The Ambassadors: From Ancient Greece to the Nation State. Jonathan Wright

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      And if there had to be diplomacy, if a foreign nation or tribe had something urgent to relate, the onus was on them to initiate proceedings. In the accounts of his military campaigns in Gaul, Julius Caesar makes few references to the despatching of Roman ambassadors: rather, we are told of foreign envoys, often weeping and prostrated, coming to the Roman camp. Foreign ambassadors, the bearers of congratulations, condolences, requests or apologies, were expected to come to Rome, not vice versa. When the senate was in session, there were regularly hundreds of envoys in the capital, the most illustrious among them being housed and fed, at the state’s expense, in the Villa Publica.

      Roman rulers took the number of envoys they received as an index of their prestige and power. Ambassadors from Germany, North Africa and Greece were unexceptional. More noteworthy were the princes who acted as their own representatives – as when Tiridates of Armenia visited Nero to receive his crown from the emperor’s own hands. The exotic ambassador was yet more desirable. If envoys came from as far away as Ceylon, as happened in the reign of Claudius, this was a sure indication of an emperor’s extraordinary fame.

      The Roman view of the ambassador’s role lacked nuance. It did not make for the inquisitive, scholarly ambassador. For the most part, while Greece was busy with the inter-state rivalries of Athens, Thebes and Sparta, neither did the Greek notion of diplomacy. But in the person of Megasthenes, at least, a moment of genuine, lasting cultural dialogue had been achieved.

      The Greeks were bemused by just how advanced and cultured Indian society seemed. Megasthenes was particularly impressed by its bureaucracy, by the number and quality of officials who oversaw a staggering range of domestic tasks. There was more to the Mauryan genius than this, however. Any fledgling empire, however exuberant, was obliged to look beyond its borders, to potential allies and likely adversaries. History in the West will always flatter classical Greece, but classical India had begun to hone its own ambassadorial skills and to meditate on the nature and ends of diplomacy. Mauryan civilization reached conclusions about its place in the world that were as startling as they were brilliant. Enter Kautilya.

       CHAPTER III A Sanskrit Machiavelli

       i. Debating Diplomacy

      Thus speaks the Beloved of the Gods: Dhamma is good. And what is Dhamma? It is having few faults and many good deeds, mercy, charity, truthfulness, and purity. I have given the gift of insight in various forms. I have conferred many benefits on man, animals, birds, and fish, even to saving their lives, and I have done many other commendable deeds. I have had this inscription of Dhamma engraved that men may conform to it and that it may endure. He who conforms will do well.

      Second Pillar Edict of the Mauryan King Asoka¹

      Asoka, Beloved of the Gods, was the greatest of the Mauryan emperors. His reign (273–232 BC) began with a string of bloody military campaigns but, tortured by pity for the fallen and displaced, he renounced martial glory and took to the peaceful, reflective path of Buddhism. Legend tells of the Buddhist monk Nigrodha who went strolling in the gardens of the royal palace one day and enchanted Asoka with his calm, almost beatific demeanour. Everyone else struck Asoka as being confused in mind, like perturbed deer, but the monk seemed utterly at ease, perhaps possessed of some wondrous transcendent vision. The emperor invited the monk into his palace and listened to his account of a Buddhist faith that, after his conversion in c.260 BC, Asoka would help to spread across the region.²

      He decreed that a series of edicts should be promulgated across his dominions, as far as present-day Pakistan, Nepal and Afghanistan. Sometimes etched on rock faces, sometimes on towering pillars, these inscriptions proclaimed Asoka’s dedication to a life of virtue, his dream that he, ‘his sons, his grandsons and his great grandsons will advance the practice of Dhamma until the end of the world’.

      It was a benign vision. Charities, hospitals and veterinary clinics were to be established, prisoners were to be treated more decently, and even the lot of dumb animals was to be improved: ‘formerly in the kitchens [of Asoka], many hundreds of thousands of living animals were killed daily for meat. But now, at the time of writing this inscription, only three animals are killed, two peacocks and a deer, and the deer not invariably. Even these animals will not be killed in the future.’ The edicts spoke of imperial officers who were to tour the countryside every five years to instruct people in the laws of piety, urging them to honour their parents and friends, to live frugally, and to maintain a bare minimum of personal property. Earlier kings might have indulged in endless ‘pleasure tours, consisting of hunts and similar amusements’, but Asoka would only travel in order to meet his people, to talk to the elderly, discourse with Brahmin priests and distribute gifts.³

      The rock-and-pillar edicts were tools of propaganda, and we might question whether Asoka was quite as saintly as he wished history to believe. That he was enlightened and, by the standards of the time, compassionate cannot be doubted, however. He claimed that his task was to ‘promote the welfare of the whole world’, and so he did. He abolished the death penalty, established a sprawling network of wells and rest houses for travellers, and planted shady trees along trade routes. As for ambassadors, they were to continue in their usual tasks – forging alliances and seeking tribute – but they were also to carry medicinal herbs to foreign lands.

      The defining diplomatic policy of Asoka’s reign had little to do with military aggrandizement or economic progress; it consisted rather of missionary-envoys being sent to Syria, Egypt, Macedonia and Nepal to preach the tenets of Buddhism. And as we will see in the missions of men like John of Plano Carpini in the thirteenth century, the tradition of the monkish ambassador had a vibrant future ahead of it. When a new king, Tissa, came to the throne of Sri Lanka, he sent envoys to Asoka informing the emperor of his accession. Asoka responded by despatching his son, Mahinda, as an ‘ambassador of righteousness’, charged with winning the new king for the Buddhist faith. He succeeded, and King Tissa was soon erecting a Buddhist reliquary in one of the royal gardens.

      Tissa’s sister was an even more impassioned acolyte and announced that she desired to become a Buddhist nun. Lacking the authority to invest her in holy orders, Mahinda sent for his own sister Sanghamitta, who was already a nun. She arrived in Sri Lanka with the requisite paraphernalia and a golden vase containing a branch of the Bodhi tree, under which the Buddha had meditated for seven years before receiving enlightenment. The sapling was planted on a terrace in the royal gardens and to this day remains an object of veneration.

      If this was one way to encounter the rest of the world, Asoka’s grandfather had espoused quite another. Chandragupta (reigned 321–298 BC), the founder of the Mauryan dynasty, was a man of humble origins: by some accounts, the son of a peacock farmer. One, presumably apocryphal, story perfectly encapsulates his fearful reputation. Ever wary of assassination attempts, Chandragupta was in the habit of taking a daily draught of poison with his meals, hoping to immunize himself against its effects. One day, when his pregnant wife accidentally imbibed some of the poison, the emperor immediately chopped off her head (hoping to stop the toxins progressing any further), ripped the unborn child from her belly and placed the embryo in the womb of a goat.⁴

      Such ruthless efficiency pervaded Chandragupta’s entire political career. It was captured for posterity by one of his most trusted ministers, named Kautilya, who wrote an intricate treatise on how a wise king ought to govern. Kautilya’s Arthasastra was not simply an abstract meditation on devious statecraft, but an account of actual political practice. It is one of the finest works of political philosophy ever written, though it remains undervalued in the West. Its radical meditations on the nature and exercise of political power led the sociologist Max Weber to conclude that, by comparison, ‘Machiavelli’s The Prince is harmless.’⁵