The Lion Throne

The Lion Throne: The Life, Empire, and Renunciation of Chandragupta Maurya

In the fourth century BCE, a young man of obscure birth walked out of the forests of northern India and into the most consequential political partnership in the history of the ancient world. Within a generation, he had expelled the successors of Alexander the Great, defeated the Nanda dynasty's six-hundred-thousand-strong army, negotiated a treaty that reshaped the geopolitics of Asia, and built the largest empire the Indian subcontinent had ever seen. His name was Chandragupta Maurya, and his story has never been fully told.

Drawing on the Arthashastra, the ancient world's most rigorous treatise on statecraft, alongside Tamil Sangam poetry, Jain hagiography, Greek diplomatic accounts, and the copper plate inscriptions that prove the Mauryan welfare state was real, Diarmuid Luby reconstructs a life of extraordinary range and depth. From the intelligence networks that destroyed the Nandas from within, to the silver coinage that knitted a continent into a single economy, to the road that ran a thousand miles from the Hindu Kush to the Gangetic plain, the Mauryan achievement is revealed in its full institutional and human complexity.

And then, at the height of his power, Chandragupta gave it all away.

This is the complete story of the man who built ancient India's first empire, and chose to die with nothing.