SOURCE: Alles, Gregory D. “Poetic Works and Their Worlds.” In The Iliad, The Rāmāyana, and the Work of Religion: Failed Persuasion and Religious Mystification, pp. 49-75. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994.

[In the following essay, Alles compares the social and mythological contexts of the Ramayana and The Iliad, arguing that both poems reflect the problem social communities face when persuasion breaks down.]

I

The Iliad and the Rāmāyana rehearse what happens when persuasion fails. Achilles takes to his hut, and the order of society is not fully restored until the Olympians intervene. Rāma retreats to the forest and does not return until he has slain the mightiest demon of all.

It has been quite some time since American scholars, at least, have argued seriously about whether these events actually occurred. Most of them simply assume that the stories we have are fictitious, whatever actual events might have inspired Homer, Vālmīki, or their predecessors. Discussions about the universes of the poems have been more serious. Within living memory, respected scholars like M. I. Finley and S. N. Vyas have tried to reconstruct “the world of Odysseus” and “India in the Rāmāyana age” partly from literary, partly from archaeological sources.¹ But so far as I can see, their critics are more nearly correct. The worlds of the Iliad and the Rāmāyana are artificial composites—imagined, literary realities—that never existed as experienced, literal totalities.

This [essay] takes up questions of history from a different angle. It transposes those questions from the events and worlds within the poems to the poems themselves as events, to the poetic work, if you will. We know that ancient audiences cared about the Iliad and the Rāmāyana. We know, too, that poems about which audiences care somehow articulate with their audiences' concerns. Otherwise, they would simply be ignored. The task at hand is to determine, so far as we are able, the manner in which the treatments of failed persuasion articulated with the concerns of their authors and early audiences. In other words, where did literary and literal realities intersect?

My suggestion is this: in imagining fictive solutions to problems of failed persuasion, Homer and Vālmīki were mystifying fundamental threats to the worlds in which they lived. That is, they addressed pressing problematics in the worlds of experienced, literal reality, but they addressed them with solutions that were, strictly speaking, available only in the worlds of imagined, literary reality. That, I will suggest, was the religious work of the poems. This suggestion will emerge more clearly, however, if before turning to actual history we assess other, plausible accounts of the work of the poems.

II

Ancient Roman rhetoricians identified three purposes for verbal activity: to please, to teach, and to move someone to act. This list is a convenient place to begin reflecting on the work of the Iliad and the Rāmāyana. It helps organize the kinds of work previous scholars have ascribed to both poems.

On one view, Homer and Vālmīki sang their poems because, for motives ranging from noble to base, they were trying to please their audiences.² This view is easy to discount, but we should not dismiss it completely. Stories and poems do please, and at some time or other stories as long as the Iliad and the Rāmāyana had better have pleased a great deal, lest Homer and Vālmīki find themselves without audiences and, perhaps, back tilling the fields. But saying that Homer and Vālmīki composed their poems to please their patrons and audiences does not tell us much that we specifically want to know. It does not identify what attracted the poets to the theme of failed persuasion, nor does it indicate why audiences would have listened with pleasure, as they obviously did, to tremendously long poems that used that theme.³

Other accounts conceive of the epics as teaching. Homer and Vālmīki were, so to speak, the educators of ancient Greece and India. The Rāmāyana has indeed taught—defined and transmitted—ideal social roles. … Another anecdote illustrates how these roles actually operate, even among people who are not particularly devout. Reflecting on the experience of being illegally demoted and locked out of his office, a professor of archaeology once told me (I'm paraphrasing), “My sons wanted me to fight it, but I asked myself, ‘What would Rāma have done?’ So at first I was inclined to let it be.”

Almost thirty years ago Eric Havelock developed a pedagogical view of Homer in the context of his work with orality and formulaic composition.⁴ In a nonliterate world like early Greece, he argued, formulaic expressions and themes constituted the prime source of knowledge, the Iliad and the Odyssey were the first Enkyklopedia Hellenikē. Underlying Havelock's view is the position that in oral-formulaic poetry the medium is the message, and the stories are unimportant. But this position is difficult to maintain for works like the Iliad and the Odyssey, whose narratives possess a unity, power, and economy unique among the epics of Greece.⁵ Worse yet, the establishment and transmission of social paradigms can hardly be the specific work of a narrative whose central thematic is a contravention of a social paradigm that no one should emulate and that cannot be redressed by ordinary human means. One can at least emulate Rāma, but that still does not tell us why audiences cared about the narrative.⁶

In the last several years, another view of the work of the Iliad and the Rāmāyana has become fashionable. In this view, the two poems moved their audience to act or, rather, not to act. Each epic was composed to legitimate the position and interests of a ruling figure, stratum, or class in ancient Greece or India. Once again, I think, our nets come up empty. An appeal to legitimation does not elucidate why or how Homer's and Vālmīki's literary and lived worlds intersected at the failure of persuasion. But this point requires separate and extended treatment for each poem. In the course of that treatment, my own position—that the poems worked to mystify ultimate threats to social and even universal existence—will begin to emerge.

III

Those who find meaning in the Iliad's structures—its world or style as opposed to its narrative—have viewed the epic as a device to legitimate the position of the highest class (using the world “class” in a nontechnical sense).⁷ The world of which Homer sings is a world of heroes, of the agathoi or leading members of society; all others are inconsequential. It is a quick jump to assume that Homeric epic provided the model for the supremacy of the aristoi in Homer's day, whether that class was actually ascendant or, as Ian Morris has recently suggested for late eighth-century Athens, in (temporary) retreat.⁸

There are good reasons to connect Greek formulaic epic with the aristoi of Homer's day. Some eighth-century funerals seem to have emulated Homeric practice, just as funerals today are often signs of social pretension. Leading figures on the Asia Minor coast bore such Homeric names as Agamemnon and Hektor and such patronyms as Neleid (after Nestor of Pylos, whose descendants allegedly came east via Athens). Narrative heroic art begins to appear at this period, presumably to cater to the fancies of the well-to-do, and some have connected the nascent cults at Mycenaean tombs with familial social ambitions.⁹ It does seem, then, as Ian Morris has suggested, that the aristoi of the eighth century liked to think of themselves as Mycenaean heroes,¹⁰ and it is easy to imagine Homer and his fellow bards providing entertainment at rich men's feasts, as Demodokos, Phēmios, and even Odysseus himself do in the Odyssey. (But is Homer's depiction of bards accurate history or useful ideology? That I cannot tell.)

It is important to be clear about what these features establish. They strongly suggest that eighth-century aristoi were using epic materials to further their social pretensions. But as vase paintings show, the epic materials they used certainly encompassed more than the Iliad and the Odyssey. On one count only about 10 percent of painted narrative scenes derive from Homer's poems; the rest of the Homeric cycle [The series of ancient Greek epics that related the Trojan war from start to finish: Cypria, Iliad, Aithiopis, Ilias parva (Little Iliad), Iliu persis (Sack of Troy), Nostoi (Returns), Odyssey, and Telegony. Usually only the Iliad and the Odyssey are ascribed to Homer himself.] provides many more subjects. And the 10 percent that do come from Homer are made up of only a limited stock of favorite stories.¹¹ At the most we can say that traditional heroic epic provided a resource for the upper crust in its play for power and prestige. If we speak of “Homer” here, that is only a sort of synecdoche. As the practitioner of heroic epic whose name we know best, Homer is made to stand for the whole.

There are solid reasons, I think, why the Iliad's defining narrative, centered on wrath, affliction, and the failure of persuasion, should not be seen as an attempt to legitimate the position of the aristoi. Hans Robert Jauss has developed a typology of the various ways audiences identify with heroes.¹² To my tastes, his typology is somewhat naive sociologically. Nevertheless, he makes sense when he connects the emulation and imitation of heroic models with a particular type of hero and a particular type of “receptive disposition.” According to Jauss, a person emulates or imitates a “perfect” hero, one whose capacities are greater than one's own can ever be, because that person identifies with the hero through admiration. Think of how certain Christians, for example, have admired and thus identified with saints.¹³

The Iliad certainly contains its share of admirable and emulatable figures. As a matter of routine, both Achaian and Trojan heroes perform tasks that are impossible for mortals of today. Even among them, certain heroes stand out. My personal favorites are Ajax, Hektor, Diomedes, and perhaps Odysseus. We admire such figures. In fact, we have to. If Hektor or Ajax or Diomedes were not admirable, the Iliad would not work.

The reason the Iliad would not work is that these admirable figures provide the necessary background against which Homer sets the defining narrative. They effect a process of identification that allows us to recognize the significance of the events portrayed. The narrative itself, however, focuses on something far different from the emulatable hero. It depicts the “perfect” hero, and he turns out to be a hero whom it is impossible to emulate or really admire.

