thing which militates against a concise pigeon-holing of such information as we can gather into this brief review of Indian history, is the fact that much of it has really nothing to do with India at all. The Hindoo Kush range of mountains may be taken as the western boundary of Asôka's empire, and the powers which encroached on that empire matured their plans, conquered and governed such provinces as they gained from beyond that boundary. The Bactrians, for instance, who appeared on the banks of the Indus, came from the valleys and fertile plains about the Oxus. They were a semi-civilised, semi-Hellenised race, who boasted the possession of a thousand cities. The Parthians, on the other hand, hailed from the wide steppes about the Caspian Sea, and were barbarian utterly in the sense of not caring for either luxury or culture. Mounted shepherds, mere moss-troopers, they were a hardy race, and under the leadership of Arsakes, gripped at the crown of Central Asia, and so, inevitably, after a time reached out to the fat lands about the Indus; for the most part leaving the princelings who parcelled out the land in possession, as feudatories to the foreign power.
It will be remembered that Seleukos Nikator's attempt to recover India for Greece in Chandra-gûpta's time failed. Thenceforward for a hundred years no other attempt was made. In B.C. 206, however, Antiochus the Bactrian made a sweep on Kandahâr, and Demetrios, his son, in B.C. 190, following his example, captured both the Punjâb and Sinde. To his own cost, however; for, weakened by these distant wars, he had to yield his throne to one Eukratides, and be content for a time with the title of "King of the Indians." Not for long, however, for Eukratides, being bad to beat, eventually got a grip even on these eastern provinces.
Justin the historian gives a few personal details of this Eukratides. How he and three hundred held a fort for five months against Demetrios and sixty thousand; and how he was killed in cold blood by his son and colleague, who drove his chariot wheels over his father's dead body and refused it burial. A poor return for trust, and honour, and devoted love! It is satisfactory to know that the monstrous crime brought its own punishment The dead hero's hold once gone, the successes he had gained drifted from the murderer's hands, and thereinafter ensued one of those confused welters of conflicting names, powers, principalities, which send us back to our outlook on the case of coins. Menander's name rises out of the obscure in B.C. 155, when he attempted to follow Alexander's footsteps. With a large army he marched on India, and crossing the Beâs, which had defied his predecessor, actually threatened the capital of Pâlipûtra itself. At that time, however, the sovereignty of Magadha lay with a strong man; the man who, ousting the degenerate Mauryas, had shown himself to have the qualities of both a soldier and general. So the Greek king had to beat a hasty retreat, thus ending the last attempt of Europe upon India until Vasco de Gama's, in A.D. 1502.
About this time two nomad tribes from the wide Roof-of-the-World began a march southward, which, like a flood, was eventually to sweep everything before it. The first were the Sâkas, who, driven from behind by the following tribe, the Yuehchi, overwhelmed Bactria, forced their way into the Punjâb, and penetrated as far south as Mathura, while another section founded a Sika dynasty at Kathiawâr. They seem to have owned allegiance to the Arsakian or Parthian kings of Persia, and bore the Persian title of satrap.
Thus, from the pell-mell of petty princelings and wild, nomadic chieftains another name springs to notice. On the coins it runs: "Maues basileus basileon."
This king of kings, as he proudly calls himself, was Maues, the first, or nearly the first, of an Indo-Parthian dynasty replacing the Indo-Greek and Indo-Bactrian ones. As our eye runs over the coins--the only relics of dead kings--it is arrested by the name of Gondophares.
Now who was Gondophares? The question clamours vainly for answer, until a faint recollection of the early fathers brings Origen and the Acts of St. Thomas back to memory. Yes! Gondophares was the King of India in the days when
"the twelve Apostles, having divided the countries of the world amongst themselves by lot, India fell to the share of Judas, surnamed Thomas or the Twin, who showed unwillingness to start on his mission."
Poor St. Thomas! It was a far cry, but Habbân, the Indian merchant, conveyed his saintly purchase (for the Lord sold the unwilling missioner to him in a vision for twenty pieces of silver) to King Gundephar in safety. And the king bade the apostle, who was an architect, build him a palace in six months.
"And St. Thomas, commanded therefore by the Lord, promised to build him the palace within the six months, but spent all the monies in almsgiving. So when the time came, he explained that he was building the king a palace, not on earth, but in heaven, not made with hands--and multitudes of the people embraced the faith."
So runs the old Monkish story. Is it true? Who knows! Gondophares was a real man, he was a real Indian king, he is associated in legend with a Christian mission, and the claim that St. Thomas was the missioner is not at variance with known facts or chronology. With that we must be content.
And now the coins tell another tale. In their turn the Indo-Parthian princes were being driven southward. Their names disappear before those of the horde of Turki nomads called the Yuehchi, who about the middle of the second century B.C. followed the path taken years before by the Sâkas, and with two hundred thousand bowmen and a million persons of all ages and sexes poured themselves into India in search of pastures new.
So much for the north-western frontier. In the south-west, while Greek prince after Greek prince in the north was minting coins that were to carry his name idly, ineffectively, through the centuries, an aboriginal Dravidian people, driven, no doubt, thousands of years before from the fertile fields of the Gangetic plain by the steady advance of the Aryan immigrants, were as steadily regaining their hold upon Central India. The Andhra race was not slow to seize opportunity. The death of Asôka gave them the chance of casting off their allegiance to the Maury a empire, and they took it. A few years later the King of the Andhras, self-styled the "Lord of the West," was able to send an army to the eastern sea-coast, and so help Kalînga to revolt also. The capital of the Andhra kingdom appears to have been an unidentified city called Sri-Kâkulum, on the banks of the Krishna River; and the area of Andhra rule gradually increasing, crept closer and closer to that of Magadha. The memory of Hâla, the seventeenth king, lives still by virtue of an anthology of love-songs called "The Seven Centuries," which he is said to have composed. That, a collection entitled "The Great Storybook," and a Sanskrit Grammar all belong by repute to the reign of this king. Finally, the inevitable collision occurred between the powerful Andhra dynasty and the degenerate, dissolute monarchy at Magadha, which resulted in the annihilation of the latter. But before turning to this, the course of the years since the Maurya kings disappeared from sheer inanition must be traced briefly. It was in B.C. 194 that Pusŷa-mitra, commander-in-chief to the last of the Mauryas, lost patience with his weak master, assassinated him, and founded the Sunga line. A strong, unscrupulous man evidently, he held his own, succeeded in stemming the steady tide of disintegration on both the south-east and the north-west, and drove back the Greek invasion of Menander.
Still unsatisfied, he revived, in order to strengthen his rule, the old traditional Horse-sacrifice, of which we read in the Vedas.
A quaint old ceremony without doubt. Imagine a grey horse, approved by lucky marks, sanctified by priests, turned loose to wander at its will. And behind it, following it from field to field as it ranges, a complete army ready to claim pasturage for it from all and sundry during the space of one whole year. Hey presto! by beat of drum the fiat goes forth, as it grazes, that proprietors, principalities, powers, must submit or fight. So, if an unconquered army returned when the trial was ended, he who sent it forth had right to claim suzerainty, to call himself Lord-Paramount of all the others.
This particular "Asva-medha," as it is called, has a peculiar significance, in that it proves a determined return from Buddhism to Brahmanism on the part of the holders of the Magadha throne. It is said, indeed, that Pushŷa-mitra, like so many bloody usurpers, was dévote, and that his piety included persecution of the new
