Introduction
From 311 and 305 BCE, King Seleucus I Nicator had gone from struggling to establish control of Babylon to being on the verge of reconquering the farthest reaches of Alexander’s former empire. Appian remembers it as a whirlwind anabasis, listing the nations falling like dominoes – Persians, Parthians, Bactrians, Arabs, Tapyri, Sogdians, Arachosians, Hyrcanians – to Seleucus’ overwhelming military forces and his power of persuasion. He is likened to Alexander, observing that ‘the whole world from Phrygia up as far as the river Indus answered to Seleucus’.Footnote 1 Nor was it just military might that paved the way. According to Seleucid accounts from a very early stage, this was a conquest sanctioned by various omens, oracles, and the king’s own visions of his place at Alexander’s side.Footnote 2 And yet, the Great King’s imperial expansion came to an abrupt halt at the banks of the river Indus. Here, he briefly ‘made war’ on King Chandragupta of the mighty Mauryan empire before they ‘concluded a treaty of Friendship’ replete with a marriage alliance.Footnote 3 Then, as quickly as he came, Seleucus turned back homeward, having ceded, according to Strabo, thousands of square kilometres of territory in exchange for 500 elephants. He next appears with these elephants in his crucial role at the Battle of Ipsus (301 BCE) in modern-day Turkey. Readers of the ancient sources can be forgiven for feeling disoriented. Those of our sources which do not omit the war entirely mention the outcomes of his Indian campaign in succinct, equitable terms before moving us rapidly on. Modern historians tend to follow this lead, presenting what Paul Kosmin calls the ‘Treaty of the Indus’ as a pragmatic and ‘mutually beneficial’ settlement allowing all parties to define clear boundaries.Footnote 4 Yet important questions remain unanswered. What happened when these two aggressively expanding empires met? What can account for Seleucus’ abrupt change in imperial policy? Is this really a treaty between equals, as generally assumed, or are we still victims of face-saving ‘fake news’ by Seleucus’ propagandists?Footnote 5
In this article I show that our pro-Seleucid sources cannot be telling the whole story. The carefully cultivated mythology surrounding the Seleucid founder was built on a narrative of divinely driven world conquest, one which sits jarringly alongside the accounts of the Mauryan–Seleucid encounter in the Indus valley in 305–303 BCE. The sympathetic sources use narratological techniques of omission, misdirection, and digression to minimise the significance of the conflict. However, I will argue that, far from a discreet ‘special military operation’, this was a failed invasion, one which had the potential profoundly to interrupt Seleucid claims to universal kingship.Footnote 6 A critical geographic approach will reveal the post-war settlement to be a humiliating blow to the oikoumenē-spanning pretentions of the regime. The settlement, like the conflict itself, has been carefully misrepresented to maintain the ideology of universal empire. This article aims at a better understanding of the sources’ representations of the conflict and settlement within their ideological context, not as the product of neutral empirical reporting, but reflecting a Seleucid propaganda campaign to put a positive spin on a PR disaster. This spin would have far-reaching effects, laying the foundations for the geographical propaganda of Seleucid geographers in subsequent decades. The impact of the resulting geographical fallacies would outlive the regime which crafted them, remaining on Hellenistic maps for centuries to follow.
Universal Kingship
The imperial ambitions of Seleucus have often been presented in limited and pragmatic terms. Bevan, reflecting the concerns of his own era, characterises Seleucus as a proto-nationalist, carving out a state in Babylon.Footnote 7 Tarn saw Seleucid imperial space as fixed within an ‘outer shell’, exploration beyond being interpreted in terms of trade, not conquest.Footnote 8 In his influential The Land of the Elephant Kings, Kosmin uses the tools of political geography to define a much larger imperial space for Seleucus, yet he argues that Seleucid political geography intended to draw clear boundaries at the Indus, the Jaxartes, the Bosporos, and the Hellespont, allowing for a limited, clearly bounded, and territorialised imperial space.Footnote 9 For Kosmin, Seleucus ‘acknowledged the spatial limitation of his own sovereignty’.Footnote 10 However, recent scholarship has challenged the notion of limited empire. Strootman argues that Seleucus was no exception to the universal imperial ambitions of the Diadochi and aimed to assume Alexander’s diadem as king.Footnote 11 Visscher proposes that Seleucus sought nothing less than a ‘world empire’.Footnote 12 Indeed, the ideology of limited empire does appear to sit awkwardly alongside the hyperbolic omens, prophetic dreams, and oracles – what Ogden collectively calls ‘the Legend of Seleucus’ – constructed by Seleucus