World History in a Year (Week 27): 300s BC
As with last week, I’m going to start with the history of ideas in this age before moving to the history of events, because this is an era with a vast number of ideas that had enduring significance. Some of them had originated in the previous century, but this is when a full picture of parallel developments across China, India, and Greece forms.
It’s worth noting that when it comes to the major Axial figures of the 400s BC – Socrates, Buddha, Confucius – we have no writing from their own hands about their ideas. Their philosophies and beliefs were handed down by their followers, disciples or students. These included two greatly important figures from the 300s BC: Plato, for Socrates, and Mencius, for Confucius, both of whom added their own ideas to their teachers’.
By the 300s BC, I can see three broad currents in the theological-philosophical-political sphere, which I am going to call Hermit, Wise Ruler, and Brutal Pragmatist. (A fourth element, orthogonal to these, is academia beyond these spheres; in the 300s BC this includes the groundbreaking Astadhyayi text on grammar and linguistics by Panini in India, as well as Aristotle’s writings on, well, everything.) The first two currents got their start earlier, with Buddhism and Jainism and some Upanishads in the Hermit stream and Confucianism in the Wise Philosopher stream; by the 300s each of them was represented in at least two of our three key Axial regions.
The Hermit philosophies advocated a renunciation of power and possessions. In India this went with a focus on spiritual enlightenment and ethical behaviour; Indian hermits, or ‘renouncers’, occurred among Buddhists, Jains, and Hindus, as well as other lesser-known belief systems. One anecdote (recorded centuries after the fact) has Alexander in India meeting renouncers who have no regard for his conquests or power and dismiss them as wasteful and pointless. Alexander recognizes the total freedom of a man who neither wants nor fears anything within the world. A similar story is told about the Greek philosopher Diogenes the Cynic, who when told by Alexander the Great to ask for anything he wanted, said, “Move; you’re blocking my sunlight.” This illustrates the similarities between these ‘renouncing’ religious-philosophical ideas across regions.
Early Daoism in China was somewhat different from Indian renunciation in lacking concern with enlightenment or ethics – if I can be excused for being flippant, some of the writings on it come across as more of an “if it sucks, hit the bricks!” philosophy. One early text essentially said: go to the woods, fish for food, live as an “untroubled idler”. A recurring term is wuwei (“doing nothing”). It’s about deliberately checking out of politics, property, power, and responsibility in order to be untroubled by them. Actively seeking to act virtuously was seen as a step down from ideal, natural behaviour.
The Wise Ruler philosophies are most famously expressed in Confucianism and in Plato’s Republic with its idea of philosopher-kings. In both cases, a king who acts and rules according to good philosophical principles will be a good king; in Confucianism, the goal is not for the philosophers themselves to become kings, but to find a king who will listen to them as advisors. Instead of the renunciation of power, this is about the responsible and ethical wielding of power. I’m not aware of an Indian philosophical school in this vein in the Axial period, but ironically, in Ashoka (200s BC) India probably had the closest thing to an ancient king who fit these philosophical ideals (at least if we take his inscriptions as representative of how he ruled in the later part of his reign).
Dropping the “ethical” and focusing just on “wielding of power” gives us the last of the three groups, the Brutal Pragmatist strain of political philosophy. These become expressed in a more systematic matter after the other axial currents, and probably in response to them. Brutal pragmatism as a means of rule obviously far predates the axial age: what is different now is that it has been challenged and needs to justify itself in philosophical language, in competition with the other currents. In some ways this is similar to Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan far later in history, which provided a secular rationale for absolutism in contrast to both liberal political theory and the older idea of divine right of kings.
In China this brutal pragmatism was expressed by the Legalist school, who believed that people were basically bad and the only way to keep them in line was by inducing fear through draconian punishments. The most (in)famous Chinese Legalist philosopher in this period was Shang Yang, advisor to the ruler of Qin.
In India the brutal pragmatist current was represented by Kautilya, author of the Arthashastra (the title could be expressed as ‘economics’ or ‘statecraft’ or, heck, ‘the seven habits of highly effective rulers’) and advisor to Chandragupta Maurya, the first of the Mauryan emperors. (There’s debate around this, and the Arthashastra may have been written later, around the first centuries BC and AD, or contain elements from multiple time periods.) The Arthashastra provided a comprehensive examination of domestic and foreign policy, including management of ministries of finance, natural resources, transportation, justice, and others, and officials overseeing industries including liquor, gambling, and sex work. Its foreign policy was firmly realist, taking for granted that every nation sought to expand its territory through conquest and advising on advantageous alliance networks in a setting containing many small states. It emphasized force and punishment as a means of keeping control and stability, for only with stability could there be prosperity. Some of its policy recommendations are strikingly amoral in comparison to the setting of the day: for example, it says the wandering lifestyle of some renouncers makes them useful as international spies. It recognized religion as a force that could be used for practical ends, but limited its religious discussion to those topics, saying, “One can think rationally about action in the human realm; the divine realm is outside rational comprehension.” This is very different from a pre-Axial state, where keeping the gods happy through proper sacrificial rituals was a central purpose of the ruler. (It’s worth noting that there’s debate about when the Arthashastra was written, with some scholars putting it a few centuries later. But even if this is the case, it refers to many earlier texts that have not now been preserved, indicating a longer tradition of Indian political philosophy.)