Why can we not admire Achilles? We cannot in part because Homer builds a critique of Achilles into the Iliad, a critique that we find compelling because we hear it from those we do admire. When Achilles' rage starts to contravene the accepted paradigms of persuasion, Phoinix says correctly, “Until now there was nothing wrong [ou ti nemessēton] with being angry” (Il. 9.523; my translation). But beginning with the failure of persuasion in book 9, there is something wrong with Achilles' anger. After Phoinix's speech, the critique continues in the tense relations between Zeus and the other gods in the middle of the poem; is taken up by Patroklos when he speaks for the Achaian cause, only to be rewarded with death (see 16.21-45); rises one notch when Odysseus demonstrates in Iliad 19 that Achilles' demands are unreasonable and another notch when the raging Achilles, in danger of losing his life at the hands of gods he has so boldly attacked, must be rescued by divine intervention. Once Hektor is killed, the dead Patroklos must plead with his former companion for burial. Finally, in the divine council of Iliad 24, even Zeus, Achilles' ultimate partisan, concedes that he has had enough.

Achilles is not an admirable and emulatable hero. He is an ambiguous hero. His rage and unpersuadability represent the internal forces of social disintegration raised to their highest power. They threaten to destroy the heroes and their world of consensus. But Achilles' rage and rejection of persuasion can pose this threat only because Achilles is the “best of all the Achaians.” He is capable of great destruction, but only because he is first capable of great good. The most powerful hero is the one most needed for survival, but as the Iliad shows clearly, he is also the most dangerous.

How does an audience respond to such a hero and such a tale? Homer hints at how he expects his audience to respond, for he builds an audience into his poem, again an audience made up of those whom Homer's audience would admire. Confronted with the account of Achilles' rage and implacability, the great heroes of old all sat in stunned amazement at the powerful words (Il. 9.693-94). Achilles' rage is stunning; silent, dumbfounded amazement is the appropriate response. But Homer is not content to leave his audience in amazed awe at his hero's capacity for implacable rage and at the unraveling of the social fabric. In the end he transforms awe at the problem into awe at the solution. The stunned amazement of the Achaians is eclipsed by the profound nocturnal peace that accompanies the quelling of Achilles' great rage in Iliad 24, in fact, by the awe of Achilles himself as he looks on the aged Priam. Human obstinacy is great, but in the end divine persuasion is greater.

The leading class of Homer's day may have used the resources of epic to legitimate their position, but it does not make much sense to say that Homer's thematic of failed persuasion furthered their efforts. The central figure is one we cannot emulate, imitate, or admire, and the turn of events is one that everyone would try to avoid. Instead, Homer seems to be articulating powerfully an ultimate threat to human, social existence, and then providing a religious, social fiction to mystify that threat and thereby overcome it.

IV

We cannot apply the same argument against legitimation to the Rāmāyana. Unlike Achilles Rāma is a perfect hero whom hundreds of millions of people still emulate and adore. Nevertheless, to suggest that Vālmīki composed a narrative centered on dharma, sukha, and resistance to persuasion in order to legitimate political privilege would, I think, again miss the point.

To be sure, the Rāmāyana has been used to legitimate political privilege for at least the last two thousand years. The Sātavāhana king Vasiṣṭhīputra Pulumāvi (mid second century c.e.), in an inscription found in a cave at Nasik in western India, eulogized his father by comparing him with Rāma, probably Vālmīki's Rāma.¹⁴ Almost two millennia later, in the state elections of July 1988 Arun Govil, who played Rāma in the televised “Ramayan,” campaigned in costume for the ruling Congress (I) party in Uttar Pradesh. In the national elections of June 1991, the same serial's Sītā, Deepika Chikaliya, was elected, as a member of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), to the Indian National Assembly (Lok Sabha) from Vadodara (Baroda) in Gujarat. Her costar, Arvind Trivedi, who played Rāvana, successfully contested the seat for Sabarkantha, also in Gujarat, as a representative of the BJP. More broadly, during the late 1980s and early 1990s the BJP, or “Indian People's Party,” rose from obscurity to become the nation's largest opposition party—largely by proclaiming a crusade to rescue Rāma's birthplace from Muslim squatters.¹⁵ So there can be no question that the Rāmāyana has been used for political legitimation. The question remains, is that why its defining narrative was composed?

Romila Thapar, arguably the leading historian of ancient India alive today, suggests that it is.¹⁶ Bards like Vālmīki, she points out, inhabited royal courts. There they both lauded the ruler and tended the mythological treasures, the traditions of itihāsa-purāna. [Collections of tales, in simple poetic meters, that relate past events. As a genre, itihāsa-purāna usually comprises the larger of India's two epics, the Mahābhārata, and the various mythological collections called Purānas, but not the Rāmāyana.] They often combined the two functions by prefixing traditional tales to praises as a way of legitimating the ruler's pedigree. That, says Thapar, is just what the bard or bards responsible for the Rāmāyana did. They started with the theme of an exiled prince common in Buddhist “foundation legends.” Then they formulated a tale in which the heir of the ancient kingdom of Kośala brought civilization to the wilds south of Prayāg. [The conjunction (prayāga) of the rivers Ganā (Ganges) and Yamunā (Jumna), today the site of the city of Allahabad. In the Rāmāyana Prayāg, and more particularly the hermitage (āśrama) of the sage Bharadvāja on its banks, forms a sort of pivot in Rāma's journey south. It is the last distinctly marked geographical location that Rāma visits. As noted earlier, Kośala is a region (mahājanapada) to the north of this site. But ancient Indians also referred to a region south of Prayāg as Kośala, or more accurately, Dakṣina-Kośala, “Southern Kośala.”] In this way, they gave legitimacy to a new dynasty (and kingdom) of Southern Kośala.

Thapar's account makes a number of questionable assumptions. It assumes that the Rāmāyana's defining narrative (as distinct from its constituent materials) experienced a long period of gestation; that the Rāmāyana's original nucleus had nothing to do with morality; that Vālmīki was a court poet; that Lankā was originally situated in Southern Kośala; that the point of the original story was to place Vibhīṣana on the throne of Lankā; in fact, that certain Buddhist stories are foundation legends.¹⁷ But even more serious than these assumptions is another obstacle to deriving the Rāmāyana's defining narrative from a desire to legitimate. That obstacle is the narrative itself, and I think it is insurmountable.

Notice how the Rāmāyana legitimates in the examples already cited. It donates virtue, above all, Rāma's virtue. This donation is possible because, unlike Achilles, Rāma is a supremely admirable figure. He has to be. Otherwise his exile would pose no problems, and his victory would breed no delight. Vālmīki ensures that his audiences admire Rāma in at least two ways. He inserts into the poem audiences with whom we identify, and these audiences clearly admire Rāma. He also introduces a cast of lesser characters against whom Rāma's virtue can be judged: Kaikeyī and Daśaratha, Śūrpanakhā, the monkey-king Vālin, to a lesser extent Vālin's brother Sugrīva, then above all Rāvana. The relation between Rāma and the other characters in the poems reverses the relation between Achilles and the kings and amplifies Rāma's stature. As a result, a favorable comparison with Rāma or any of his close associates—Sītā, Lakṣmana, Hanumān, Kausalyā, or Bharata—becomes useful as an instrument of legitimation.

But the crucial point is this: the Rāmāyana only works to legitimate to the extent that those who use it systematically neglect the problems that Vālmīki's narrative raises, then resolves. Not only does the desire to legitimate provide no motivation for a tale about the confrontation between what ought to be and what one ought to do and the failure of persuasion to resolve it; these themes, essential to the present discussion of the poem, only obstruct its legitimatory utility.

Vālmīki could have easily legitimated rule in, say, Southern Kośala without ever introducing the distinctive features of the Rāmāyana's story as follows: “Plagued by the attacks of demons, the inhabitants of the forests south of Prayāg ask Daśaratha, lord of Ayodhyā, for help. In response, Daśaratha sends his son Rāma, who defeats the demons, stays to rule, and fathers a dynasty.” Some variants could replace “stays to rule …,” with “and appoints as governor Vibhīṣana, father of the current dynasty.” This rather trite tale would do the job of legitimation nicely, but it is distinctly not the defining narrative of the Rāmāyana.¹⁸

Even more important, the features of the narrative that are our concerns—the conflict between what ought to be and what one ought to do and the failure of persuasion—fundamentally obstruct any attempt to legitimate. They emphasize a lesson that any poet serious about legitimation would work hard to avoid: the king's virtues and person and office are problematic. Vālmīki's narrative begins innocently enough. It rehearses the sort of cant virtues that praise poets have always propagated. “His ātman is always calm; his speech is always kind. When he is addressed harshly, he says nothing in reply” (Rām. 2.1.15; my translation). But it abruptly undercuts that praise. These very virtues require Rāma to renounce the kingdom and enter the forest.¹⁹ Like all great poets, then, Vālmīki opens our eyes to the profundity of life. Among other things, he demonstrates that if we take the cant virtues of the praise poets seriously, they lead to events whose consequences everyone would want to avoid.

