a terribly dull time and often have sighed for the good old days of worldly-minded Chandragupta.
Communication between the capital and the provinces was maintained by the river waterways and a system of roads, the principal of which was the royal highway leading from Pataliputra to the Indus through Taxila, the forerunner of Lord Dalhousie's Grand Trunk Road. Distances were marked by pilla1's erected at intervals of ten stadia, or half a kôs, about an English mile and a quarter. Asoka added a well beside each pillar, and further consulted the comfort of travellers by planting trees for shade and fruit, and by providing rest-houses and sheds supplied with drinking—water. The communications must have been good to make possible the control of the whole empire from a capital situated so far to the east as Pâataliputra [1].
- ↑ Strabo (Bk. xv,’ ch. 11 ; McCrindle, Anc. India, p. 16) gives the length of the royal road as 10,000 stadia, or about 1150 English miles, on the authority of Megasthenes and Eraotesthenes, who obtained the figures from an official record, and as 9,000 according to another authority. 1 stadium 20214 yards; 10 stadia=202212 yards. The mean length of the Mughal kôs as measured between the existing pillars (mînârs) is 4558 yards, but a shorter kôs is used in the Panjâb. I do not think it possible to accept the proposed interpretation of aḍhakosikya in
the Great, Bk. viii, ch. 9', transl. McCrindle (Invasiobn of India by Alexander the Great, p. 188); and Aelian, On the Peculiarities of Animals, Bk. xiii, ch. 18, 22; Bk. xv, ch. 15, transl. McCrindle (Ancient India, pp. 141-5). Trotting oxen are used largely to this day, especially in Western and Southern India but I have never heard of the racing breed except in Ceylon and in the pages of Megasthenes. I fully believe his statement.