and his propagandists to present him as the ‘true successor of Alexander’.Footnote 13 These legends no doubt developed over time, but, if we are to follow the Diodorus–Hieronymus source, and epigraphical and numismatic sources, at least some of these stories appear to develop early in Seleucus’ own reign.Footnote 14 These myths cover several themes, anticipating a divine kingship over an expansive empire: Laodice’s conception via Didymaean Apollo, hyperbolic imperial conquest, and associations with Alexander. The anticipatory themes are not discrete units. The legends of Seleucus’ divine conception, for example, tend to establish his divine parentage and prescribe later kingship and imperial reach. We find the pre-natal myths preserved in three places: Justin–Trogus, Appian, both following Hieronymus, and a third-century fragment of Euphorion in Tertullian.Footnote 15 In the Trogean source, Seleucus’ mother explicitly dreams of conceiving through sexual union with Apollo, something only indirectly alluded to in Appian.Footnote 16 In both accounts she is given an anchor signet-ring as proof of the oneiric visitation, and she gives this token to Seleucus.Footnote 17 Appian’s account would use this ring to anticipate divine kingship, Laodice discovering in her dream-visitation that ‘he [Seleucus] would become king on the spot where he dropped the ring’, something fulfilled in Year One of the new Seleucid Era calendar.Footnote 18 Euphorion’s account emphasises conquest, anticipating an empire which spanned all of Asia.Footnote 19 The parallels with Alexander’s own conception, the result of Zeus–Amun’s oneiric coupling with Olympia, are striking.Footnote 20 And like Alexander, Seleucus’ divine twofold origin, sired by man and god, paves the way for a far-reaching empire.Footnote 21
The accounts of the oracle of Apollo at Didyma echo Alexander’s encounter with his father, Zeus-Amun, at Siwa, where divine parentage and future universal kingship were confirmed. In Appian, the Didymaean oracle speaks darkly of Asia-wide conquest before treachery during his invasion of Europe (at the hands of Ptolemy Ceraunus) undid the king. This legend is clearly retrospective, but the oracular account in our Diodorus–Hieronymus source may be significantly earlier.Footnote 22 The oracular experience is apparently revealed by Seleucus as fugitive satrap to his band of brothers prior to his triumphant return to Babylon in 311. It is followed by a vision of Alexander. The two are best read as a single passage:
πιστεύειν δὲ δεῖν καὶ ταῖς τῶν θεῶν προρρήσεσι τὸ τέλος ἔσεσθαι τῆς στρατείας ἄξιον τῆς ἐπιβολῆς· ἐν μὲν γὰρ Βραγχίδαις αὐτοῦ χρηστηριαζομένου τὸν θεὸν προσαγορεῦσαι Σέλευκον βασιλέα, τὸν δὲ Ἀλέξανδρον καθ᾿ ὕπνον ἐπιστάντα φανερῶς διασημᾶναι περὶ τῆς ἐσομένης ἡγεμονίας, ἧς δεῖ τυχεῖν αὐτὸν προϊόντος τοῦ χρόνου.
He added that they ought also to believe the oracles of the gods which had foretold that the end of his campaign would be worthy of his purpose; for, when he had consulted the oracle in Branchidae [Didyma], the god had greeted him as King Seleucus, and Alexander standing beside him in a dream had given him a clear sign of the future leadership that was destined to fall to him in the course of time.
Diod. Sic. 19.90.4 (trans. Geer (Reference Geer1954))
The oracle serves as an authoritative revelatory narrative device, for both the characters and the audience, conveying moira in open terms. Unlike a Herodotean mortal, the god-sired protagonist has little difficulty reading the signs. The revelatory greeting (Σέλευκον βασιλέα) echoes Alexander’s Siwa experience. It is clarified by the dream-vision of Alexander who is, significantly, standing beside him, demonstrating an equivalence of status. The two divine kings are in the same category above mortal men. The oracular pronouncement and accompanying dream vision are not exactly humble. To eliminate any uncertainty, Hieronymus’ Seleucus provides the interpretation for us. The reader is positioned to see Seleucus and his conquests as the natural succession to Alexander, who was destined to control a world-spanning empire.Footnote 23
Omens follow a similar thematic concern to the dream-visions, leaving us in little doubt that Seleucus’ destiny was to follow in the footsteps of Alexander. In Appian’s account, the signs occur in all three continents of the oikoumenē. In Macedonia, Seleucus’ ancestral hearth spontaneously burst into flame, suggesting his rightful claims to his homeland, yet to be realised.Footnote 24 In Egypt, he tripped on a submerged anchor. As in the Alexander Romance, the omen is initially misread as negative, before the realisation dawns that the omen is, in fact, good – a symbol of security (ἀσφαλείας).Footnote 25 The third and perhaps most illuminating omen occurred in Mesopotamia, according to Appian and Arrian, drawing on several sources.Footnote 26 The story goes that in the spring of 323, when Alexander and his companions were surveying the waterways between the Pallacotta canal and the Euphrates, a gust of wind blew off