To be sure, it remains entirely possible that Vālmīki—whoever he might have been—was a court poet, despite tales in the Uttara-kānna that place him in a hermitage. In that case, it is almost certain that the royal cultivation of poetry served to legitimate the ruler's power, not just blatantly through the activity of praise poets, but more subtly through the act of sustaining the creative arts. A court that, if tradition is correct, produced the first Sanskrit kāvya would have some (just?) cause to brag. In that sense, the Rāmāyana may have always helped to legitimate, even if the earliest solid evidence for the active legitimatory use of the poem dates no earlier than the second century c.e., some time after the poem was composed (see section 7 of this [essay]). Nevertheless, it does not make much sense to say that the desire to legitimate provided the impetus to compose the defining narrative that we find in the Rāmāyana. On the one hand, legitimation cannot account for the poem that was written. On the other, the Rāmāyana legitimates only to the extent that it can invoke Rāma's virtues without invoking the problems that the narrative works so assiduously to develop.²⁰ Instead, Vālmīki seems to have powerfully articulated an ultimate threat to human social existence: what ought to be done threatens to upset entirely what ought to be, and the ordinary force of social control, the force of persuasion, is helpless before it. Having drawn that threat, Vālmīki then composed a masterful fiction to mystify it and thereby overcome it. The lesson of the Rāmāyana reads: despite initial appearances, acting in accordance with dharma and ignoring practical advice will eventually produce what ought to be.

V

This, I suggest, was the poetic work of Homer's and Vālmīki's defining narratives: they mystified ultimate threats. First, they articulated the threats of social and universal collapse that arose when persuasion failed. Then, they imagined solutions to those threats in narrative form. The solutions are mystifications because, however compelling they may seem, they remain unavailable in our ordinary lives. Zeus and the Olympians do not send messengers to us on earth. Evil does not present itself in the form of demons that we can physically kill.

For these mystifications to have worked, the imagined, literary realities of the poems must have intersected with the experienced, literal realities of their audiences. What problems in the worlds of experience did these mystifications address? Our knowledge of ancient Greece permits a more finely grained answer than our knowledge of ancient India does. For Homer, we can distinguish the context of initial composition from the contexts of later dissemination. For Vālmīki we must discuss both concurrently.

Let us assume that the scholarly consensus is correct and that the Iliad came into existence in Ionia in the mid eighth century b.c.e. What was its originary context like?

There is much room for caution. Knowledge of the social and cultural institutions in which Homer would have composed is essential to any convincing analysis, but it is simply not available. We know a little about later bards, such as the rhapsodes who recited Homeric poetry and Hesiod who won first prize in a competition on Euboea. But for Homer and his Ionian associates, G. L. Huxley is depressingly sober and depressingly correct: “There is little evidence for the circumstances in which the Asiatic Greek poets were accustomed to recite their epics.”²¹ As for the circumstances of Homer's audience, new archaeological discoveries and ever more sophisticated analytical techniques promise increasing elucidation, but much of what we would most like to know remains dismally obscure. About Asia Minor in the eighth century, J. M. Cook writes, “[Archaeology] cannot relieve our ignorance of the constitutional history of these early settlements.”²² On the best known location in all of Greece, Snodgrass observes, “We still do not know enough of Attica in the second half of the eighth century to speak with any confidence about the likely intellectual and spiritual concerns of its artists.”²³ Nevertheless, there are a few hints of the Iliad's originary context, and they are tantalizing.

If Homer lived in eighth-century Ionia, it seems that he lived in the wrong place at a very exciting time. By the eighth century, Ionia was one of Greece's cultural backwaters. It was, ironically, isolated from the oriental influences that had sparked off bursts of cultural activity in other parts of the Greek world.²⁴

But Ionia did have a proud past. Precisely when and why and how Greeks had come to settle on the western coast of Asia Minor is unknown, but come they did, beginning somewhere around the eleventh century b.c.e. They seem to have brought with them the roots from which a flourishing tradition of oral poetry would grow. It is difficult, of course, to know the precise place of oral poetry in Ionic life. All that we have are tasty hors d'oeuvres that do nothing to sate our hunger for the main course. Homer's references to phyla and phratries as military and kinship units seem to echo the phyla and phratries of Ionia.²⁵ Features of Ionian settlements seem reflected in similar characteristics in Ionian epic.²⁶ Homer's audiences would probably have included the leading men on the Asia Minor coast, whose suggestive names and patronyms I have already had occasion to mention ….

Ionia could also boast of another major achievement, although given the recent discoveries at Lefkandi on Euboea it must now share its bragging rights.²⁷ Early on, Ionia developed large, settled communities. We do not know how the settlements were patterned. Toward the end of the eighth century some communities were gathered about an elevated citadel (what Homer calls a ptolis) with an open area (for assembly?) flanked by a temple and what is presumably the hut of the leading man.²⁸ Fortification walls were not unknown—Smyrna and Emporio-on-Chios had them—but they seem to have been rare.²⁹ The scarcity of fortifications should not be taken, however, as indicating a scarcity of strife. Inter-Ionian struggles were not entirely quelled when later the twelve leading Ionian cities banded together to form a league, centered about a common sanctuary.³⁰

These characteristics are hopelessly broad. They are nothing like the refined historical detail available to critics of modern literature, who may be able to correlate the words of a poem with events contemporary to the month or even the day of its composition.³¹ But rough as they are, they may contain a clue to the significance of Homer's originary context. Many have noted that Homer's (imagined) perspective is that of an Ionian colonist. His Ionia is deliberately archaizing: for example, in the Iliad Miletus is not a Greek city, although by the eighth century it was.³² The Achaian camp on the Ilian shore is reminiscent of the situation of the first Greek colonists who came to Asia Minor. Do the experiences of colonization and the development of larger settlements provide a context against which we can read the Iliad's defining narrative?

The potential is certainly present, for these situations posed a problem, and the Ionians utilized a solution, that are familiar from Homer. Colonization and the subsequent coalescence of larger communities required a shift in patterns of authority. So far as we can tell, “dark age” Greeks lived in a patriarchal society. Authority resided in the aristos, the “best man” in charge of the oikos or “extended household.” Colonization and urban coalescence would have disrupted this pattern by removing individuals from the context of the oikos and bringing them together as relative equals for joint ventures. That is, it would have created a community based on mutual persuasion and consensus.³³

The problem is that in such a setting the traditional pattern of authority (the dominance of the single aristos) and the inevitable, clear interest of the aristos in the affairs of his family and retainers would no longer apply. What would ensure successful persuasion and consensus in the face of dissent, dissent that would be especially disastrous on a foreign shore? Social problems were never solved in ancient Greece without recourse to religion. Later colonizers received their commissions from the god. At the center of cities stood temples; under the watchful eyes of their inhabitants the citizens performed their duties and observed the laws. The general pattern seems clear: where mortal authority was ill defined, the Greeks invoked a higher authority made in their own image, the gods.³⁴

The defining narrative of the Iliad is built around the same tensions. The story of Meleagros shows that the enraged aristos had been an important theme in the formulaic tradition prior to the Iliad. But the Meleagros tale is not set in a community of consensus. It works by playing the enraged hero's obstinacy off against the persuasion by those in whom he has an interest, his relatives and retainers. Its effect within the patriarchal community is clear from the moral Phoinix draws: an agathos must suffer personal affronts and maintain the position of his household as soon as it is threatened, otherwise he loses.

By contrast, Achilles' destructive wrath dramatizes the fragile nature of the community of consensus:³⁵ not just the precariousness of an Ionian existence susceptible to fragmentation and annihilation as a result of unpersuadable rage but also the recognition that those on whom the community of consensus depends the most pose the greatest threat. The Iliad does not simply objectify and dramatize this threat; it also mystifies and obscures it. For it dramatizes, operating behind the scenes, a world of divinities who although they fight among themselves, take an interest in human affairs. The authority of these gods, especially of the greatest among them, Zeus, resembles that of the old aristos, for it is both universally recognized and unavoidable. Even the greatest hero of them all, when enraged beyond all bounds, felt compelled to obey it. The central, social fiction of the Iliad reads: when the consensus of human persuasion fails, the persuasion of the gods will stand firm.

VI

It is at least conceivable that the tensions inherent in Ionian colonization and urban coalescence, along with the religious resolution of these tensions, provided the stimulus by which a poet or group of poets transformed traditional tales of rage, such as the story of Meleagros, into the masterpiece of the Iliad's defining narrative. But what accounts for the widespread dissemination of this story throughout Greece in the eighth century and the intense attention that, given the Iliad's careful construction and full elaboration, the narrative must have received?

