the true nature of the campaign in which SudAs is engaged… (is the) conquest over supernatural agents who… stand inwardly antagonistic to the Divine … - K. D. Sethna

We may legitimately conclude: "Th ere were a number of Saka Eras. Two of them were much older than that of 78 A.D ., and one of them which both Bhattotpala and Varahamihira have used to indicate the epochs of their works went back to the middle of the 6th century before Christ: the year 551-550.

The case for a fresh perspective in the post-Alexandrine epoch is argued in a positive tone which may create the impression in some places that the writer has no misgiving at all about any element of his thesis. As said at the very start of this Introduction, no historian can afford to be cocksure: he must always keep his mind plastic. But he is allowed to state as forcibly as he can whatever he believes to be worthy of audience - all the more if he is pleading on behalf of something that has seemed a lost cause . The present writer has no wish to appear in the eyes of historians a convinced heretic. He is prepared for criticism, open to correction and agreeable to further dialogue. What he has not bargained for is indifference. His hope is to deserve, by setting about his job as honestly and thoroughly as possible, the right of the Themistoclean appeal: "Strike, but hear!"

It seems impossible to doubt that Prithu Vainya at the commencement and Chandragupta I, founder of the Imperial Gupta in Magadha, at the termination are what the Indian informants of Megasthenes intended when they spoke of a series of 153 kings from Dionysus to Sandrocottus. Through Megasthenes the Purānic chronology of the rise of the Imperial Guptas in the last quarter of the 4th century B.C. appears to be completely vindicated.