Megasthenes was the Greek ambassador who wrote Indica after visiting Chandragupta Maurya’s court.
Megasthenes served Seleucus I Nicator, the Hellenistic ruler who reached a settlement with Chandragupta Maurya in the early third century BCE. He visited the Mauryan court at Pataliputra, near modern Patna, and recorded observations about India in a work known as Indica or Indika.
The original book has been lost. Its surviving material comes from quotations and paraphrases preserved by later writers such as Arrian, Strabo, Diodorus Siculus, and Pliny the Elder. These fragments discuss geography, rivers, social groups, animals, government, and the administration of the Mauryan state.
The distractors are associated with the tradition in different ways. Strabo and Arrian transmitted passages from or about Megasthenes, but neither wrote the original Indica about Chandragupta’s court. Seleucus was Megasthenes’s king, not the ambassador. A later Greek envoy, Deimachus, served Chandragupta’s son Bindusara, which is another frequent source of confusion.