Page:History of India Vol 2.djvu/140

 110 CHANDRAGUPTA AND BINDUSARA cious and trustworthy witness concerning matters which came under his personal observation, and his vivid account of Chandragupta's civil and military adminis- tration may be accepted without hesitation as true and accurate. That account, although preserved in a frag- mentary form, is so full and detailed that the modern reader is more minutely informed in many respects concerning the institutions of Chandragupta than he is about those of any Indian sovereign until the days of Akbar, the contemporary of Queen Elizabeth. Pataliputra, the imperial capital, which had been founded in the fifth century B. c., stood in the tongue of land formed by the confluence of the Son with the Ganges, on the northern bank of the former, and a few miles distant from the latter. The site is now occu- pied by the large native city of Patna and the English civil station of Bankipur, but the rivers changed their courses many centuries ago, and the confluence is at present near the cantonment of Dinapur, about twelve miles above Patna. The ancient city, which lies buried below its modern successor, was, like it, a long, narrow parallelogram, measuring about nine miles in length and a mile and a half in breadth. It was defended by a massive timber palisade, pierced by sixty-four gates, crowned by five hundred and seventy towers, and pro- tected externally by a broad and deep moat, filled from the waters of the Son. The royal palace, although chiefly constructed of tim- ber, was considered to excel in splendour and magnifi- cence the palaces of Susa and Ekbatana, its gilded pil-