Teacher at Taxila
By tradition a teacher at the great northwestern seat of learning before he turned to the making of an empire.
Chanakya was the strategist who, by tradition, raised Chandragupta Maurya from obscurity to the throne of an empire. His Arthashastra is a treatise on statecraft of astonishing range, covering law, taxation, diplomacy, espionage, agriculture, and war with a frankness that spares no illusion about how power actually works. The welfare of the people is the king's duty, he insists, yet the means he sanctions to secure the state are unsentimental in the extreme. Read as political philosophy, it asks the permanent question of whether the order that protects us can be built without hands that get dirty.
By tradition a teacher at the great northwestern seat of learning before he turned to the making of an empire.