By the eighth century, Greece was emerging from the dismal decline that followed the end of the Mycenaean world and experiencing what scholars since the early eighties have called a renaissance.³⁶ The real excitement was back by the mainland at places like Euboea, Corinth, and Athens. Some alleged developments of the time are debatable: a shift from pastoral nomadism to sedentary agriculture, the quadrupling of the population of Athens in the last half of the century, or, alternatively, the rise of a populist movement at Athens in mid-century that was suppressed as the seventh century began.³⁷ But other developments are more certain, and they make for an impressive list. Serious trade began with peoples both to the east and to the west, and it was followed within a generation by serious colonization, especially in the fertile plains of Magna Graeca. Greeks, perhaps traders, adapted the Phoenician script to produce their alphabet. Greek artists borrowed oriental themes and motifs to produce a distinctive, new style, and mythographers systematized traditional tales along oriental lines.³⁸ These developments alone would be enough to swell any generation with pride, but they were accompanied by three others that, I believe, are even more significant for the widespread reproduction of the Iliad.

First, it was in the eighth century that the polis emerged generally. The small, isolated settlements of the Dark Ages (in Homer's terms, the oikoi) gave way to a new kind of community, whether by the coalescence of oikoi (“synoikism”) or some other means. A prime characteristic of this new community was the body of “citizens” (variously restricted) who deliberated on communal goals.³⁹ Second, the religion of the Greeks developed very significant forms. For the first time, Panhellenic sanctuaries at Olympia, Delphi, Delos, and Dodona became active. Mycenaean tombs generally became the sites of hero cults. Most visible of all were the temples that became common at the places around which the emerging poleis coalesced.⁴⁰ Third, an intense interest in epic poetry seems to have swept the Greek world in the mid to late eighth century, and with it came an interest in “narrative” representational art. The epic influence extended the width and breadth of Greece, from the Ionian east to as far west as Pithecousai off the coast of modern Naples.

It is clear that the defining narrative of the Iliad is fully congruent with what would appear to have been ideological developments in the eighth century, whether it caused them or, as I think more probable, reflected and reinforced them. Greeks in the eighth century seem to have made two basic cultural moves: a move to the outside world, to which we can attribute the rise of trade, colonization, writing, and orientalizing art and mythography (and the popularity of the Odyssey), and a shift in the basis of power. In the second move we see once again a shift from a hierarchical, probably patriarchal model of power to a model of power based on persuasion and consensus, now in the rise of the full-fledged Greek polis.⁴¹

This shift would have been accompanied by tensions that resulted from the uncertain consensus on which community rested, and Greeks generally resolved these tensions by obscuring them through religious ideology. Seeking an archaeological sign for the new form of organization, Snodgrass can do no better than point to the rise of temples. To justify his choice, he writes, “there was no factor more important in the composition of the state than devotion to common cults.” Elsewhere, he recalls Victor Ehrenberg, according to whom “the god became the monarch of a state which had ceased to be monarchical.”⁴² The eighth century was a seminal period in the development of the religion of the Greeks, in large part because religion was the essential fiction that made the existence of the polis possible. Pointedly, the gods most crucial to the process of “polisization” were the gods most active in and familiar from Homer: Zeus, Athena, and Apollo.

The Iliad became widely popular in eighth-century Greece because, in mystifying the failure of persuasion, it dramatized the social, religious fiction on which the Greek community had come to be based. It remained popular because its religious fiction retained its hold on Greek political life. As Oswyn Murray notes with regard to Iliad 11.807-8, “the rituals and procedures essential for the orderly conduct of mass meetings were well established [in Homer's world], and show remarkable similarities with the highly complex rituals surrounding the only later assemblies whose workings are known in detail, those of democratic Athens.”⁴³ Before Alexander, Greek communities were always communities of persuasion, threatened by the same force of fragmentation that Achilles embodied, and united by the common fiction that the gods were socially supreme. After Alexander, the Iliad's fiction became no longer serviceable, but the poem itself had attained such traditional prominence that new fictions had to be developed for it, the fictions of allegory.⁴⁴

VII

It is impossible to assume that the scholarly consensus on the date of the Rāmāyana is correct because there is no scholarly consensus. A distinct minority still clings to the brahminical tradition, according to which Vālmīki, a contemporary of Lord Rāma, lived and worked at the end of the Tretā age. But most find that date, some 869,000 years before the present, considerably too early. It antedates the known appearance of Homo sapiens by several hundred thousand years. Still, the majority is a long way from unity. In the last two decades, serious and respected scholars have argued vigorously that the Rāmāyana should be dated as far apart as the “pre-Buddhist” era (before the sixth century b.c.e.) and roughly 500 c.e.—a span of over a millennium.⁴⁵ In another context, I have tried to strike something of a balance.⁴⁶ I have argued that the Rāmāyana's defining narrative arose in the territory of Kośala during the time known as the Śunga period (second century b.c.e. to first century c.e.). Since I adopt that date here, I should explain why. What follows is the skeleton of my argument, adapted for readers who may not be Indologists.

Despite a few claims to the contrary, it seems certain that the Rāmāyana's defining narrative dates before the time known as the Kuṣāna period, that is, before the end of the first century c.e. One of the strongest reasons for this lies in the work of an accomplished poet of Kośalan origin, Aśvaghoṣa. A brahmin turned Buddhist, Aśvaghoṣa was active in the court of the great Buddhist king Kaniṣka, who initiated Kuṣāna rule in Kośala. One of Aśvaghoṣa's most prominent poems, the Buddhacarita (“The Life of the Buddha”), mentions Rāma and Vālmīki by name and contains verses that, Sanskritists have often noted, closely resemble the Rāmāyana. So it is likely that the Rāmāyana was known to at least one member of Kaniṣka's court, probably more.⁴⁷ The question becomes, how much earlier than Aśvaghoṣa shall we place Vālmīki? There is no direct evidence, so we are forced to rely on conjecture.

According to some, the Rāmāyana must date much earlier than Aśvaghoṣa. They argue that Vālmīki does not mention Buddhism, therefore his poem must be pre-Buddhist. But in this argument logic slips a little. There is no reason why poets who postdate the Buddha must mention his movement. The critical edition has actually identified a great many additions to the Rāmāyana that must be later than the Buddha, and with only a single, pointed exception, none of them mentions the Buddha or Buddhism, either.

In fact, the view that the Rāmāyana is pre-Buddhist faces severe difficulties. The Rāmāyana's narrative presupposes a fairly developed civilization: multistoried buildings that (in Northeast, unlike Northwest, India) require burnt brick, goods such as choice jewels and gems that could only have been imported through developed long-distance trade, and the high level of economic prosperity that marks the contrast between the ordinary prosperity of Ayodhyā and the splendid opulence of Lankā. Some scholarly and popular descriptions attribute just such features to Northeast India before the Buddha, but those descriptions are anachronisms. They take the cultural climate found in the jātakas as accurate descriptions of conditions prior to the Buddha, when in fact those descriptions more accurately reflect the conditions when the jātakas were recorded, probably the Śunga period. Archaeologists working in Northeast India have established a clear and uniform cultural sequence from very early times to highly developed urban civilizations. The cultural conditions that the Rāmāyana presupposes do not appear until sometime during the Maurya period (fourth to third centuries b.c.e.).

But is it possible and necessary to place the Rāmāyana as far back as the Maurya period? Some scholars have thought that it is, among them such acknowledged earlier experts as A. B. Keith and Camille Bulcke.⁴⁸ Nonetheless, several points speak against that date. A monumental epic such as the Rāmāyana cannot have arisen at just any time whatsoever. The cultural atmosphere would have to have met certain requirements. Among them, I would insist on the following: that people be allowed to assemble to listen to poetic recitations, that there be a thriving medium of popular narrative poetry, and that the poet's ideological position not evoke forcible repression. Unfortunately, none of these conditions prevailed during the later Maurya period, the portion of the period most acceptable on cultural grounds.

