Ashoka the Great
The Mauryan emperor who conquered nearly all India, then renounced war for Buddhism and rule by moral law; his lion emblem crowns India today.
Sometime around 261 BC, an Indian emperor won the greatest victory of his career and never got over it. Ashoka, third ruler of the Maurya dynasty, had conquered Kalinga on the east coast, and by his own later reckoning the war left 100,000 dead, 150,000 deported, and many times that number dead of its aftermath. What makes Ashoka extraordinary is not the carnage, which was ordinary for his age, but what he did next: he wrote the horror down, in public, on rock, and told his subjects he was ashamed.
An empire, then a conversion
Ashoka inherited the largest empire the Indian subcontinent would see until the Mughals, stretching from Afghanistan to nearly the southern tip of India. He came to power around 268 BC and, like every Maurya before him, expanded it by the sword. Kalinga was the last of those wars. In its wake he embraced Buddhism and remade his kingship around dhamma, a word he stretched to mean something like moral law: tolerance between sects, welfare for subjects, and ahimsa, non-harm to living things.
This was not private piety. Ashoka governed by dhamma and advertised it relentlessly. He had officials dig wells, plant shade trees, and provide rest houses and medical care for humans and animals along the roads. He softened, though did not abolish, the harshness of Mauryan justice. He called it conquest by dharma, and presented it as superior to conquest by arms.
The first ruler to publish
Ashoka's real genius was communication. He is the first ruler in history known to have broadcast his policies directly to his people, carving edicts onto polished sandstone pillars and boulders across the empire, more than thirty of which survive. They were written for their audiences: Prakrit in the Brahmi and Kharosthi scripts across India, and Greek and Aramaic in the northwest, where Alexander's successors and old Persian administrators still lived. One bilingual Greek-Aramaic edict sits in modern Kandahar.
He also exported his faith. Ashoka sent Buddhist missions well beyond his borders, most consequentially to Sri Lanka, where tradition holds that his own son Mahinda carried the religion that still defines the island. It was under Ashoka that a regional Indian sect began its transformation into a world religion.
The caveats, and the afterlife
The obvious catch is that almost everything flattering about Ashoka comes from Ashoka. The edicts are his own account of his reign, a two-thousand-year-old press release in stone, and the peace he preached did not save his dynasty: within roughly fifty years of his death around 232 BC the Maurya empire had fragmented and vanished.
Then Ashoka himself vanished from memory, surviving only in Buddhist legend, until 1837, when the scholar James Prinsep cracked the Brahmi script and realized the modest king of the inscriptions, who called himself Beloved of the Gods, was the great emperor of the tales. The rediscovery made him a founding symbol of the modern Indian state. The Lion Capital that once topped his pillar at Sarnath is now India's national emblem, and the 24-spoke wheel from that same monument, the Ashoka Chakra, turns at the center of the Indian flag. A man remembered for renouncing conquest ended up conquering the imagination of a nation born 2,200 years after his death.