The Social and Military Position of the Ruling Caste in Ancient India, as Represented by the Sanskrit Epic c2.s5.757

c2.s5.757

But the most striking difference between the early and the late praiser is this, that at first the profession was full of honor; priests and kings’ sons sang to the heroes’ honor. But the praiser became a lying sycophant. Honor left the occupation. The priests no longer made new songs for new kings; they had embodied the old songs and kings alike into a religious ritual. The business of making new laudations passed into the hands of a lower class. The singer became a hired servant: or rather, hired minstrels took the place of the old singers. The bard was a lowly member of the warrior-caste or of a mixed caste.† But is it from such that the Epic has come? This comes from the priest. The latter had stored together a mass of legendary narrative; he had ceased to celebrate new victories in new verse, but he had a fund of family-histories of heroic or godly character. The Epic arose from the priest’s converting the minstrel-lays into poems, and connecting them with his store of tales that had existed as prose narration. The poem for recitation united the prose and lyric on a middle ground. The prose was beautified, the lay was robbed of its beauty. Narrative verse linked the two factors together at the same time, and in their subsequent expansion and later additions of wholly extraneous character we have the Mahābhārata.