The World

Foxy, pointy-faced and fearless, Seleukos had the gift of winning over different nationalities to work with his Macedonians. In the last year of Alexander’s life he had joined the king’s inner circle, present at the final drinking parties before his death, and unlike henchmen of longer standing he had not at first requested a satrapy. Alone among the Companions, he had stayed with his Bactrian wife Atama, a decision that was to pay off when he retook the east. But the biggest threat to Alexander’s heir was his own blood: in 310, Alexander IV and Roxane were murdered, followed soon afterwards by Hercules. Finally Ptolemy decided to marry Alexander’s sister Cleopatra, but she too was murdered before the ceremony could take place. After 300 years of rule by one family, the House of Alexander had vanished.

In 306, Ptolemy and Seleukos declared themselves to be kings, founding two Alexandrian dynasties that would rule for centuries, setting new lows for depravity down to their last great ruler, Cleopatra. Egypt was Ptolemy’s heartland; while he created a Greek-speaking bureaucracy there, fortified by a Macedonian army, he backed the Egyptian priests and embellished their temples. In return, they hailed him as pharaoh.^* Towards the end of the reign, he settled himself and Alexander the mummy in his expanded Alexandria.^*

In 287, now in his eighties, Ptolemy chose a younger son, the twenty-two-year-old Ptolemy, intellectual and thoughtful, to succeed him instead of his elder son, Thunderbolt, then aged thirty-two. It was a sensible decision: Thunderbolt was a psychopathic wrecking-ball. When Ptolemy died in 283, the only one of Alexander’s successors to die in his bed, he was smoothly succeeded by Ptolemy II, while Thunderbolt escaped to seek his fortune elsewhere.

After a murderous rampage around the Mediterranean, Thunderbolt fled to Seleukos and invited him to seize the west. Seleukos, now seventy-five and the last of the successors, was up for the challenge. His eldest son Antiochos, who accompanied him on his campaigns, was half-Persian, which helped as they established a Greek empire from Syria to Pakistan, earning Seleukos the epithet Nicator – Victor. Like Alexander, the Victor was an avid founder of cities, building two capitals – an eastern one, Seleucia (near Baghdad), and a western one, Antioch (Antakya, Türkiye). When, as part of an alliance, he took a new young wife, Stratonice, his son Antiochos fell ill. Consulting his doctor, the old king discovered that the boy was in love with her. Seleukos fixed his own succession and his son’s sickness by giving the boy both the crown and the girl, announcing their marriage and then crowning them king and queen of Asia, progenitors of the Seleucid dynasty.

Before he returned to the west, Seleukos had marched into the Punjab, where he discovered his limits. In 305, he clashed with a new dynasty there led by an Indian king who may have met Alexander.

Twenty years earlier, Chandragupta Maurya, who may have advised Alexander on Indian affairs, led a rebellion against the unpopular Nanda kings of Pataliputra (Patna). Chandragupta may have been an illegitimate relative of the Nandas, hidden by his mother and brought up far from court. It was said that a courtier, Chanakya,^* invited the boy to his philosophical school at Takshashila (Taxila). Little is known about Chandragupta, but he may have served King Dhana Nanda until he became jealous of the young general and ordered his killing. Chandragupta finally took Pataliputra and, when the Macedonian rule in Punjab collapsed, he expanded there too.

In 305, Seleukos arrived to retake these Indian provinces but, after failing to defeat Chandragupta, he met the Indian monarch on the Indus and ceded territories, agreed a marriage alliance and exchanged ambassadors. Ambassador Megasthenes wrote a (mostly vanished) book Indica, describing the heavily guarded monarch, his orderly empire and his capital Pataliputra, one of the world’s biggest cities. Chandragupta sent Seleukos a useful gift for an ageing warlord: Indian aphrodisiacs. Even more useful, he gave Seleukos the equivalent of a twentieth-century panzer division – 500 war elephants, which he would use to conquer the west.

ASHOKA – WHEEL -TURNING KING