THE MAURYAS OF INDIA


"Some talk of Alexander" may be appropriate here; but not much.
He was Aristotle's pupil; and apart from or beyond his terrific
military genius, had ideas. Genius is sometimes, perhaps more
often than we suspect, an ability to concentrate the mind into a
kind of impersonality; almost non-existence, so that you have in
it a channel for the great forces of nature to play through. We
shall find that Mr. Judge's phrase 'the Crest-Wave of Evolution'
is no empty one: words were things, with him and in fact, as he
says; and it is so here. For this Crest-Wave is a force that
actually rolls over the world as a wave over the face of the sea,
raising up splendors in one nation after another in order
_geographically,_ and with no haphazard about it. Its first and
largest movement is from East to West; producing (as far as I
can see) the great manvantaric periods (fifteen hundred years
apiece) in East Asia, West Asia, and Europe; each of these being
governed by its own cycles. But it has a secondary movement as
well; a smaller motion within the larger one; and this produces
the brilliant days (thirteen decades long for the most part) that
recur in the manvantaras. Thus: China seems to have been in
manvantara from 2300 to 850 B. C.; West Asia, from 1890 to 390;
Europe, from 870 B. C. to 630 A. D. So in the time of Alexander
West Asia was newly dead, and China waiting to be reborn. The
Crest-Wave, in so far as it concerned the European manvantara,
had to roll westward from Greece (in its time) to awaken Italy;
but in its universal aspect--in its strongest force--it had to
roll eastward, that its impulse might touch more important China
when her time for awaking should come. It is an impetus, of which
sometimes we can see the physical links and lines along which it
travels, and sometimes we cannot. The line from Greece to China
lies through Persia and India. But Persia was dead, in pralaya;
you could expect no splendor, no mark of the Crest-Wave's
passing, there. So Alexander, rising by his genius and towering
ideas to the plane where these great motions are felt, skips you
lightly across dead Persia, knocks upon the doors of India to say
that it is dawn and she must be up and doing; and subsides. I
doubt he carried her any cultural impulse, in the ordinary sense;
it is _our_ Euro-American conceit to imagine the Greek was the
highest thing in civilization in the world at that time. We may
take it that Indian civilization was far higher and better in all
esentials; certainly the Greeks who went there presently, and
left a record, were impressed with that fact. You shall see;
out of their own mouths we will convict them. It is the very
burden of Megasthenes' song.

Alexander had certain larger than Greek conceptions, which one
must admire in him. Though he overthrew the Persians, he never
made the mistake of thinking them an inferior race. On the
contrary, he respected them highly; and proposed to make of them
and his Greeks and Mecedoinians one homogeneous people, in which
the Persian qualities of aristocracy should supply a need he
felt in Europeans. The Law made use of his intention, partially,
and to the furtherance of its own designs.--His method of
treating the conquered was (generally) far more Persian or
Asiatic than Greek; that is to say, far more humane and decent
than barbarous. He took a short cut to his broad ends, and
married all his captains to Persian ladies, himself setting the
example; whereas most Greeks would have dealt with the captive
women very differently. So that it was a kind of enlightenment
he set out with, and carried across Persia, through Afghanistan,
and into the Punjab,--which, we may note, was but the outskirts
of the real India, into which he never penetrated; and it may
yet be found that he went by no means so far as is supposed; but
let that be. So now, at any rate, enough of him; he has brought
us where we are to spend this evening.
 

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