A History of Sanskrit Literature c24.s6.1

c24.s6.1

An interesting suggestion has been made by Jacobi¹ that the Dohā metre of Apabhrañça, with which may be compared the Dodhaka metre of Classical Sanskrit poetry, in so far as both are essentially originally dactylic in structure, is to be traced back to the Greek hexameter, the Dohā being the result of combining two hexameters into a stanza and then dividing it in the usual Indian manner into four lines. The Ābhīras, he contends, were situated in Gandhāra and the neighbourhood during the period of the influence of the Greco-Bactrian kings, and they must have eventually felt the need for a rendering into an Indian speech of the Homeric poems which, as Dio² tells us, the Greeks loved so dearly, and clung to even when they had lost much else of Hellenic character. The version of Homer thus made for the educated classes would probably be in the metre of the original, and thus the Dohā would grow up as the peculiar metre of the Ābhīras and would cling to Apabhraṅça poetry. A parallel may be seen in the great influence exerted on Bengal prose literature by the missionaries of Serampore.