Historians, European, American, and Indian alike, have tended to romanticize the Mauryas. Especially the emperor Aśoka, who inscribed edicts on rocks, pillars, and cave walls proclaiming the rule of dharma or righteousness, has provided a postcolonial world with a tremendously useful mythology. For that reason, the lion-capital from Aśoka's pillar at Sarnath appears on Indian rupee notes of every denomination.⁴⁹

But in the past several decades, two outstanding historians have called that mythology into question. In an epoch-making study, Niharranjan Ray contrasted Maurya monumental art—abstract, impersonal, timeless, imperialistic—with the art of the succeeding Śunga period—concrete, personal, narrative, popular. In careful translations of Aśoka's edicts, D. C. Sircar, India's leading epigraphist, revealed an imperial policy that, far from ideal, was actually repressive.⁵⁰ Among other things, Aśoka's edicts reminded workers at entrances to his mines that the poor, as well as the rich, could enjoy celestial bliss, if only they worked diligently and disregarded the fruits of their labors.⁵¹ More to the point, they explicitly forbade popular religious assemblies, including those in which poems like the Rāmāyana would have been recited. Only one exception was allowed, assemblies that promoted the specific dharma and used the distinctly nonnarrative means that Aśoka himself favored.⁵²

It is not at all clear to what extent Aśoka's edicts were carried out, and to what extent they were just bluster. S. P. Gupta has argued vigorously—and correctly—that Ray's view of Maurya art is too homogeneous. Even in relative proximity to the Maurya capital, Pāṭaliputra, artists were actively using “non-Maurya” styles on less monumental scales.⁵³ Presumably, too, people were telling religious stories, brahmins among them, despite the supposedly pervasive presence of Aśoka's dharma-ministers (dhamma-mahamatas) in every regional center and religious group. Nonetheless, conditions in the late Maurya period would not have been suitable for the production, dissemination, transmission, or preservation of a monumental epic like the Rāmāyana. The poem would have violated imperial rescript much more blatantly and publicly than any short story. In addition, it would have celebrated not an isolated backwater but Ayodhyā, a regional center that housed a military garrison and was thus a potential rival to Pāṭaliputra. Furthermore, as a monumental celebration of brahminical dharma, the Rāmāyana would have sharply opposed the ideology propagated by imperial ministers and monuments, and it would have done so in a competing monumental style.

To be sure, the preceding negative considerations are only suggestive, but they tend to the conclusion that the Rāmāyana was composed after the Mauryas but before Kaniṣka, which is to say, during the Śunga period. Several positive indications also point to a Śunga date.⁵⁴

First, the Śunga period would have provided a suitable artistic climate for a monumental epic like the Rāmāyana. Even allowing for greater plurality, Maurya monumental art remains atemporal and abstract; Śunga monumental art is, like the Rāmāyana, vigorously and plentifully narrative and representational. In Greece, monumental epics arose at a time when representational narrative art flourished (for example, eighth-century vases). It is reasonable to expect that the Rāmāyana, too, arose at a time when narrative pervaded monumental art, a time like the Śunga.

Second, the Śunga period provides appropriate images for Vālmīki to utilize. For example, in the Rāmāyana's world, every king practices brahminism, and every king but Rāma is subject to kāma, lust. That would be an odd representation of kings during Maurya times. The Mauryas were notoriously heterodox [“Heterodox” refers to religious movements that rejected the authority of the ancient ritual texts called the Veda, “wisdom.” The most prominent of these groups are the Buddhists and Jains.] and austere. But the Śungas would have given Vālmīki much to allude to. They were disposed to brahminism, and they were, many of them, addicted to sensual pleasures.

Third, only a date in the Śunga period makes sense of some archaeological evidence. Digging at sites mentioned in the Rāmāyana, B. B. Lal, former director general of the Archaeological Survey of India, made an unexpected discovery. He and his team found that Śrngaverapura, located at a ford of the Ganges about thirty kilometers upstream from the confluence with the Jumna, was in ancient times a major settlement of economic importance.⁵⁵ Śrngaverapura is important in the Rāmāyana, too. Vālmīki takes pains to emphasize the friendship between Rāma and Guha, the king of Śrngaverapura. In fact, on their first meeting, Guha offers Rāma all his lands. Evidently Vālmīki wanted to underscore the close economic ties between Ayodhyā and Śrngaverapura (in contrast, perhaps, to close ties with nearby Kauśāmbī, which Vālmīki ignores). Significantly, Lal and his coworkers have found coins from Śunga Ayodhyā at Śrngaverapura.⁵⁶ In fact, before the end of the Kuṣāna era, there is only one period when it makes sense to talk of close economic relations between Śrngaverapura and an independent Ayodhyā. That period is the Śunga.

For these reasons, and others that are more technical and obscure, I am convinced that the Rāmāyana's defining narrative dates to the Śunga period. As we shall see, that period provides a significant context for Vālmīki's interest in both the tension between dharma and sukha and in the failure of persuasion.

VIII

The Śunga period in India began with a singular event: a coup d'état, somewhere around the year 187 b.c.e., that overthrew the last Maurya emperor, Brhadratha, and established his general Puṣyamitra in power. We do not know the precise significance of this event, for we cannot distinguish, in even the roughest terms, between sudden and gradual developments, local and general traits, and partisan and unanimous judgments. But there are indications that in Śunga times, the texture of Indian life changed tremendously.

During the Śunga period, brahminical ritualists enjoyed considerable, but not exclusive, royal patronage. So far as we can tell, the later Mauryas, kings such as Daśaratha and Sāliśuka, shared the heterodox preferences of their predecessors. But Puṣyamitra was a brahmin, and an aggressive one. According to an uncorroborated Buddhist report, he placed a bounty of one hundred denarii [The denarius was a Roman coin, so even if the Buddhist legend recalls an actual anti-Buddhist campaign, it cannot have remembered the correct bounty. When Puṣyamitra cama to power, Rome was just beginning to extend its domination into the eastern Mediterranean. All denarii found in India are imperial coins, which means they date not earlier than about 30 B.C.E.] on the heads of Buddhist monks. The grammarian Patañjali refers to a sacrifice by Puṣyamitra as still in progress. (Sacrifice was a distinctly brahminical practice, outlawed by Aśoka.) An inscription found in Ayodhyā refers to not one but two horse-sacrifices (aśvamedhas) that Puṣyamitra sponsored. Archaeologists have found remains at Kauśāmbī from this period that seem to evidence a grisly practice that literary scholars argued long and hard rarely if ever occurred: a human sacrifice (puruṣamedha) on a flying-hawk altar according to the rites of the Taittirīya school of the Black Yajurveda.⁵⁷ [The Yajurveda is one of the four major divisions of the Vedic literature. (The other three are the Rgveda, the Sāmaveda, and the Atharvaveda.) A collection of formulas used by the priests who prepared for the sacrifice, the Yajurveda comes in one of two forms: Black, in which the ritual text (samhitā) and the commentary (brāhmana) are mixed, and White, in which they are kept separate. The Taittirīyas were one of several distinct brahminical schools (śākas) that transmitted (and later recorded in writing) a tradition of the Black Yajurveda.] Incidentally, the Taittirīyas are the only school of brahmins mentioned by name in the Rāmāyana (Rām. 2.29.13c).

Along with the shift in favor of brahminical religion came a shift in favor of brahminical language. [The heterodox schools commonly used the vernacular languages of India at the time, which for convenience here we can call Prakrit. Brahmins were partial to Sanskrit, the “perfect” language more closely related to the language of Vedic ritual. But if we read between the grammatical lines, there are hints that probably in eastern India, brahmins, too, used Prakrit, sometimes even for sacrificial purposes. Vālmīki's language, too, shows clear indications of “prakrit-isms,” usages more vernacular than “classical,” a point established in a number of technical articles by Nilmadhav Sen (see the bibliography in the first volume of the Goldman et al. translation of the Rāmāyana).] As inscriptions attest, Sanskrit began to replace Prakrit for some official purposes. When Patañjali wrote a commentary on the Sanskrit grammarians Pānini and Kātyāyana, probably during Puṣyamitra's reign and in Pāṭaliputra, Puṣyamitra's capital, it seems likely that he had other motives besides those of pure scholarship. The preference for brahminical speech eventually led to the development of Buddhist Sanskrit literature (for example, the Mahāyāna sūtras) and classical Sanskrit fine letters (kāvya). But both developments are too late to consider here.

Besides a shift toward brahminism, the Śunga was one of many periods in Indian history when, in contrast to what had preceded, the tendency to centralization gave way to a vigorous regionalism. Rulers at important cities like Ayodhyā (Sāketa), Kauśāmbī, and Vidiśa issued their own coins and presumably enjoyed a degree of political autonomy. Just as important, economic activity became independent of political control. During the Maurya period, the central government seems to have managed the production, transport, and distribution of precious goods: Aśoka's edicts are commonly found at iron and gold mines. But beginning in the Śunga period we have specific evidence that significant wealth was in the hands of private merchants.⁵⁸

The same evidence testifies that in Śunga times, both within areas of Śunga control and outside them, private merchants patronized the arts to an unprecedented degree. Along the trade routes they excavated and decorated caves for monks and nuns, such as the earliest of the famous caves at Ajanta (Aśoka and his son Daśaratha had excavated caves earlier.) They also contributed immensely to the construction of stūpas [A stūpa is a mound that (allegedly) contains at its core a relic of Lord Buddha.] such as those at Bharhūt and Sāñcī. In comparison with Maurya art, the design of these monuments reflected an increased interest in and proliferation of narrative, as opposed to didactic, modes of discourse.⁵⁹

We would not expect all wealth to be channeled into such noble projects as stūpas, caityas, and vihāras. [A caitya, like a stūpa, refers to a funeral mound; but here it refers to certain cave sanctuaries, such as those at Ajanta and Karle, that contain an image of a stūpa around which monastics gathered to “worship.” A vihāra was a cave carved to house mendicants.] There are strong indications that our expectations are correct. Before the Śunga era, kings seem to have inclined toward the austere. For example, Candragupta, the founder of the Maurya dynasty, is reputed to have taken the vows of a Jain mendicant. He renounced his life by traditional Jain means, depriving himself of food and eventually water.⁶⁰ By contrast, Vasumitra, the fourth Śunga ruler of Pāṭaliputra, is remembered as dissolute and overly fond of dramas. According to a later historical play, he was murdered in the midst of his cavorting by a certain Mitradeva. Some speculate that Mitradeva's act of treason actually inaugurated an autonomous Śunga dynasty at Ayodhyā, the first Śunga dynasty independent of Pāṭaliputra.⁶¹

The changing texture of life in the Śunga periods provides a significant context for Vālmīki's concern with the disjunction between what ought to be and what one ought to do. It also elucidates his concern with the failure of persuasion to negotiate that disjunction.

