OF ANCIENT INDIA CONDENSED into ENGLISH VERSE By ROMESH C. DUTT, C.I.E. WITH ΑΝ INTRODUCTION BY THE RIGHT HON. F. MAX MÜLLER TWENTY-FOUR PHOTOGRAVURES FROM ORIGINAL ILLUSTRATIONS DESIGNED FROM INDIAN SOURCES BY E. STUART HARDY 29 LONDON J. M. DENT & CO. & 30 BEDFORD STREET, W.C. INTRODUCTION WE possess but very little of true Epic Poetry, and the PK 4474 by Reinthal, 1857. They were found to be in a much more fragmentary state, and it is supposed that they were largely restored, while in the case of the Kalewala we possess the trustworthy copy of poems exactly as they were, and are still recited in Finland by old men and women in the presence of their Swedish auditors. All other epic poems, after existing for an unknown length of time in the tradition of popular poets, have passed through what is called a Diaskeué, a setting in order, a dressing or recension at the hands of later poets. The most perfect specimen of this kind of epic poetry exists in the two Homeric poems, the Iliad and Odyssey. How the component parts of these poems, such as the Cyclopeia, the story of the wooden horse at Troy, the Nekyia, the Doloneia, the Patrokleia, &c., had existed before they formed part of an Odyssey and Iliad, we can see in the case of Demodokos and other Aoidoi who sang these Aristeias at festivals, both public and private. But we have no trustworthy information as to how these poems came to be collected, whether their dialect and metre were changed in the schools of the Homerida, and at what time the first written copies of them were prepared and circulated. I doubt whether in Greece the very idea of a written literature existed much before 500 or 600 B.C., that is, before the first contact between West and East. There is the Greek alphabet, which tells us in the clearest way that the Greeks learnt their letters from the Phoenicians; but there is a long distance between a knowledge of the ABC and its employment for inscriptions, coins, and even for official treaties, and its use for literary purposes. I confess that the well-known passage at the end of the Phædrus gives me the impression as if even Plato had still a recollection of the time when literature was mnemonic only, and not yet written |