The Social and Military Position of the Ruling Caste in Ancient India, as Represented by the Sanskrit Epic c2.s4.3

c2.s4.3

This view is of course not brought forward in the law-books. Their authors were the later priests, who regarded the world as made for them alone, and looked upon the king as a steward divinely appointed to provide them with what needed. Far otherwise appears the Aryan state in the early Epic. A freer life is found here. The king is a king, not an appendage to the priest. The view of the formal law reflects the vain ideas of men conscious of mental superiority and anxious to bring the state into harmonious relations with their egotism. The Epic, an unconscious mirror, furnishes social facts as found in an age as yet comparatively independent, and portrays conditions that survived even the unscrupulous handling of the text by those opposing this independence. ‘The priest is the standard of the world,’ says the formal law; ‘the king is the standard,’ says the Epic.*