that during the pauses in the great horse sacrifice, performed to assert the wide sovereignty of the king, both Brahmins and warriors sang songs to fill up the time? We may legitimately assume that in the Ṛgveda we have hymns of other than directly ritual or magic purpose; the gambler's hymn cannot by any reasonable stretch of the imagination be taken as ritual.[1]
It is also impossible to accept the view that the Vedic drama died out under the chilling effect of the disapproval of the priests of fertility ritual. We find, on the contrary, that fertility ritual is fully recognized later in the Mahāvrata ceremonial, and also in the horse sacrifice, which are both known to the other Vedic Saṁhitās, though this feature of the rite is not referred to, directly at least, in the Ṛgveda. Moreover, even if the disapproval of fertility rites had been real, why should it have brought to a close the drama? The dialogues of Agni and the gods, of Saramā and the Paṇis, of Varuṇa and Indra, of Indra and the singer – and perhaps Vāyu also (viii. 100), have no connexion with fertility, and this aspect of drama need not have perished. Dr. Hertel is certainly right in demanding traces of development, not of decadence, but his great effort to find a full drama in the Suparṇādhyāya must definitely be pronounced a failure. It involves an elaborate invention of stage directions, the preparation of a list of dramatis personae largely on the basis of imagination, and a translation of the piece based on this theory, which can be shown in detail to be open to the certainty of error. Add to this the fact that there is no hint in Indian tradition that the Suparṇādhyāya, on the face of it a late imitation of Vedic work proper, had ever any dramatic intention or use.
A very different theory of the purpose of these hymns is that which we owe to Professors Windisch,[2] Oldenberg,[3] and Pischel.[4] They represent an old type, Indo-European in antiquity, of composition of epic character, in which the verses, representing the points of highest emotion, were preserved, and the connecting links were in prose which was not stereotyped, and therefore
