House of Nanda, then reigning in Magadha; which country, now called Behar, had been growing at the expense of its Gangetic neighbors for some centuries.  King Suddhodana, the Buddha’s father, had reigned over the Sakyas in Nepaul as a tributary under the king of Magadha; which statement I let pass, well aware that the latest western scholarship has revolutionized the Sakyas into a republic—­perhaps with soviets,—­and King Suddhodana himself into a mere ward politician.

This Sandrakottos, as the Greeks called him, had many tales to tell of the wealth of his kinsman’s kingdom, and of the extreme unpopularity of its ruler:-and therefore of the ease with which Alexander might conquer it and hand it over to him.  But two of a trade seldom agree; both he and his host were born to rule empires; and presently he offended susceptibilities, and had to flee the camp.  Whereupon he shortly sharked up a list of landless reprobates, Kshatriyas at a loose end, for food and diet; and the enterprise with a stomach in’t was, as soon as Alexander’s back was turned, to drive out the Macedonian garrisons.  This done, he marched eastward as king of the Indus region, conquered Magadha, slew his old enemy the Nanda king with all male members of the family, and reigned in his stead as Chandragupta I, of the house of Maurya.  That was in 321.  Master then of a highly trained army of about 700,000, he spread his empire over all Hindustan.  In 305, Seleucus Nicator, Alexander’s successor in Asia, crossed the Indus with an army, and was defeated; and in the treaty which followed, gave up to Chandragupta all claim to the Indian provinces, together with the hand of his daughter in marriage.—­and received by way of compensation 500 elephants that might come in useful in his wars elsewhere.  Also he sent Megisthenes to be his ambassador at Pataliputra, Chandragupta’s capital; and Megasthenes wrote; and in a few quotations from his lost book that remain, chiefly in Arrian,—­we get a kind of window wherethrough to look into India:  the first, and perhaps the only one until Chinese travelers went west discovering.

Here let me flash a green lantern.  If at some future time it should be shown that the Chandragupta Maurya of the Sanskrit books was not the same person as the Sandacottos of Megasthenes; nor his son Bindusara Amitraghata, the Amitrochidas of the Greeks; nor his son and successor, Asoka, the Devanampiya Piadasi whose rock-cut inscriptions remain scattered over India; nor the Amtiyako Yonaraja—­the “Ionian King Antiochus” apparently,—­Atiochus Theos, Selecus Nicator’s granson:  as is supposed; nor yet the other four kings mentioned in the same instricption in a Sanskrit disguise as contemporaries, Ptolemy Philadelphos of Egypt (285-247); Magas of Cyrene (285-258); Antigonus Gonatas of Macedon (277-239), and Alexander of Epirus, who began to reign in 272;—­if all these identifications should fall to the ground, let no one be surprised.  There are passages