CHARACTER AND EXTENT OF THE USE OF SANSKRIT 13 long before Acoka. Now, though the Brahmins made the epics largely their own, they were not the earliest composers of this form of literature, and the fact is attested in the simpler, more careless, language which shows indifference to many of the refine- ments of Brahmanical speech. Panini ignores these deviations from his norm ; it was no part of his aim to deal with the speech current outside the hieratic circle, and in the epic speech we have doubtless the form of language used by the Ksatriyas and the better educated of the Vaicyas during the period when the poems took shape. Both the Mahabharata and the Ramayana are, it must be remembered, essentially aristocratic ; they corre- spond to the Iliad and the Odyssey, and like them became the objects of the deep interest of wider circles. In recent times, no doubt, the epics have been unintelligible to the audience, to whom interpretation has been requisite, though delight is still felt in the sound of the sacred language. But this doubtless was not the -case in older times ; we must postulate a long period when the epic was fairly easily intelligible to large sections of the people.
Doubtless, as time went on, the gulf between Sanskrit and the languages of the day became more and more marked; even between the epic language and that of the Brahmin schools there were differences to which express reference is made in the Ramayana?- and both the practice of the dramas and such passages 'as that in Kalidasa's Kumarasambhava? in which Sarasvatl addresses Qiva and his bride, the one in Sanskrit, the other in Prakrit, attest dialectic differences based on rank, sex, and locality. In a sense doubtless Sanskrit came more and more to resemble Latin in the Middle Ages, but, like Latin, its vitality as the learned speech of the educated classes was unimpaired, and it won victories even in fields which were at first hostile to it. 3 The medical textbook current under the name of Caraka tells us that Sanskrit was used in discussions in the medical schools of the day. A work of very different character, the Katnasutra of Vatsyayana, bids its man of fashion in his con-
1 v. 30. 1 7 f. ; iv. 3. 28 f. ; li. 91. 22 ; vii. 36. 44 ; Jacobi, Ramayana, p. 1 15. Cf. Hopkins, Great Epic, p. 364.
2 vii. 87.
3 Cf. Jacobi, Scuntia, xiv. 251 ff. ; Oldenberg, Das Mahabharata, pp. 129 ff.
