There was another way to generate power from money, a way pioneered by Alexander but now exploited more fully by Ptolemy in Egypt. Coined money itself, bearing images struck at state-run mints, was a powerful propaganda tool. Alexander had used this tool all across his empire, striking coins showing Heracles, his legendary ancestor, on one side and bearing the legend “Alexander’s” on the other. Heracles was shown wearing a headdress made from the impenetrable skin of the Nemean lion, an emblem of Alexander’s own seeming invincibility. Ptolemy, during his first two years in Egypt, took this strategy one step further. He minted a coin depicting the profile not of Heracles but of Alexander himself. It was the first time that the image of a human being, rather than a god or a mythic hero, had appeared on any Western coinage.

In place of the lion skin formerly shown on the Heracles issues, Ptolemy’s coin showed Alexander wearing a fantastic headdress made from the flayed scalp of an elephant. The beast’s tusks protruded from the top of the king’s head, and the trunk reared upward like a bizarre, fleshy crest. From the side of the headdress curled a ram’s horn, symbol of the Egyptian god Ammon, who had supposedly claimed the king as son. It was not an image ever seen in life but a symbolic one conveying useful ideas. It connected Alexander to the non-European world, an important link for Ptolemy to display to his new Egyptian subjects. It especially evoked the invasion of India, Alexander’s greatest feat of power and daring. In India, Alexander had defeated the most fearsome weapon his army had faced, the trained war elephant, and even learned how to use it himself. He had met the wildness of the jungle and made it his own.

It was as though in the crucible of India a new kind of ruler had been forged, blending enlightened, rational Hellenism with something terrifying and monstrous. Ptolemy, by disseminating this ingenious icon on his coins, was investing Alexander with a new power, the power of the East.

6. CHANDRAGUPTA AND CHANAKYA (GANDHARA/INDIA, 323–318 B.C.)

The land of the war elephant, the region the Persians called Gandhara and the Greek world India (today eastern Pakistan), was the last province of Alexander’s empire to learn of his death. The news must have arrived there weeks later than in other regions of Asia. Messages that traversed the central satrapies by fleet horsemen or fire signals slowed to a crawl as they crossed the Hindu Kush, carried on foot over the Khyber and Khawak passes. Once the news reached the broad plain east of the mountains, it picked up speed once again, racing from garrison to garrison along the Indus River and its four tributaries. Eventually, it passed beyond the Hyphasis River, the eastern limit of the empire, and was heard on the banks of the Ganges, in the realm of the Nandas, rulers of the great Magadha kingdom.

The news aroused the keen interest of two men who were at that time plotting the overthrow of the Nandas andthe expulsion of the Macedonians. Within only a few years they would succeed at both ventures and would join the Indus and Ganges valleys under one rule, founding an empire that ultimately encompassed nearly all of the Indian subcontinent. Together they would chase Alexander’s governors out of the region and ensure that they never came back. These men were Chandragupta Maurya (Sandracottus to the Greeks) and his brilliant teacher and adviser, a man who goes by two different names in Indian texts, the patronymic Chanakya and the surname Kautilya.

Almost nothing is known for certain about these two men, but legends abound in both Greco-Roman and Indian sources. Justin, in his summary of the Roman historian Pompeius Trogus, claims that Chandragupta was a commoner who offended the Nanda king and was then condemned to death. Somehow he broke away from his captors and outran them, collapsing in exhaustion when he reached the safety of the jungle. He slept where he fell, and as he slept, a lion came and licked the sweat off his face. He woke to see the beast calmly walking away; he knew then that he was destined for rule.

Chanakya, the sage who helped Chandragupta gain his empire, was also a man marked out for greatness, according to Indian legends. Chanakya had been born with a full set of teeth, a sign that local monks explained as an omen of future kingship. But Chanakya’s father feared that royal power would mean the perdition of his son’s soul, so he ground down the teeth with a file. The monks, seeing the infant’s new condition, proclaimed that destiny had been changed. Chanakya would not rule himself but would oversee one who ruled; he would be “a king concealed within an image.”

Grown to manhood, Chanakya searched for a youth worthy to be his avatar, finally recognizing Chandragupta by way of yet more omens and signs. Chanakya took Chandragupta with him and trained him in the science of conquest and rule—lessons preserved, perhaps, in the Arthashastra, a Sanskrit political guidebook that purports to be the work of Chanakya. The Arthashastrain fact dates from later centuries, but its core lessons, including dark teachings about assassination and espionage, may well go back to Chanakya himself.

Chandragupta was in his mid-teens during Alexander’s years in India and almost certainly living in Taxila, the university town that the Macedonians used as their base. Chanakya, perhaps thirty-five or forty at that time, had brought the boy here and enrolled him in one of the town’s religious schools. It must have been here in Taxila that Chandragupta met Alexander, if we believe the brief record Plutarch made of the encounter. How the two leaders crossed paths, one ending his campaign of conquest, the other not yet having begun, Plutarch does not say. But he reports that in later years Chandragupta was known to laugh when he thought of Alexander and how great an opportunity he had missed. Had the Macedonians kept going to the Ganges, Chandragupta scoffed, they would have found the conquest of the Nanda kingdom an easy matter. He knew whereof he spoke, having by then accomplished that deed himself.

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).