The World

Seleukos, now aged seventy-five, accompanied by his twenty-two-year-old son Antiochos and his corps of Indian elephants and Scythian chariots, marched all the way from Pakistan to the Aegean, defeating all contenders. In 281 BC, they crossed the Hellespont but, as Seleukos – the last of Alexander’s Companions and, with Ptolemy, the most gifted – stopped to admire an ancient shrine, the psychopathic Thunderbolt, who had invited him into Greece, stabbed the old Victor. Then, seizing control of the army, he marched into Macedon and claimed the throne. It was an astonishing turn of events, but it did not last. Thunderbolt was himself killed in battle, the end of the wars of Alexander’s successors. Seleukos’ family kept Syria, Iraq and Iran; the Ptolemies ruled Egypt, Israel and Lebanon.

The great Ptolemy’s daughter Arsinoe was left high and dry in Greece: twice married to warring kings, twice widowed, she wanted her share of power and headed to Alexandria to join her brother Ptolemy II. Arsinoe framed his wife for planning to kill the pharaoh, had her killed and then married Ptolemy II. The incest pleased the Egyptians but disgusted the Greeks. ‘You’re pushing your cock into an unholy hole,’ wrote a lampoonist named Sotades. Ptolemy had Sotades sealed in a lead coffin and dropped into the Nile. Ptolemy II called himself and his wife Philadelphoi – Sibling-lovers, a divine pharaonic couple.

Philadelphos did everything with extravagance – what the Greeks called tryphe^* – making his father’s library the greatest collection in the world and inviting all peoples to settle in Alexandria, which was soon home to a million people, Greek, Egyptian and Jewish. When he commissioned Greek-speaking Jews to translate their Torah into Greek, he made the Bible available to non-Jews, a move which later had world-changing consequences.

In 275, Arsinoe and Philadelphos held a sacred festival combined with military parade and trade fair to celebrate their power: 80,000 troops marched through Alexandria with floats and statues of Zeus, Alexander and the Sibling-lovers themselves, elephants, leopards, giraffes and rhinoceroses, and delegations of Nubians and Indians in national dress. The Nubians advertised Ptolemy’s trade with Arkamani, qore (ruler) of Kush, who operating from his capital at Meroe, where he built many pyramids that still stand, sold war elephants to Philadelphos. As for the Indians, the festival’s theme was Dionysios returning from India – and Philadelphos had founded new Red Sea ports on the Egyptian and Arabian coasts to trade with the emperor of India, Ashoka, who boasted of his Greek links, naming Philadelphos in his inscriptions.

Born around the time that his grandfather Chandragupta was giving Seleukos those elephants, Ashoka was just one of the possible heirs of an expanding empire. Around 297, Chandragupta abdicated from the throne to devote himself to Jain ascetism, handing over to his son Bindusara, who maintained his father’s friendly relations with the Seleucids, asking Antiochos to send figs, wine and a Greek philosopher. Bindusara appointed Ashoka as governor in the north-west at Taxila and Ujjain, where he fell in love with a merchant’s daughter, Devi – Vidisha-Mahadevi – whom Buddhists later claimed was related to Buddha.

In 272 BC, as Bindusara lay dying, Ashoka, reported by one tradition as unattractive and suffering from a fainting condition, possibly epilepsy, fought and killed his brothers. Calling himself Beloved of the Gods (Deva¯nampiya) and the Kindly (Piyadasi), Ashoka expanded down the east coast, vital for Mauryan links to eastern Asia: ‘King Piyadasi conquered Kalinga, 150,000 people were deported, 100,000 were killed and many times that number perished,’ and ‘Kalinga was annexed.’ Leading an army of 700 elephants, 1,000 cavalry and 80,000 infantry and protected by a bodyguard that included female archers, he may have conquered lands from Afghanistan to Bangladesh and south to Deccan – probably the largest raj until the British. When he had the luxury of security, he did what he thought was right, encouraged by his Buddhist lover Devi. ‘Now that Kalinga was annexed, the Beloved of the Gods felt remorse,’ he declared in one of the thirty-three remarkable inscriptions he raised around his empire.^* The killing ‘is extremely grievous to the Beloved of the Gods and weighs heavily on this mind’, and he even mentioned the suffering of slaves.