Alexander’s diadem.Footnote 27 The diadem landed on the reeds. near the tombs of ancient kings.Footnote 28 Arrian says that in Aristobulus’ version, the royal diadem is fished out by an anonymous sailor who carries it from the reeds on his own head, an inadvertently subversive act, for which the sailor is whipped or beheaded.Footnote 29 But in another version, preserved in both Arrian and Appian, the sailor is none other than Seleucus, and his inadvertent wearing of the diadem ‘foreshadowed both Alexander’s death and Seleucus’ great empire’.Footnote 30 Arrian finds merit in this omen, because ‘Seleucus was the greatest of the kings who succeeded Alexander, and that he possessed, in the highest degree, a kingly spirit and ruled a domain second in extent only to Alexander’s’.Footnote 31 Clearly, these stories do not form the ideological architecture for a stable and limited state in a world where ‘peer kingdoms’ are accommodated, as Kosmin has proposed.Footnote 32 Rather, these omens make claims over the three continents of the oikoumenē. The legends are emphatic: under Seleucus, like his divine predecessor, Alexander, there can be only one.Footnote 33 What we see here is the creation of an audacious sense of destiny which accompanies the Seleucid project of an empire without limit.Footnote 34
Don’t Mention the War: the Special Military Operation in India
The propaganda was designed to prescribe imperial expansionism, complementing the military and diplomatic successes of Seleucus’ early rule.Footnote 35 Appian suggests that the conquest is something of an inevitability for the beloved king, moving effortlessly from centre to periphery, paralleling Alexander’s imperial campaigns:
ἐφεδρεύων δὲ ἀεὶ τοῖς ἐγγὺς ἔθνεσι, καὶ δυνατὸς ὢν βιάσασθαι καὶ πιθανὸς προσαγαγέσθαι, ἦρξε Μεσοποταμίας καὶ Ἀρμενίας καὶ Καππαδοκίας τῆς Σελευκίδος λεγομένης καὶ Περσῶν καὶ Παρθυαίων καὶ Βακτρίων καὶ Ἀράβων καὶ Ταπύρων καὶ τῆς Σογδιανῆς καὶ Ἀραχωσίας καὶ Ὑρκανίας, καὶ ὅσα ἄλλα ὅμορα ἔθνη μέχρι Ἰνδοῦ ποταμοῦ Ἀλεξάνδρῳ ἐγεγένητο δορίληπτα, ὡς ὡρίσθαι τῷδε μάλιστα μετ᾿ Ἀλέξανδρον τῆς Ἀσίας τὸ πλέον· ἀπὸ γὰρ Φρυγίας ἐπὶ ποταμὸν Ἰνδὸν ἄνω πάντα Σελεύκῳ κατήκουεν.
Constantly on watch for opportunities against neighbouring peoples, and both powerful in the use of force and persuasive in winning friends, Seleucus ruled over Mesopotamia and Armenia and what is known as Seleucid Cappadocia; and over Persians and Parthians and Bactrians and Arabs and Tapyri; and over Sogdiana and Arachosia and Hyrcania, and all the other adjacent peoples who had been conquered by Alexander as far as the river Indus. The result was that more of Asia fell within this man’s frontiers than anyone since Alexander. For the whole world from Phrygia up as far as the river Indus answered to Seleucus.
App. Syr. 55.281–2
A seductive hodological geographic lens is utilised by Appian, listing one land after another in a chain of implicit victories, presented as a fait accompli. It is a technique we also see in early Ptolemaic propaganda promoting a rival ideology of universal kingship, exemplified in the Theocritus’ Idyll 17 and the Adulis inscription, listing conquered territories with seeming inevitability, until ‘all’ (πᾶσα) lands and seas are controlled by the Ptolemies.Footnote 36 Here, Appian sacrifices action for certainty, the aorist-active verb (ἦρξε) reinforcing the ‘narrative of success’.Footnote 37 The listing of conquered territories allows the audience to view the world through an imperial lens of inevitable conquest.Footnote 38 The source hints at a less glamorous reality in which ‘persuasion’ (πιθανός) seems to allude to negotiation with satraps, following Antigonid diplomatic precedent.Footnote 39 Such diplomacy is carefully presented as complementing, not replacing, the military might of Seleucus. The notion of ‘spear-won’ (δορίκτητον) lands remains present, emulating Alexander’s own claims.Footnote 40 Strootman rightly identifies Appian’s account as echoing the ‘universalistic propaganda’ of the Seleucids.Footnote 41 It certainly has all the hallmarks of such propaganda: the anabasis reflects an expansive imperial policy to conquer barbarian and Greek alike, as part of a universal empire.Footnote 42
Appian’s account reflects the ideology of expansion on display in the coinage early during Seleucus’ reign. The distinctly martial hero-type coins depict an assimilation of Alexander, Seleucus, and Dionysus dressed in panther headdresses on the obverse.Footnote 43 The oikoumenē-wide claims of all three divine conquerors are interwoven. Nike’s prominence on the reverse of these coins makes the imperial triumph a foregone conclusion.Footnote 44 The Alexander-in-elephant-headdress coins associate Seleucus with Alexander’s conquest of the world including India. Here is the singular successor of Alexander, his victorious imperial expansion, like his divine predecessor, presented as a natural expression of his divine right to rule the entirety of the oikoumenē.Footnote 45 The next step was to reclaim India for his world empire.