At least from the time of Aśoka, royal ideology in Northeast India had been an ideology of dhamma (Sanskrit, dharma). In theory, society was constituted as a community of duty. It flourished when people faithfully performed their prescribed roles and responsibilities without regard for the fruits of their actions.⁶² Many Śunga rulers, in keeping with the sweeping changes, committed themselves to a distinct version of this ideology, a brahminical rather than a heterodox one; presumably, some of their subjects did, too. For example, the Śunga monarch Dhana[deva?] set up an inscription at Ayodhyā that emphasized both his brahminical loyalties (he was “sixth in line from Puṣyamitra, who sponsored two aśvamedhas”) and an ideology of dharma (he styled himself dharmarāja, “the king who rules on the basis of dharma”).⁶³ Similarly, the grammarian Patañjali, who probably resided at Puṣyamitra's court, also linked brahminism and dharma. When pressed for reasons to learn and apply the rules of correct Sanskrit, the brahminical language, Patañjali replied with a single word: dharma.⁶⁴

But brahminical dharma entailed problems, and the Śunga period was too pluralistic and decentered to let sleeping problems lie. In particular, it knew two groups who sharply opposed an ideology of brahminical dharma.⁶⁵ The first has a textual, the second an intertextual relationship with the Rāmāyana. Together, they help define a significant context for Vālmīki's concern with the disjunction between what is and what ought to be.

The first group comprised thinkers, whether brahminical or not, who advocated philosophical materialism. Lokāyatas and other materialists denied both the efficacy of moral dharma and the imperceptible reality in which brahminism grounded that dharma. Their critique actually appears in the Rāmāyana. At Citrakūṭa the minister Jābāli urged Rāma to return home, speaking, as Vālmīki says, “words devoid of dharma.”⁶⁶

Whoever says, “Dharma is better than artha
          [prosperity],” that's who I feel sorry for, no one else.
Having acquired misery [duḥkha] in this world, that
          person gets nothing but dissolution at death. …
Make up your mind, great-minded one, that there is
          nothing beyond this world.
Cling to what is visible; put aside what is not

(Rām. 2.100.12, 16; my translation)

Besides materialists, a group of more traditional brahmins would have rejected dharma, too. I am thinking above all of the Bhārgavas, named for their alleged ancestor Bhrgu. In antiquity the Bhārgavas dominated the western reaches of the most commonly used trade route, the southern one (Dakṣina-pātha), which connected places like Banaras, Ayodhyā, and Kauśāmbī in the northeast to India's west coast. One of that route's two seaports sat at the mouth of the holy river Narmadā, a town known today as Bharuch, from the old Sanskrit name Bhrgukacchā, “the coast of Bhrgu.” The other port, not quite so old, was Sopara, known in antiquity as Śūrpāraka. (Was the name of Rāvana's sister, Śūrpanakhā, “fan-nail,” a loose pun?) Among the famous sites at Śūrpāraka was a bathing area (tīrtha) dedicated to Rāma, but to Paraśurāma (“Axe-Rāma”), the Rāma of the Bhrgus, not to Vālmīki's Rāma, the son of Daśaratha.⁶⁷

The existence of a distinctly Bhārgava transmutation of Rāma illustrates the extent to which their convictions fundamentally opposed Vālmīki's. Their Rāma, Axe-Rāma, ran amok, slaughtering high-class nonbrahmins (kṣatriyas), until Vālmīki's Rāma, a kṣatriya, stopped the rampage (Rām. 1.73-75). The distance between the two also appears in the field of literary production. The Bhārgavas were instrumental in producing not the Rāmāyana but the other great Indian epic, the Mahābhārata, renowned for “telling it like it is,” not as it ought to be. As these two examples intimate, one crucial difference between Vālmīki and the Bhārgavas centered on the ideal of dharma. Despite Krṣna's advice on karma-yoga in the Bhagavad-Gītā, the Bhārgavas seem to have been unwilling to act without regard for the fruits of their actions. Their reluctance accords fully with brahminical tradition. Brahmins had always performed the paradigmatic act, the sacrifice, out of a desire (kāma) for rewards (phalāni, “fruits”).⁶⁸

Together, the materialists and Bhārgavas help define a significant context for Vālmīki's concern with the disjunction between what ought to be and what one ought to do. Both groups promoted goal-oriented, pleasure-seeking action; in the process, they forcefully opposed ancient advocates of brahminical dharma. The circumstances of Śunga life would have only compounded their critique. The chief advocates of brahminical dharma were, of course, the monarchs; unfortunately, the royal example would have lent as much support to dharma's opponents as to its partisans, if not more. To start with, the Śunga monarchs were weak and unimpressive, especially in comparison with their heterodox predecessors. Not only had they failed to maintain any centralized political control; they had also ceded a large proportion of their economic privileges to nonroyals.⁶⁹ Their collective experience only confirmed Jābāli's lesson: the pursuit of dharma leads to misery, nothing more. Worse yet, many Śungas appear to have been hypocrites as well as weaklings. Their ideology may have advanced dharma, but their actions served sukha instead. Kālidāsa's play about the amorous interests of Puṣyamitra's son Agnimitra (Mālavikā and Agnimitra) provides a late but readily accessible example.⁷⁰

It is at least conceivable, then, that during the Śunga period, the criticism of materialists and Bhārgavas combined with royal weakness and dissolution to evoke Vālmīki's interest in the tension between dharma and sukha. But what accounts for the thematic complement to this interest, his attention to the failure of persuasion?

By the second century b.c.e. dharma and persuasion were closely linked. Aśoka's Seventh Pillar Edict reads in part: “The advancement of dhamma amongst men has been achieved through two means, legislation and persuasion. But of these two, legislation has been less effective, and persuasion more so. … Men have increased their adherence to dhamma by being persuaded not to injure living beings and not to take life.”⁷¹ Aśoka sounds as if he learned from experience to rely on persuasion, but as the conversion of demons in the jātakas testifies, that is not entirely true. The propagation of dharma by persuasion reflected sound, traditional practice, in Aśoka's case, sound, traditional, Buddhist practice. When the Śungas made dharma a brahminical virtue, however, the link between dharma and persuasion became problematical.

What made this link problematical was the changed social standing of dharma's exemplars. Aśoka may have propagated dharma, but he made no pretense of embodying dharma's highest ideals, at least during his active life. For the adherents of heterodox teachings, the prime embodiments of dharma were śramanas, renunciants who had given up all interest in pleasure. As a result, among Buddhists and other śramanas, the persuasive propagation of dharma, action apart from a desire for results, was fully consonant with the social standing of those who embodied the ideal. But brahmins were not renunciants; they were householders and thereby attached to the delights of artha and sukha. Worse yet, as householders their fundamental professional duty was to persuade, and this professional persuasion conflicted profoundly with the persuasion of dharma.

In a masterful study, Romila Thapar has pointed out how, in the middle of the first millennium b.c.e., human communities in the central Ganges basin shifted in structure from lineage-based societies to city-centered territorial states.⁷² One result was that the primary occupations of brahmins changed. In a broad sense, brahmins still made their livings in the traditional way: they procured prosperity for their employers by means of speech (vāc, brahman, mantra). But by the end of the first millennium, most brahmins could no longer procure prosperity by means of ritual speech. There were not enough employers to go around, especially in later Maurya times. Instead, brahmins became mantrins or ministers. They instructed public officials on how to achieve what ought to be. In other words, they procured prosperity for their employers by means of sound, practical, goal-oriented persuasion. In this limited sense, Jābāli is exactly what Vālmīki says he is: a true and representative brahmin (brāhmanottamaḥ, Rām. 2.100.1b).

