Page:History of India Vol 2.djvu/164

132 ASOKA MAURYA ports of the western coast to the markets of the interior, it combined the advantages of a favourite place of pil- grimage with those of a great commercial depot. The city was recognized as the headquarters of Indian as- tronomy, and latitudes were computed from its me- ridian. The Ceylonese tradition that Asoka was residing at Ujjain when he was summoned to the capital by the news of his father 's mortal illness may well be believed, but no credence can be given to the tales which relate that Asoka had a hundred brothers, ninety-nine of whom he slew, and so forth. These idle stories seem to have been invented chiefly in order to place a dark back- ground of early wickedness behind the bright picture of his mature piety. Asoka certainly had brothers and sisters alive in the seventeenth year of his reign, whose households were objects of his anxious care; and there is nothing to indicate that he regarded his relatives with jealousy. His grandfather, Chandragupta, " a man of blood and iron," who had fought his way from poverty and exile to the imperial throne, naturally was beset by jealousies and hatreds, and constrained to live a life of distrustful suspicion. But Asoka, who was born in the purple and inherited an empire firmly established by half a century of masterful rule, presumably was free from the " black care " which haunted his ancestor. His edicts display no sense of insecurity or weakness from first to last, and the probability is that he succeeded peaceably in accordance with his predecessor's nomina- tion.