Megasthenes was an eyewitness to the reign of Chandragupta Maurya, maker of the first India-wide empire (from ca. 321 BCE). The army with which he made that empire depended largely upon the supply of men, horses, elephants, and oxen, a sector which may be called military livestock. Megasthenes’ account of this large sector of government expense and the policies under which it operated gives important testimony about the causes of Chandragupta's success, namely the maintenance of a royal monopoly of horses, elephants, and arms, payment of the soldiers in peacetime and war, the demilitarization of the farmers, and the separation of the soldiers from the land. Over the long run of Indian history, from the Mauryan Empire to the present, the environmental roots of the political order lay in the complementary distribution of horse and elephant country, to the dry west and humid east of a line running down the middle of the Subcontinent; that is, respectively, the valleys of the Indus and the Ganga. The dominating power of India has always had its capital in elephant country, the valley of the Ganga, in cities from Pataliputra (Patna) to Kanauj to Delhi, in a position from which to control the eastward flow of horses and the westward flow of elephants to other states.

Megasthenes是Chandragupta Maurya统治时期的见证人，Chandragupta Maurya是印度第一个帝国的制造者（约公元前321年）。他建立这个帝国的军队在很大程度上取决于人，马，大象和黄牛的供应，这可以称为军用牲畜。梅加锡涅斯（Megasthenes）对这一庞大的政府开支部门的描述以及其运作所依据的政策，为钱德拉格普塔（Chandragupta）成功的起因提供了重要的证词，即维持对马，大象和武器的皇家垄断，在和平时期和战争中向士兵付款，农民的非军事化以及士兵与土地的分离。在从莫里扬帝国到现在的印度历史上，政治秩序的环境根源是马和象国家的互补分布，位于次大陆中部的干线西部和湿润的东部。分别是印度河和恒河的山谷。印度的统治力量一直是大象之乡，恒河谷，从帕塔利普特拉（Patna）到卡瑙吉再到德里，从那里可以控制马匹的东移和大象的西移到其他州。