammes is said to have been a barber, who had an amour with the queen, and murdered her husband, and then placed his own son Aggrammes on the throne (Quintius Curtius, ix. 2). The scandal is unworthy of credit. It is simply the oriental form of abuse, which is directed not against the individual, but against his mother and other female relatives. The story of the murder will be explained further on. See Appendix I. Buddhist Chronicles. 38 Justin, xv. 4. Plutarch, Life of Alexander.

of the Greek Bactrian empire of Seleukos Nikator.

of frequent wars, yet the provinces were beginning to CHAPTER IV. harden into independent kingdoms. The region Establishment between the Euphrates and the Indus fell to the lot Brink of Seleukos Nikator, who dated his reign from the year B.c. 312, which is the era of the dynasty of the Seleukidæ. Seleukos Nikator had accompanied Alexander in his expedition into the Punjab; and he appears to have been ambitious to carry out the designs of his great commander. Like him he conquered Bactria; and then he turned towards the south and east, and appeared on the bank of the Indus. But he found himself confronted by a far superior enemy to the one whom Alexander had encountered. There was no longer a dismembered empire to be subdued in detail. Sandrokottos had already consolidated his imperial authority over the Punjab and Hindustan; and was apparently enabled to concentrate such an overwhelming force on his north-west frontier that Seleukos deemed it expedient to cultivate his friendship, rather than assail him as an enemy. A treaty was accordingly concluded between the Greek sovereign and the Hindú Raja. Sandrokottos supplied his Greek neighbour with a force of five hundred elephants. In return Seleukos ceded the mountain territory westward of the Indus; and also gave one of his own daughters to be the bride of his Indian ally. This alliance was strengthened by the residence of a Greek ambassador named Megasthenes at the court of Sandrokottos; and it will hereafter appear that the most authentic information respecting the condition and civilization of the Gangetic valley at this period is supplied by Megasthenes.39

39 Strabo, India, sects. 36, 53, 57; Ariana, sect. 9. The Greek and Hindú