The narrative of expansion comes to a jarring halt at the river Indus with what is described in only one of our sources – Appian – as a war with the Mauryan empire. The Justin–Trogean and Diodorus–Hieronymus sources are remarkably coy. Hieronymus is silent on the matter, ending the narrative with imperial expansion up to Bactria.Footnote 46 In contrast to the historian’s detailed accounts of Seleucus’ other campaigns, information for this failed campaign is missing. The unsuccessful India campaign is effectively written out of history, the gains, and subsequent losses of territory further east, neatly cut. The Trogean source is more ambitious. We have already seen echoes of Seleucid court ideology in Justin–Trogus, positioning us to accept the universal kingship of the divinely sired king. Here, the Trogean source uses digression, euphemism, and redirection to distract the reader from geopolitical realities which undermine such claims. His audience, having followed the triumphs of Seleucus from Babylon to Bactria, arrive with him at India, before we are diverted down a temporal narratological alley, distracting us from the confrontation at hand.
The diversionary effect of digressions has been demonstrated in geographical texts. Clarke has revealed how Strabo uses digressions to distance the reader from the author’s ostensible aims.Footnote 47 We see this to significant effect in Justin’s treatment of the Mauryan–Seleucid encounter. The author distracts us from the Seleucid progress he claims to be explaining as we approach the conflict itself. Instead, we are diverted into a temporal digression, but as we view the recent history of the disputed space, we are safely equipped with a colonial lens. We discover that India has experienced chaotic mob rule in the years since Alexander departed, the Macedonian governors killed in violent revolts in the name of unrestrained libertas. This is followed by a brutal tyranny, under the upstart-turned-tyrant ‘Sandracottus’. There is no room in this account for the Nanda empire, centred in the Ganges valley, nor the Mauryan state which supplanted it, far to the south-east of Alexander’s territory according to Indian sources, as we will see below. The Mauryan king Chandragupta is conflated with the regional revolts following Alexander’s departure. We are allowed little time to digest this disorderly local background before we are swiftly returned to the narrative’s historical present. The confusion is cleaned up in a single line: Seleucus makes an agreement (cum quo facta pactione) and settles affairs in the east (conpositisque in Oriente rebus).Footnote 48 We are then transported immediately to the Battle of Ipsus in the following line. The hazy expression contrasting with the certainty of the redirection gives us no room to ponder the nature of these ‘affairs’ in the East. This euphemism effectively discourages closer analysis.
The Seleucids adopt a colonial gaze to diminish their Indian rivals. The Mauryan imperialist Chandragupta Maurya (r. c. 321–297 BCE) is transformed into a distinctly local rogue inspired by parochial concerns.Footnote 49 The rest of his Indian empire is an afterthought. Appian’s ‘Andrakotta’ is a passive regional king, the ‘King of the Indians’ portrayed as somehow inert and non-active.Footnote 50 Seleucus ‘waged war’ (ἐπολέμησεν Ἀνδροκόττῳ) upon him, the imperial protagonist imposing on the passive indigenous state before coming to a resolution. Such depictions position the audience to view the Mauryan king as entirely manageable. In the Trogean account, ‘Sandracottus’ is a fortune-blessed indigenous brigand ‘of low birth’ who was sentenced to death by Alexander for parrhēsía.Footnote 51 As the fates would have it, he was rescued by divine intervention and, following Alexander’s death, he incites disorder and insurrection from Greek rule, only to establish a petty tyranny.Footnote 52 This translocation of Chandragupta’s origins to Greco-Indian space reduces him to a local disrupter of order. If we look at accounts of Chandragupta in Indian texts, they are certainly not all flattering. In the Lives of the Jain Elders, he is the low-born son of a peacock-seller’s wife and a wandering disgruntled ascetic.Footnote 53 In the Signet-Ring of the Minister, Chandragupta cuts a more aristocratic figure who uses political nous and blackmail to help establish his coup against the Nanda dynasty, perhaps echoing the sophisticated Realpolitik we see in Kautilya’s influential treatise, the Arthaśāstra.Footnote 54 Yet these diverse traditions are clear enough in terms of the geography: Chandragupta’s spectacular rise imposes on Nanda imperial space first in the Ganges valley, some 1,500 kilometres south-east of Alexander’s easternmost territory of Gandhāra. For a Seleucid court audience, the translocation of Chandragupta undermines his position as a rival imperialist, a disrupter of universal monarchy. We are relieved to discover in Justin’s digression that this warlord is little more than a local upstart born of indigenous disorder, another petty tyrant on the make.Footnote 55
