A History of Sanskrit Literature c23.s2.11

c23.s2.11

The similarities, however, between the Alexandrians, the Flavians, and the lesser masters of the Kāvya are as interesting as they are natural. Encyclopaedic learning is common to all three; Apollonios does his best to weary us of the *Argonautika* by his intempestive geographical dissertations, and Lucan, despite his youth, loses no opportunity of showing his mastery³ of the Roman counterpart of the Indian Kalās. The subject-matter is, on the whole, sacrificed to the form; threadbare legends, descriptions of scenery, and commonplace reflections are crowded in without regard to appropriateness; Māgha is no greater a sinner than Apollonios or Lucan, and Valerius Flaccus and Statius are infinitely worse than he. Point, antithesis, and metaphor became essential; it was demanded of the Roman poets that they should like the prose authors adorn their writings with *sententiae*, *lumina orationis*; success was often achieved in this genre. There is a remarkable similarity between the average stanza of a Kāvya and the style of post-Augustan poetry. ‘Almost every group’, writes Merivale,⁴ ‘of three or four lines in Statius constitutes in itself an idea, perhaps a conceit, a play of thought or of words; it fastens itself like a burr upon the memory: such is the distinctness of his vision, such the elaborate accuracy of his touch. The epigram is the crowning result of this elaborate terseness of diction, and this lucid perception of the end in view. The verses of Martial are the quintessence of the Flavian poetry.’ This holds good no less of Kallimachos and the Greek epigrammatists, who come nearest to achieving similar effects to Sanskrit poets. Latin prose felt the effects of poetry; it became poetical in construction, vocabulary, and ornaments. Old and obsolete words were revived, new words invented or existing terms given new senses, and bold metaphorical transfers of meaning were affected,¹ all phenomena which occur freely in the ornate prose of the Sanskrit romances. As we have seen, Subandhu shows traces of the appropriation of verses for his work, and Tacitus himself is full of reminiscences of Vergil; Kalhaṇa in his turn freely adapts to poetry the happier turns of Bāṇa’s prose.² In prose and poetry alike we find in the silver age of Latin literature the love of strained expression and involved constructions and a search after metaphorical expression which is often artificial; Lucan, Statius, and Valerius Flaccus offer abundant examples of unsuccessful similes which make the Sanskrit poetaster’s³ comparison of an orange with the freshly shaved chin of a drunken Hun quite pardonable.