Page:Asoka - the Buddhist Emperor of India.djvu/21

Rh communicated with their European allies on terms of perfect equality. The mission of Dionysios, who was sent to India, and no doubt to the Maurya court, by Ptolemy Philadelphos, King of Egypt (B. C. 285—247), must have arrived in the reign of either Bindusâra or his son Asoka. Patrokles, an officer who served under both Seleukos and his son, sailed in the Indian seas and collected much geographical information which Strabo and Pliny were glad to utilize.

About seven years after the death of Seleukos, Asoka-vardhana, commonly called Asoka, a son of Bindusâra, and the third sovereign of the Maurya dynasty, ascended the throne of Pâtaliputra (B. C. 273), and undertook the government of the Indian empire, which he held for about forty years. According to the silly fictions which disfigure the Ceylonese chronicles and disguise their solid merits, Asoka waded to the throne through a sea of blood, securing his position by the massacre of ninety-nine brothers, one brother only, the youngest, being saved alive. These fictions, an extract from which will be found in a later chapter, do not deserve serious criticism, and are sufficiently refuted by the testimony of the inscriptions which proves that the brothers and sisters of the king were still living in the middle of the reign, and that they and all the members of the royal family were the objects of the sovereign's anxious solicitude.