This characterisation could not have been further from the truth. Thapar describes a Mauryan imperial space which aggressively radiated from Pataliputra in all directions, supported by a complex and centralised military, diplomatic, and administrative network.Footnote 56 Kautilya’s Arthaśāstra, a treatise providing instruction concerning supply, logistics, strategy and tactics for campaigning, gives us the impression of a sophisticated and amply equipped military administration.Footnote 57 The Seleucid ambassador and geographer Megasthenes, in an unusual and potentially subversive challenge to Seleucid propaganda, echoes the Indian sources, depicting the Mauryan empire’s logistics and military in formidable terms.Footnote 58 With this imperial machine, the Macedonian satraps in Gandhāra and the Indus valley were rapidly absorbed.Footnote 59 Chandragupta then invaded and assimilated central India in 313 BCE.Footnote 60 The next recorded conflict was in response to the sudden attack of the Indus valley in 305–303 by a yona who called himself Seleucus. Following the war, the Mauryan empire continued its westward expansion, claiming the Paropamisadae, Indus valley, and even parts of Arachosia and Gedrosia, according to Strabo.Footnote 61 From a Mauryan perspective, then, the Mauryan–Seleucid war was but one of many conflicts in a continuous imperial narrative of uninterrupted victories and geopolitical expansion, fuelled by the empire’s own imperial ideology of growth (Vṛddhi), as elucidated by the Arthashastra.Footnote 62 In the Buddhist tradition, Chandragupta’s rule develops the geopolitical groundwork for the chakravartin, the universal monarch, a notion manifested in the reign of Aśoka the Great.Footnote 63 At the time when Seleucus’ whirlwind invasion breached the Indus valley, he was encroaching on the territory of an empire in mid-expansion. Both empires, then, were mobilised and ideologically driven by continual conquest. Heading for a collision, there was no room in either regime’s imperial ideology for two universal kings.
The explicit reference to the war surviving in Appian’s account is suspiciously brief, moving with rapidity from a martial to a sympotic tone. We pick up here from the passage in the introduction:
ὡς ὡρίσθαι τῷδε μάλιστα μετ᾿ Ἀλέξανδρον τῆς Ἀσίας τὸ πλέον· ἀπὸ γὰρ Φρυγίας ἐπὶ ποταμὸν Ἰνδὸν ἄνω πάντα Σελεύκῳ κατήκουεν. καὶ τὸν Ἰνδὸν περάσας ἐπολέμησεν Ἀνδροκόττῳ βασιλεῖ τῶν περὶ αὐτὸν Ἰνδῶν, μέχρι φιλίαν αὐτῷ καὶ κῆδος συνέθετο.
more of Asia fell within this man’s frontiers than anyone since Alexander. For the whole world from Phrygia up as far as the river Indus answered to Seleucus. He even crossed the Indus to wage war on Andracotta, king of the Indians living on the river, until they concluded a treaty of friendship and a marriage alliance.
App. Syr. 55.281–282.
The passage is thematically comprised of two uneven parts and should be considered in sequence. Firstly, the initial martial elements of this passage are clear, emphasising unstoppable Seleucid imperial expansion. This imperial imperative propels him across the river Indus, presumably to claim Gandhāra and its great city of Taxila, like Alexander before him, the next inevitable step towards universal empire.Footnote 64
And then we are served with a jarring tonal shift in the final line. The ideology of total imperial control (πάντα Σελεύκῳ κατήκουεν) is diverted to sympotic themes: the war itself is glossed over and we are suddenly in the world of the symposion, friendship having somehow resolved the conflict (μέχρι φιλίαν) which is concluded with an enigmatic marriage arrangement. Any concessions can be reimagined as gift-giving. Sympotic friendship, that quality so readily idealised in Hellenistic courts, allows us to suspend geopolitical judgement.Footnote 65 In this, Appian is reflecting the language of Diodorus–Hieronymus, who explains other Seleucid losses in similar terms.Footnote 66 With such a turn of events, any further campaigning would by a breach of that most prized of values in the sympotic court: philia.
The omission of the war raises important questions. Why would our sources go to such lengths to deflect a closer look by their readers? Bevan took a leaf out of Hieronymus’ book and avoided the episode altogether.Footnote 67 Many historians have tended to follow Justin and Appian in underplaying the significance or scale of the probable war. Walbank suggests that the war was something of a stalemate, an ambiguity echoed by Sherwin-White and Kuhrt.Footnote 68 Kosmin questions whether a pitched battle ever even occurred, and Ogden uses an ex silentio argument to suggest that ‘mere contact’ with the Mauryan empire dissuaded Seleucus from a full-fledged invasion.Footnote 69 But such minimalist accounts cannot adequately explain the dramatic outcomes of the conflict. Following Appian and Justin, they turn a pivotal engagement into a trifle. Thapar has observed that that we should consider geopolitical results of the conflict, rather than Seleucid apologia, to better understand the nature of the conflict.Footnote 70 Let us turn, then, to the post-war settlement.