For brahmins in this position, the ideologies of brahminical dharma on which communal life came officially to be based in Śunga India presented grave difficulties. To be blunt, it required them to play the fool (a role for which, by the way, they became famous in later Sanskrit drama). At one and the same time, brahmins had to advocate two contradictory positions. On the one hand, they had to advocate a dharma of renunciation. On the other, they had to commend a life that neglected this ideal in favor of more traditional notions of what ought to be, sukha conceived as prosperity and sensual pleasures. Even worse, they had to give advice that tended to promote the latter ideal. Clearly, one form of brahminical persuasion or the other had to yield. Persuasion became a significant locus in which brahminical practice confronted the disjunction between what is and what ought to be.

Vālmīki's narrative rendered these difficulties less pressing. By means of a compelling if fictional example, it taught that the renunciation of pleasure, prosperity, and results for the sake of dharma did not open up an unbridgeable abyss between what ought to be and what one ought to do. To advocate brahminical dharma did not abrogate one's professional concerns for the well-being of king and kingdom. Instead, despite initial appearances—the weakness and hypocrisy of the monarchs, the critique of materialists and Bhārgavas—actions performed in accord with dharma wonderfully fulfilled the aims that brahminical verbal practice had always pursued.⁷³ In this way, the Rāmāyana provided ancient Indians with a central, mystifying fiction. It made a common life based on brahminical dharma tenable. Half a millennium later, it probably helped make that vision of the common life dominant.⁷⁴

IX

In this [essay] I have explored how the imagined, literary realities of the Iliad and the Rāmāyana intersected with the experienced, literal realities in which Homer, Vālmīki, and their audiences lived. I have suggested that both poems performed the same kind of work: the mystification of fundamental threats to social and universal existence, emblematized by the problems that arise when persuasion fails. And I have correlated that mystification with conditions in the worlds that Homer and Vālmīki inhabited, Greece in the eighth century b.c.e. and India during the Śunga period (second century b.c.e. to first century c.e.).

Until now, we have discussed the poems' contexts in alternation. How do they compare? If we could date the Rāmāyana to the sixth century b.c.e., we might hypothesize, in the historicist manner of a Walter Ruben, that at a certain stage of economic and social development, a strong need to mystify the failure of persuasion provoked the composition of certain kinds of epic poems.⁷⁵ As it stands, however, such a unilaterally deterministic relationship between experienced and imagined reality seems unlikely. The structural and dynamic differences between the two contexts are too significant.

In structure, Homer's and Vālmīki's communities varied in size, complexity, and manner of organization. Homer plied his trade in the relatively small settlements of an emergent eighth-century Greece; Vālmīki plied his in the much larger, more established cities of the post-Maurya Gangetic plain. Homer's small-scale settlements were relatively homogeneous, cultivating a shared ideology according to which social reality was sustained by the Olympian gods. Vālmīki's larger city-society was decidedly more pluralistic. It accommodated people who practiced many different ideologies, allowing them to interact and conflict. Homer's settlements determined communal action via consensus, presumably the consensus of the leading men. Officially, Vālmīki's cities were governed by a single monarch, in whom authority for communal action resided. In the Iliad and the Rāmāyana, these structural differences appear most notably, perhaps, in the predominant forms that persuasion assumes. Homer's paradigm of persuasion is the embassy to Achilles. There persuasion is deliberative; it strives to achieve consensus. Vālmīki's paradigms of persuasion are the attempts to dissuade Rāma and Rāvana, for example, Lakṣmana's attempt in Rāmāyana 2.20. There persuasion is not deliberative but “ministerial.” It strives to give good advice.

Besides structural differences, Homer's and Vālmīki's worlds differed in social movement, too. Both Homer and Vālmīki lived at times of tremendous economic growth. That is clear from the rise in the number and quality of archaeological remains. But the economic upswings were accompanied by different social dynamics. Homer lived in a world emerging from intense social fragmentation. In the so-called Dark Ages, the Greek population had been widely scattered; in most places the largest significant political unit was not much bigger than a well-to-do household. By Homer's day larger settlements (poleis) were beginning to coalesce. Vālmīki's world was significantly different. He lived at a time of increasing fragmentation. The previous period had seen the first great attempt at centralization in the Gangetic plain, the rule of the Mauryas. But by Śunga times that unifying structure was giving way to decentralization, political regionalism, and economic “privatization.”

Clearly, then, Homer's and Vālmīki's worlds were undergoing profound social changes in two very different directions. But the changes share one crucial similarity. In both early Greece and ancient India social flourishing depended on (different kinds of) persuasion. The social changes effectively highlighted the tenuousness of that instrument. They provoked poets to respond by concealing the peril. In narratives whose immense length mirrored the magnitude of the threat, Homer and Vālmīki used a religious ideology—the intervention of the gods, Rāma's defeat of the demons—to mystify it and thereby overcome it. In doing so, they helped make communal life in ancient Greece and India tenable and tolerable.

Notes

1. See Finley, The World of Odysseus, and S. N. Vyas, India in the Rāmāyana Age: A Study of the Social and Cultural Conditions in Ancient India as Described in Vālmīki's Rāmāyana (Delhi: Atma Ram, 1967).

2. Recall, for example, the old judgment of Richard Bentley (1662-1742), disputing the claim that Homer “designed his poems for eternity to please and instruct mankind”: “Take my word for it, poor Homer never had such aspiring thoughts. He wrote a sequel of songs and rhapsodies, to be sung by himself for small earnings and good cheer, at festivals and other days of merriment. The Iliad he made for the men and the Odyssey for the other sex” (quoted in Rudolf Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship from 1300 to 1850 [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976], 158).

3. For poems that arise in an oral context, as the Iliad and the Rāmāyana both seem to have done, one can postulate a fairly direct relationship between the length of the composition and the delight of the audience. On the one hand, a positive reaction from the audience will induce a poet to elaborate her or his efforts. On the other, a poem that does not please will lose its audience and thus not be perpetuated.

4. Eric Havelock, Preface to Plato (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963); see his more recent book, The Muse Learns to Write: Reflections on Orality & Literacy from Antiquity to the Present (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1986). The locus classicus for “Homer the educator” is, of course, Plato, who disapproved of Homer's lessons.

5. See Jasper Griffin, “The Epic Cycle and the Uniqueness of Homer,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 97 (1977): 39-53. Similarly, the narrative of the Rāmāyana, traditionally classed as kāvya (high letters), is much more unified (in a loose, Aristotelian sense of poetic unity) than the Mahābhārata and other works of itihāsa-purāna (the mythological collections known as Purānas).

6. The Daśaratha-jātaka, as an occasion and demonstration story, seems (like all jātakas) to have a clearly didactic, moral purpose. One difficulty with including the Rāmāyana in this class is, why then would Vālmīki have framed his narrative as problem and resolution, rather than as occasion and demonstration? Compare, too, the stories from the Pan̄catantra and, in a Greek context, Aesop. The relatively brief compass of all these stories and the jātakas also tends to indicate that simple, moral didacticism is not a sufficient reason to generate a monumental poem: the same lesson can be taught more quickly and more directly in a poem of shorter compass. In fairness one should note that at least other ages would have vehemently disagreed with this assertion. Howard Clarke summarizes the views of Philip Sidney, John Dryden, and above all Torquato Tasso: “Tragic heroes teach us what vices we must avoid, epic heroes teach us what virtues we must imitate” (Howard Clarke, Homer's Readers: A Historical Introduction to the Iliad and the Odyssey [Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1981], 113).

7. Compare Ian Morris, “The Use and Abuse of Homer,” Classical Antiquity 5 (1968): 128: “The Homeric poems are an example of ideology by analogy, … using the analogy of the Heroic Age to legitimize an eighth-century dominance structure.” Yet Morris is absolutely correct when he insists that we can read the Iliad as only analogous to the situation of the poet and his contemporaries. Unfortunately for the historian (but fortunately for the history of literature), the analogy between the poem and its audience can work with any number of specific forms of sociopolitical organization.

8. Ian Morris, Burial and Ancient Society: The Rise of the Greek City-State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

9. On funerals, see J. N. Coldstream, Geometric Greece (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1977), 349-52, and “Hero-Cults in the Age of Homer,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 96 (1976): 8-17; but see also the sources cited at note 56. On names, see G. L. Huxley, The Early Ionians (New York: Humanities Press, 1966), 43; and compare Stefan Hiller, “Possible Historical Reasons for the Rediscovery of the Mycenaean Past in the Age of Homer,” in Hägg, ed., The Greek Renaissance, 9-15, esp. 11-12, on the Aeneids and Glaucids. On narrative heroic art, see Coldstream, Geometric Greece, 352-56, and Anthony M. Snodgrass, “Poet and Painter in Eighth Century Greece,” Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 205 (1979): 118-30. On Mycenaean cults as familial, see Anthony M. Snodgrass, Archaeology and the Rise of the Greek State: An Inaugural Lecture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 30-31; but compare Coldstream, Geometric Greece, 346-48, and “Hero-Cults,” and Theodora Hadzisteliou Price, “Hero-Cult and Homer,” Historia 22 (1973): 129-44.

