Ghost on the Throne - James S. Romm [57]
While studying at Taxila, Chandragupta and Chanakya watched the Macedonians devastate their homeland. Alexander’s campaign down the Indus to the sea, starting in the fall of 326, cut like a scythe through India’s proud, independent tribes, the Malli and the Oxydracae (Sanskrit Malavas and Ksudrakas). Despite outnumbering the invaders many times over, these fierce warriors suffered horrific losses; hundreds of thousands were killed or enslaved. The Malli seemed for a time to have finished Alexander off, hitting him square in the chest with one of their fearsome arrows, but the king miraculously recovered. In the end the two peoples surrendered their ancient liberty to Alexander, lavishing him with gifts and offering their leaders—those few who had survived—as hostages.
Chandragupta and Chanakya learned to revere a man with the odd-sounding name of Philip as their new master. Alexander appointed this man (no relation to his father or half-brother) satrap of the region and left him a corps of hardened Thracian troops under a captain named Eudamus. Then Alexander and his men departed. They boarded ships in the Indian Ocean or marched back through the Hindu Kush; the least fortunate units followed Alexander himself into the deserts of Gedrosia. The Macedonians’ Indian adventure, which had turned the land of the five rivers red with blood for more than a year, was over.
The skeleton crew of Europeans left behind in the Indus valley were not nearly enough to hold it, and they weakened themselves further with internal dissension. Philip was already dead a few months after Alexander’s departure, killed by an uprising of his own troops. Eudamus took command in his place, but within a few years he would be pushed out of the region, as Chandragupta and Chanakya, who now had an army behind them, moved to take back the Indus valley (they had already, by that time, taken over the Ganges).
How did such an army materialize in a region depleted by near-genocidal war? Justin supplies our only hint when he says that Chandragupta used “outlaws” to attack Alexander’s garrisons. Some have guessed that this refers to the Malli and the Oxydracae, self-governing peoples whose independence might well have looked like lawlessness to a Roman like Justin. It is only a guess, but it suggests that Chandragupta’s conquests were fueled by the anger of Alexander’s most brutalized victims. The peoples of the Indus valley, in this scenario, rose up and reclaimed the land Alexander took from them, the only Asian nations to have done so. Perhaps Alexander, though he had horrifically reduced their numbers and forced their submission, did not break their proud spirit.
Eudamus fled west, toward the central satrapies of the empire, where we shall meet him again in due course. He took with him a herd of war elephants he had acquired after killing the raja Porus, once Alexander’s greatest enemy in the region, more recently his faithful vassal. Gandhara, the land of the five rivers, ceased to belong to Alexander’s empire and became part of Chandragupta’s. Within a generation the Macedonians would cede control permanently for the price of five hundred more elephants, the heavy weaponry they needed for their unending civil wars.
7. THE END OF THE BACTRIAN REVOLT (SUMMER 322 B.C.)
About a year after Alexander’s death Peithon, commander in chief of the East by order of Perdiccas, arrived in Bactria. His forces by this time had swollen to thirteen thousand infantry and eighty-eight hundred cavalry. This was the largest army seen in the East since Alexander had left there, except for the twenty-three thousand mutinous Greeks whom it had been ordered to destroy. Peithon, however, did not intend this order to be carried out. His plan