The ‘Treaty of the Indus’
Although Justin and Appian try to redirect our attention westward at the conclusion of the conflict, a passing observation by Strabo, following Eratosthenes, allows us to get a clearer sense of the realities as the dust settled. Neither Strabo nor Eratosthenes had any patience with Seleucid propaganda, making this source particularly useful:Footnote 71
Ἡ δὲ τάξις τῶν ἐθνῶν τοιαύτη· παρὰ μὲν τὸν Ἰνδὸν οἱ Παροπαμισάδαι, ὧν ὑπέρκειται ὁ Παροπαμισὸς ὄρος, εἶτ᾿ Ἀραχωτοὶ πρὸς νότον, εἶτ᾿ ἐφεξῆς πρὸς νότον Γεδρωσηνοὶ σὺν τοῖς ἄλλοις τοῖς τὴν παραλίαν ἔχουσιν· ἅπασι δὲ παρὰ τὰ πλάτη τῶν χωρίων παράκειται ὁ Ἰνδός. τούτων δ᾿ ἐκ μερους τῶν παρὰ τὸν Ἰνδὸν ἔχουσί τινα Ἰνδοί, πρότερον ὄντα Περσῶν· ἃ ἀφείλετο μὲν ὁ Ἀλέξανδρος τῶν Ἀριανῶν καὶ κατοικίας ἰδίας συνεστήσατο, ἔδωκε δὲ Σέλευκος ὁ Νικάτωρ Σανδροκόττῳ, συνθέμενος ἐπιγαμίαν καὶ ἀντιλαβὼν ἐλέφαντας πεντακοσίους.
The geographical position of the tribes is as follows: along the Indus are the Paropamisadae, above whom lies the Paropamisus mountain: then, towards the south, the Arachoti: then next, towards the south, the Gedroseni, with the other tribes that occupy the seaboard; and the Indus lies, latitudinally, alongside all these places; and of these places, in part, some that lie along the Indus are held by Indians, although they formerly belonged to the Persians. Alexander took these away from the Arians and established settlements of his own, but Seleucus Nicator gave them to Sandrocottus, upon terms of intermarriage and of receiving in exchange five hundred elephants.
Strabo 15.2.9 (trans. Jones 1930) (= Eratosthenes fr. 78).
Importantly, this Eratosthenes–Strabo source reveals a ceding of territorial control, glaringly omitted in our pro-Seleucid accounts. Yet for historians sympathetic to Seleucus, this has been minimised, as an equitable exchange: land-for-elephants and an unclear marriage arrangement to seal the deal.Footnote 72 W. W. Tarn’s influential The Greeks in Bactria and India draws a conservative concession of land, a clear boundary, from the Kunar river, along the mountains to Quetta, and then south to the sea: all within the basin of the river Indus.Footnote 73 Such a boundary cedes little beyond the Indus valley itself. However, another Eratosthenes–Strabo fragment, which did not perhaps receive the level of attention it deserved by Tarn, presents something much more threatening to the Seleucids:
ὑπὸ τοῦ Ἐρατοσθένους ἐν τῷ τρίτῳ τῶν γεωγραφικῶν ἐκτεθέντα κεφαλαιωδῶς περὶ τῆς τότε νομιζομένης Ἰνδικῆς, ἡνίκα Ἀλέξανδρος ἐπῆλθε· καὶ ἦν ὁ Ἰνδὸς ὅριον ταύτης τε καὶ τῆς Ἀριανῆς, ἣν ἐφεξῆς πρὸς τῇ ἑσπέρᾳ κειμένην Πέρσαι κατεῖχον· ὕστερον γὰρ δὴ καὶ τῆς Ἀριανῆς πολλὴν ἔσχον οἱ Ἰνδοὶ λαβόντες παρὰ τῶν Μακεδόνων.
in the third book of his geography by Eratosthenes of what was in his time regarded as India, that is, when Alexander invaded the country, is the most trustworthy; and the Indus river was the boundary between India and Ariana, which latter was situated next to India on the west and was in the possession of the Persians at that time; for later the Indians also held much of Ariana, having received it from the Macedonians.
Strabo 15.1.10 (= Eratosthenes fr. 69).
This space, Ariana, was the second ‘seal stone’ (σφραγίδες) for Eratosthenes, a territorial unit marked out by mathematical and natural, rather than political, boundaries.Footnote 74 Eratosthenes’ Ariana seal stone spanned from the Indus all the way to the Persian Gulf.Footnote 75 So the ceding of substantial parts (πολλὴν ἔσχον … λαβόντες) of this territory should be understood through Eratosthenes’ lens as more expansive than Tarn’s modest concessions. This is echoed in the Historia naturalis of Pliny who, like Eratosthenes, was informed by Megasthenes, and observes that ‘most authorities do not put the western frontier at the river Indus but include four satrapies, the Gedrosi, Arachotae, Arii and Paropanisidae, with the river [Cophen] as the final boundary’.Footnote 76 This India which emerges after the Seleucid ‘special military operation’ is not one which stops at the Indus valley, but spills, worryingly for the Seleucids, deep into ‘Ariana’ beyond.