Greek philosophy doesn’t seem to have had a brutal pragmatist strain – unless we count the sophists, who are accused of exhibiting a similar amorality – but, in an opposite example to Ashoka, they did have a ruler whose implementation of conquest by force was unparalleled in its day: Alexander of Macedon. A great irony is that followers of the ‘wise philosopher’ streams ended up more than once as teachers and advisors to brutal pragmatists: Aristotle was a teacher of Alexander, and two students of the Confucian Xun Zi were prominent officials in the conquering state of Qin.
This brings us to the history of events. The 300s BC saw the rise of the empire of Alexander in Greece and the Mauryan Empire in India, as well as the increasing predominance of the state of Qin within China and the Roman Republic within central Italy.
But for context we need to step back in time a bit before the origins of those empires. The Persian Empire spent the early part of the 300s BC actually getting stronger. In 387 BC the Spartans were having military difficulties with other Greek states following Sparta’s defeat of Athens in the Peloponnesian War. The Spartans reacted by making a deal with the Persians that gave Persia control of all Anatolia and the northeast coast of Greece and made Persia the ‘guarantor of peace’ in disputes between Greek states. Basically, it gave Persia hegemony over Greece. Ironic, given that Sparta’s historical fame is heavily associated with fighting Persia.
Phillip II of Macedon (r. 359-336 BC) was, after this, the strongest Greek ruler, and in 337 BC the Greek states allied against Persia under his leadership. But in 336 BC he was assassinated. His 20-year-old son Alexander took over for him and the rest was history: within 6 years Alex had conquered Persia and ruled a continuous stretch of territory from Macedonia in the west to Egypt in the south to the borders of India in the east. Notably, though, it didn’t last: after his death in 323 BC, his successors immediately started fighting with each other and continued to do so until the end of the century, breaking the empire into multiple competing parts. The equally famous Qin Empire of China, which we’ll see next week, would likewise struggle to outlive its notorious founder and last less than 20 years. In contrast, the Mauryan Empire, founded by Chandragupta Maurya, lasted over 100 years, and the Han Empire and Roman Empire were even more long-lived. In each case, a short-lived dominant state or empire gave way to (or laid the foundation for) a much more lasting one. (To some degree this is a similar pattern to Assyria and Persia – an earlier empire ruling only by force, and a longer-lived one establishing a more stable ideology – even though Iron Age Assyria was longer-lived than other empires of its type.)
The Indian predecessor to the Mauryans is less well-known than Alexander the Great or Qin Shi Huang. It was the Nanda Empire, founded by Mahapadma Nanda around 350 BC. He was ruler of the state of Magadha, and under him Magadha gained control of the whole Ganges-Yamuna region – basically, the bulk of northern India. This would have been the empire that Alexander faced when he reached India. The Nanda dynasty were shortly after that (around 324-320 BC) overthrown by Chandragupta Maurya, who established the Mauryan Empire.
We’ve now reached an era of inter-imperial diplomacy: not just successive empires overthrowing each other (like Assyrians, Babylonians, and Persians) but multiple ones interacting. Seleucus I Nicator, an Alexandrine general who had taken over the central Asian and Iranian parts of Alexander’s empire, attempted to invade India but was quickly stopped by Chandragupta Maurya. He ceded what is now Pakistan and parts of Afghanistan to Chandragupta Maurya, who gifted him 500 war elephants in return. These war elephants then played a major role in Seleucus’ victory over another Alexandrine general, Antigonus, who had claimed the Levant, Syria, and much of Anatolia. The Seleucids and Mauryans additionally made a marriage alliance, and there was a Seleucid ambassador stationed in the Mauryan capital of Pataliputra.
At the same time Qin in China was expanding its control. Qin was based around its capital of Xi’an in western China. Over the 300s BC, it first expanded south into Sichuan, gaining rich agricultural land, and then captured much of the rest of western China from its rivals. It was the state where Legalist philosophy was most prominent, with adherents including the Qin prime minister, Shang Yang. He created a centralised state entirely oriented towards military mobilization and conquest. Government became more systematic: people and land were carefully counted and measured in order to exact heavy taxation and forced labour from the peasantry. Weights and measures were standardized. People were classified into groups of adjacent households, and if anyone in the group stepped out of line, the whole group was harshly punished.
Like Qin, Rome was not yet a great power but was expanding its territory through conquest, and during this century it increased its prominence in central Italy substantially. Its system of expansion was one it would continue in its later conquests through Italy. Conquered populations were enslaved and their lands annexed. Some of these lands were distributed to Roman soldiers, others to aristocratic landowners. The fact that both of those groups benefitted from conquests by obtaining land and slaves diffused social conflicts between them. Rome’s social model and social stability basically required continual conquest. Even as a midsize, politically republican state, it was already operating like an empire: drawing resources from conquered areas to benefit the core territory. New infrastructure projects supported conquest and growth. The late 300s BC saw the building of the Appian Way, a stone-paved road to enable rapid movement of armies from Rome to wars in the south, as well as the first aqueduct bringing water to Rome from outlying areas.
The roots of yet another major empire were being laid in the Americas, though it would take several more centuries to develop. At the start of the 300s BC, the Basin of Mexico was home to about 80,000 people and had five or six competing proto-states with capital cities and pyramid mounds. Most prominent of them was Cuicuilco, but by the end of this century another had begun to grow in power: Teotihuacán, which would rise to be the greatest empire of ancient Mesoamerica.
