A History of Sanskrit Literature c14.12

c14.12

Thus the great King Vikramāditya vanishes from the historical ground of the sixth century into the realm of myth. With Vikramāditya an often-quoted but ill-authenticated verse occurring in a work of the sixteenth century associates Dhanvantari, Kshapaṇaka, Amarasiṃha, Varāhamihira, and Vararuchi as among the "nine gems" of his court. With the disappearance of Vikrama from the sixth century a.d. this verse has lost all chronological validity with reference to the date of the authors it enumerates; it is even inadmissible to conclude from such legendary testimony that they were contemporaries. Even though one of them, Varāhamihira, actually does belong to the sixth century, each of them can now only be placed in the sixth century separately and by other arguments. Apart from the mythical Vikramāditya, there is now no reason to suppose that court poetry attained a special development in that century, for Harisheṇa's panegyric, and some other epigraphic poems of the Gupta period, show that it flourished greatly at least two hundred years earlier.