Chandragupta Maurya and Kautilya: founding the empire (c. 321 BCE)

The Mauryan Empire · section 4 of 10

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Alexander of Macedon left India around 325 BCE. He died in 323 BCE. His empire broke up among his generals.
A few years after Alexander left, Chandragupta Maurya founded the Maurya Empire in c. 321 BCE. He was the first ruler to bring most of India under one administration [2].
He first took over the Nanda territories — the rich Magadha kingdom — and then pushed far beyond them.
Britannica dates his takeover of the Magadha throne to c. 325 BCE, his winning of the Punjab region to c. 322 BCE, and the start of the dynasty to the year after [2].

Note: NCERT fixes the founding at c. 321 BCE. Britannica's slightly earlier steps are a different reading of the same few years, not a different empire [2].
The empire that grew from this is called the first pan-Indian empire — the first time one throne ruled from the north-west to the Deccan [4].

Kauṭilya is the same man as Chāṇakya and Viṣhṇugupta — three names, one person. He was Chandragupta's teacher and guide.
Buddhist texts say he taught at the famous university of Takṣhaśhila (Taxila), in the north-west.
The legend of the insult:
Kautilya advised the last Nanda king, Dhana Nanda, to change his ways.
The king insulted him and threw him out of court.
Kautilya vowed to end the "evil Nanda" rule — and found a young Chandragupta to do it.
Britannica calls Kautilya a Brahman statesman and philosopher and the chief minister of Chandragupta [2][3].
The Arthaśhāstra (meaning "science of wealth/statecraft") is the manual on politics and government credited to Kautilya. It has 15 sections (books), each on one part of running a state [3].
Remember: it is a manual on how a state should work, not a history book of Chandragupta's reign.

Chandragupta took Magadha and kept Pāṭaliputra (today's Patna, Bihar) as his capital.
He then defeated the Greek satraps — the governors Alexander had left behind in the north-west — and took their land.
Extent, in NCERT's words:
as far north-west as Afghanistan and Baluchistan (Class 12 Part 1, Ch 2 "Kings, Farmers and Towns");
from the northern plains down to the Deccan plateau (Class 7 Part 1, Ch 5 "The Rise of Empires").
Britannica describes the same empire's reach as running from the Himalayas and the Kābul river valley in the north and west to the Vindhya range in the south [2].

In 305 BCE Chandragupta fought Seleucus I Nicator, one of Alexander's generals, who had set up the Seleucid kingdom in Iran [4].
Result was a treaty, not a long war:
Seleucus gave up the lands west of the Indus (the trans-Indus provinces) to the Mauryas;
Chandragupta gave Seleucus 500 elephants [4].
This is the deal behind NCERT's line that Mauryan control reached Afghanistan and Baluchistan.

After the fighting, Chandragupta kept friendly relations with the Greeks. Both sides exchanged envoys (ambassadors) [4].
One envoy was Megasthenes, a Greek historian-diplomat sent by Seleucus to Chandragupta's court — around 302 BCE [4][5].
He wrote Indika — the first written foreign account of India. Britannica records it as a four-book work [5].
The book is lost. It survives only as excerpts quoted by later Greek writers such as Strabo and Arrian [4][6].
Megasthenes on Pāṭaliputra (which the Greeks called Palibothra), as quoted by Strabo and Arrian and repeated by ASI [4]:
sat where the Ganga met the Erannaboas river;
about 14.5 km long and 2.4 km wide, shaped like a parallelogram (a long rectangle-like shape);
ringed by a wooden wall with 570 towers and 64 gates, with loop-holes (narrow slits) for shooting arrows;
guarded by a ditch about 182 m wide and 14 m deep.
A 19th-century English translation of the surviving fragments — collected by Dr Schwanbeck and printed with Arrian's Indika — is held by the Library of Congress [6]. This is how students read Megasthenes today: fragments, not the original.

c. 321 BCE — founding of the Maurya Empire by Chandragupta Maurya, after absorbing Nanda territory.
Kauṭilya = Chāṇakya = Viṣhṇugupta — one man, three names; Buddhist texts place him as a teacher at Takṣhaśhila.
Last Nanda ruler insulted by name in the legend: Dhana Nanda.
Arthaśhāstra has 15 sections/books on statecraft, credited to Kautilya [3].
Mauryan capital: Pāṭaliputra (modern Patna).
305 BCE — treaty with Seleucus I Nicator: trans-Indus provinces to Chandragupta, 500 elephants to Seleucus [4].
Megasthenes — Seleucid ambassador at Chandragupta's court, c. 302 BCE; wrote Indika, a four-book work [4][5].
Indika is lost; known only from quotations in Strabo and Arrian [4][6].
Greek name for Pāṭaliputra: Palibothra — described as 14.5 km × 2.4 km, wooden wall, 570 towers, 64 gates [4].
NCERT extent line: control "as far northwest as Afghanistan and Baluchistan", reaching the Deccan plateau.

Why Magadha, and why then? The Nanda state already had the treasury, army and capital at Pāṭaliputra. Chandragupta did not build an empire from nothing — he captured a ready-made state machine and then expanded it. The power vacuum left by Alexander's withdrawal in the north-west gave him a second, softer frontier to take.
Conquest plus diplomacy as one policy. The 305 BCE treaty with Seleucus turned a war into a fixed north-west border, an elephant trade and an exchange of envoys [4]. Useful line for answers on early Indian foreign policy: Mauryan power rested on arms and on settled agreements with Hellenistic kingdoms.
The problem of sources. Kautilya's Arthaśhāstra is a manual of the ideal state, not a record of events; Megasthenes' Indika survives only in second-hand Greek quotations [4][6]. So the "Chandragupta" we study is built from a prescriptive text, a foreigner's lost book and later Buddhist and Jain legends — each needing care before being read as fact.
Legend versus history. The Kautilya-and-Dhana-Nanda insult story explains motive in a satisfying way, but comes from later texts. Good answers can note that such founder-legends shaped how Indian tradition remembered the fall of the Nandas, even where the event-level detail cannot be checked.