Rather than a trade of elephants for ‘fringe satrapies’ as it is sometimes characterised, Pliny and Strabo, following Eratosthenes and Megasthenes, appear to indicate that substantial lands were ceded.Footnote 77 The loss of Gandhāra creates ideological and practical difficulties for the Seleucids. Its major city, Taxila, was not only ‘valuable and prosperous’ for its abundant agriculture but also significant for its geostrategic location at the southernly gateway from the Khyber Pass.Footnote 78 A loss of this nexus now left Bactria and Sogdiana vulnerable to potential incursions, requiring defensive measures on the Oxus.Footnote 79 This valuable territory, formerly under Achaemenid then Alexander’s rule, was in myth-historical lore the land of the imperial Dionysus, a painful loss to any king with designs of universal rule.Footnote 80 The ceding of the river Indus was another seismic blow, not only in terms of resources, but imperial geography. The river had been for Alexander a fluvial conduit to the Great Sea, from which his fleet would chart the Great Sea itself, a peri-circumnavigation which, like those of later European colonialists, would audaciously claim to territorialise swathes of the interior through a nautical journey.Footnote 81 Seleucus has lost one of the great maritime vectors of Alexander’s universal empire.
The ceded territories west of the Indus river are the most problematic from the standpoint of universal kingship, amounting to an unambiguous contraction of Seleucid imperial space. The amount of territory is disputed. Closely following the first of our Eratosthenes–Strabo fragments while overlooking the second, we have seen that Tarn drew a confident line at the watershed of the Indus basin with Seleucus maintaining the strategically important Arachosian peaks.Footnote 82 But if this territory exceeded the basin, as Megasthenes and our second Eratosthenes fragment would seem to suggest, then the imperial map is dented with an ideologically embarrassing concave border all but impossible for the court audience to ignore. With loss of part of the Paropamisus, any claims to Alexander’s India are lost. The ceding of some or all of Gedrosian desert to the Mauryan empire not only removes a strategic desert shield, but makes a mockery of Alexander’s notorious march, where he had territorialised even the emptiest of spaces for his empire.Footnote 83 Furthermore, Chandragupta gained ‘parts’ of Arachosia (ἐκ μερους). The obvious strategic weakness is matched by the damage this does to the imperial map, an unmissable chunk out of any spatial representations of a world empire. This is no convex edge traditionally associated with the world map, where land gives way to Ocean.Footnote 84 Nor can it suggest the deliberate delimitation of empire as is sometimes characterised.Footnote 85 The porous and unstable boundary speaks to alien encroachment of the periphery into the interior, highlighting imperial limits within the oikoumenē.
These massive territorial concessions were exchanged (ἀντιλαβών) for ‘500’ elephants, although Tarn reduced this ‘fabulous figure’ to 150.Footnote 86 Irrespective of the exact number, it is a gift which our pro-Seleucid sources are keen to emphasise, promptly appearing in the Battle of Ipsus in the next act. And yet, the value of these animals was not universally agreed upon. For the Mauryan king who, like the Nanda dynasty before him, had possibly thousands of elephants back in the royal stables, this was not so precious a gift as it may appear through a Greek lens.Footnote 87 Elephants were more imposing than effective on the battlefield and were notoriously difficult to move long distances.Footnote 88 Kosmin suggests it was cheaper for the Mauryan king to give them away than bring them home.Footnote 89 From a Mauryan perspective, the exquisite gift may be better understood as a token gift in a sharply asymmetrical relationship.Footnote 90 Indeed, it was a deal so obviously lop-sided that it still evokes wonder in The Indian Express today.Footnote 91
For the Greeks, though, these elephants were no trinkets. In fact, they were the Wunderwaffen of the age, and the Seleucids’ propagandists were not shy about promoting them.Footnote 92 On first contact, elephants could apparently be utilised to devastating effect, as seen in the Battle of Ipsus, where Seleucid elephants proved decisive.Footnote 93 What was commonplace for the Mauryan empire was, in the west, a transformative element in Hellenistic set battles.Footnote 94 However, in the Seleucid court’s propaganda, it was the elephants’ symbolic power which proved even more significant. In terms of coinage, the issues from 300 BCE onwards are saturated with elephant imagery. The familiar Alexander elephant headdress was now even more widely disseminated.Footnote 95 Elephants, some curiously horned, appear on issues with BAΣΙΛΕΩΣ ΣΕΛΕΥΚΟΥ blazoned on the reverse at both mints of Seleucia-on-the-Tigris, as well as Susa, Antioch, and Apameia.Footnote 96 Militant depictions of Athena Promachos atop an elephant quadriga-chariot begin to be issued.Footnote 97 The ‘elephant victory’ of Antiochus I, in which the terrified Celts turn to flight, is more carefully constructed myth-making.Footnote 98 The Seleucids became synonymous with elephants, a token gift following a humiliating defeat successfully transformed into a triumphant totem.
