Page:Asoka - the Buddhist Emperor of India.djvu/20

18 After twenty-four years of stern and vigorous rule, Chandragupta died or abdicated, and transmitted the empire which he had won to his son Bindusâra Amitraghâta, who reigned for twenty-five or, according to other authorities, twenty-eight years. The only recorded public event of his reign, which may be assumed to have begun in either B. C. 298 or 301, according to the chronology adopted, is the dispatch to his court by the King of Syria of an ambassador named Deïmachos. The information is of interest as proving that the official intercourse with the Hellenic world begun by Chandragupta was continued by his successor. In the year B. C. 280 Seleukos Nikator, then in the seventy-eighth year of his age, was murdered, and was succeeded on the Syrian throne by his son Antiochos Soter.

Greek writers have preserved curious anecdotes of private friendly correspondence between Seleukos and Chandragupta and between Antiochos and Bindusâra, of value only as indications that the Indian monarchs