Not all were fooled by the Seleucid spin. Seleucus’ rival kings in the west, especially, seemed to have noted the stench of the deal. Demetrius I’s philoi mock Seleucus as a trainer or master of elephants (ἐλεφαντάρχης), a title suitable for a palace philos.Footnote 99 The joke is double-edged: Seleucus is reduced to the court philos of the true universal king, Demetrius, yet the jibe also highlights a contradiction in Seleucid imperial ideology, the widespread use of elephants as a symbol of strength and domination, sitting incongruously beside the political reality of the Mauryan–Seleucid settlement, in which spear-won land, the measure of a king, had been traded for beasts.
The marriage agreement – the most uncertain element of the treaty – has invited some of the most creative speculation. Strabo refers to epigamian (intermarriage), an unclear term, which may hark back, as Thapar argues, to the Achaemenid-brokered treaties where two peoples are permitted to marry into other ethnic groups.Footnote 100 Such an arrangement would serve Chandragupta’s imperial interests, ‘legalising’ thousands of Greek/non-Greek relationships now in his rapidly expanded territory.Footnote 101 However, in Appian’s account, we have the more personal term – kedos – for the connection by marriage.Footnote 102 This personal slant on the treaty is in keeping with Appian’s emphasis on philia. Some have speculated about a ‘Seleucid Princess’.Footnote 103 But as Grainger observes, a marriage, even a royal one, does not necessarily make an alliance. It may be an act of asymmetrical and submissive negotiation, seen in Darius III’s offer of his daughter’s hand to Alexander.Footnote 104 Or it may be, as we see with the marriage treaty of Antiochus II Theos and Ptolemy II’s daughter, Berenice Syra, ‘a continuation of war by other means’.Footnote 105 Appian’s language, in contrast to Strabo’s, may be better understood as a technique to distance us from thinking too critically about the other terms of the treaty: a personal marriage gives Seleucus more agency, responding to his own sense of philia rather than acting to further accommodate his victorious opponent. Given its ambiguity, the marriage clause is not especially helpful for evaluating the post-war settlement. As Kosmin puts it, we ultimately come back to ‘territory-for-elephants’.Footnote 106
Conclusion
A critical look at the Mauryan–Seleucid conflict and the subsequent treaty not only encourages a re-evaluation of Seleucid and Mauryan geopolitical realities in the early third century but provides insights into the highly charged ideological climate in which Hellenistic court histories and geographies were produced. We have seen that the Seleucid propagandists went to great lengths to present Seleucus as a divinely sired imperialist, predestined to attain an oikoumenē-spanning empire. His anabasis, presented as hodological geography, creates a sense of inevitable fulfilment of these hyperbolic imperial claims. Like a ‘special military operation’, the problematic war with the Mauryan empire was minimised with a range of literary techniques and a dismissive colonial lens utilised to discourage scrutiny. Sympotic themes are evoked to stifle critical analysis and encourage us to turn away to bigger and better things at Ipsus.
Yet there are clues to understanding the war in the status quo post bellum. The so-called ‘Treaty of the Indus’ is presented in the sources with stunning brevity, our pro-Seleucid accounts emphasising the elephants but omitting the ceding of valuable territory. This territorial loss would create profound and long-lasting strategic weaknesses for the Seleucid kingdom; the Mauryan empire would consolidate its expansion deep into Arachosia, while the upper satrapies would soon become independent kingdoms.Footnote 107 Yet the ideology of universal kingship had remarkable longevity; Antiochus III’s own anabasis almost a century later was perhaps an echo of the earlier Seleucid propaganda.Footnote 108 These campaigns lay in the future. The immediate effect of the defeat was a geographic challenge to claims of universal empire.
However, Seleucid regime’s spin did not end with the cover-up. The apparent ‘mistakes’ in subsequent Seleucid geographical treatises, most prominently those of Patrocles, may hint at the use of imperial geography to attain an oikoumenē-spanning empire by other means.Footnote 109 The Seleucid cartographers used the weapons of imperial geography: omission, peripheral distortion, displacement, encirclement, complemented with the descriptive geographic techniques of emplotment and digressions, to bend the map until it reflected Seleucid ambitions.Footnote 110 Some of these distortions were breathtaking in scope. Patrocles would fabricate an oceanic vector from an open-mouthed Caspian Sea to India via an imaginary north-east passage, the Seleucids encircling Mauryan space and territorialising the entirety of Asia through peri-circumnavigation.Footnote 111 Demodamas would claim fluvial vectors from the Himalayas to the Caspian, domesticating the interior of the eastern oikoumenē.Footnote 112 Thwarted by geopolitical realities, the imperial geographers would now publish ‘fake news’, prescriptive maps with distorted projections and spatial fallacies, creating a place in the geographic treatises where the Seleucids’ delusions of universal kingship could still be realised.
Acknowledgments
This article would not have been possible without support of my former supervisor, Professor Julia Kindt, of the Department of Classics and Ancient History at University of Sydney. I wish to thank Professor Kindt for her insights and guidance throughout the writing of this paper. I would also like to thank my former supervisor Associate Professor Paul McKechnie of the Department of History and Archaeology at Macquarie University for advice concerning early Seleucid political developments.
Competing interests
The author declares none.