10. Morris, “The Use and Abuse of Homer,” 127-28.

11. Anthony M. Snodgrass, “Towards the Interpretation of the Geometric Figure-Scenes,” Mitteilungen des deutschen archäologischen Instituts, Athenische Abteilung 95 (1980): 51-58, esp. 53. For more detail, see Snodgrass, “Poet and Painter,” which discusses inscriptions, sanctuaries, and other evidence to suggest pointedly that “non-Homeric epic [was] a focus of public interest [in the eighth century], and … that influences could also have existed outside the sphere of poetry altogether” (125). For a briefer discussion, see “Central Greece and Thessaly,” in The Cambridge Ancient History, 2d ed., ed. John Boardman, I. E. S. Edwards, N. G. L. Hammond, and E. Sollberger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), vol. 3, part 1, pp. 657-95, esp. 686.

12. Hans Robert Jauss, “Interaction Patterns of Identification with the Hero,” in Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 152-88.

13. Ibid., 159, 167-72.

14. D. C. Sircar, in V. Raghavan, ed., The Rāmāyana Tradition in Asia, 325-26.

15. On the elections, see India Today (International Edition), May 31, 1991, 77 and 79; August 15, 1991, 70-72. Much recent literature alludes to these events, but it is still too early to see where the sage will end. For recent information, see almost any edition of the news magazine, India Today, or Indian newspapers such as The Times of India, Indian Express, or The Hindu. For accounts of events leading up to the demolition of the Babri Masjid on December 6, 1992, see Sarvepalli Gopal, ed., Anatomy of a Confrontation: The Babri Masjid-Ramjanmabhumi Issue (New Delhi: Viking Penguin, 1991), and, in a broader context, Ainslee T. Embree, Utopias in Conflict: Religion and Nationalism in Modern India (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), Daniel Gold, “Organized Hinduisms: From Vedic Truth to Hindu Nation,” in Fundamentalisms Observed, ed. Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 531-83, Barbara Stoler Miller, “Presidential Address: Contending Narratives—The Political Life of the Indian Epics,” Journal of Asian Studies 50 (November 1991): 783-92, and Peter van der Veer, Religious Nationalism (California, 1994).

16. Romila Thapar, Exile and the Kingdom: Some Thoughts on the Ramayana (Bangalore: The Mythic Society, 1978); see also her “Origin Myths and the Early Indian Historical Tradition,” in History and Society: Essays in Honour of Professor Niharranjan Ray, ed. Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya (Calcutta: K. P. Bagchi, 1978), 271-94.

17. Consider the notion that the Rāmāyana was composed to legitimate a dynasty in southern Kośala, perhaps the most crucial assumption of all. If legitimation of a southern kingdom were the narrative's purpose, we would expect the establishment of that kingdom to be a major, well-developed component of the story. But in our Rāmāyana, Vibhīṣana's inauguration is only incidental. It occupies only eleven lines in the critical edition (Rām. 6.100.8-18), and of these eleven, only half (9-14) are really concerned with the inauguration itself. The incident is easily overlooked in favor of other, more important events. Of course, Thapar postulates a prior version of the poem, but this version is both hypothetical and unnecessary. We can imagine the Rāmāyana being produced without recourse to an origin myth for southern Kośala, and there is not a shred of evidence that Vibhīṣana's coronation ever occupied a more prominent position in the poem.

18. I am not averse on principle to finding legitimatory efforts in a poet's work or even in Vālmīki's work. For example, the scenario I have sketched in the text begins to resemble some of the Viśvāmitra episodes of the Bāla-kānḍa. Later in this [essay], I suggest that when Guha, the local prince (rāja) of Śrngaverapura, lays all he has at Rāma's feet (Rām 2.44, esp. ślokas 12; 14-15), his behavior speaks in favor of close economic relations on the part of Śrngaverapura, a site of strategic economic importance in ancient India, with Ayodhyā as opposed to, say, Kauśāmbī, which was perhaps Ayodhyā's closest competitor for the city's loyalties. But these instances are isolated; they hardly motivate the composition of the Rāmāyana's narrative.

19. Compare Rām. 2.23.11, in which Vālmīki hints that the events which bring about Rāma's exile silence the efforts of praise poets.

20. It is possible, I suppose, to posit a hypothetical, prior stage in the poem's genesis and attribute a legitimatory function to that stage. But it strikes me as senseless to discuss a hypothetical stage for which there is neither evidence nor any demonstrable need.

21. Huxley, The Early Ionians, 42. On the Homeridae, see Thomas W. Allen, Homer: The Origins and the Transmission (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924), chap. 2.

22. J. M. Cook, “Greek Settlement in the Eastern Aegean and Asia Minor,” in The Cambridge Ancient History, ed. I. E. S. Edwards et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), vol. 2, part 2, pp. 773-804, esp. 776.

23. Snodgrass, “Towards the Interpretation of the Geometric Figure-Scenes,” 57.

24. See in general J. M. Cook, The Greeks in Ionia and the East (New York: Praeger, 1963); idem, “East Greece,” in The Cambridge Ancient History, 2d ed., vol. 3, part 1, pp. 745-53; idem, “Greek Settlement,” and idem, “The Eastern Greeks,” in The Cambridge Ancient History, 2d ed., vol. 3, part 3, pp. 196-221; Emlyn-Jones, The Ionians and Hellenism; and Huxley, The Early Ionians. See also the major archaeological report by John Boardman, Excavations in Chios, 1952-1955: Greek Emporio, British School of Archaeology at Athens, suppl. vol. 6 (Oxford, 1967).

    On oriental influences generally, see Coldstream, Geometric Greece, 358-65; Oswyn Murray, Early Greece (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1980), 80-99; Oxford History of the Classical World, 26-27; and Walter Burkert, The Orientalizing Revolution: Near Eastern Influence on Greek Culture in the Early Archaic Age, trans. Margaret E. Pinder and Walter Burkert (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), and more specifically, “Oriental Myth and Literature in the Iliad,” in Hägg, ed., The Greek Renaissance, 51-56.

25. Huxley, The Early Ionians, 33.

26. Emlyn-Jones, The Ionians and Hellenism, 69.

27. M. R. Popham and L. H. Sackett, Excavations at Lefkandi, Euboea, 1964-66 (British School of Archaeology at Athens, 1968); Popham, Sackett, and P. G. Themelis, Lefkandi, The Iron Age (London: Thames & Hudson, 1979); and Popham, Sackett, and E. Touloupa, “Further Excavations of the Toumba Cemetery at Lefkandi, 1981,” Bulletin of the British School of Archaeology at Athens 77 (1982): 213-48, and “The Hero of Lefkandi,” Antiquity 56 (1982): 169-74. For a general, preliminary discussion of the site's possible significance, see Oxford History of the Classical World, 20.

28. Boardman, Excavations in Chios; compare Il. 11.807-08. On urbanization in Ionia, see Snodgrass, Archaic Greece, 32, as well as Cook, The Greeks in Ionia and the East, “Greek Settlement,” “East Greece,” and “The Eastern Greeks.” David Rupp observes that elaborately constructed altars do not appear in Greece until the second half of the seventh century; he sees the eighth century's concern with temples and votive offerings as “a tangible means of showing for all to see the cohesion, wealth, and importance of the growing political body” (“Reflections on the Development of Altars in the Eighth Century b.c.” in Hägg, ed., The Greek Renaissance, 101-7, esp. 107).

29. Coldstream, Geometric Greece, 303-4.

30. Cook, The Greeks in Ionia, 34-35; for a revision of the date, see Cook, “East Greece,” 749-50.

31. For example, McGann, Beauty of Inflections, chap. 1, in which elements of Keats's “To Autumn” are linked to specific events in England in 1819.

32. Emlyn-Jones, The Ionians and Hellenism, 14 and passim.

33. The oikos as the fundamental unit of society was first emphasized by M. I. Finley in The World of Odysseus. For a recent survey, see Chester G. Starr, Individual and Community: The Rise of the Polis 800-500 b.c. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 27-33. Bjørn Qviller has analyzed the shift from oikos to polis in economic terms borrowed from social anthropology; see his “Dynamics of the Homeric Society,” Symbolae Osloenses 56 (1981): 109-55.

34. For a discussion of this move in the context of modern experimental psychology, see Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), esp. 47-49, and 135-64.

35. See the last paragraph of section 3 in this [essay]. One might also speak of a “community of persuasion,” because the communities are structured in such a way that joint activity must be accomplished through the persuasion of relative equals.

    Walter Donlan has provided a more finely tuned analysis of authority in the Iliad from a sociological point of view that is consistent with what I mean here by a “community of consensus.” See his “Structure of Authority in the Iliad,” Arethusa 12 (1979): 51-70. According to Donlan, the structure of authority in the Iliad is tripartite; its constituent elements are “established social position,” “standing based on ability,” and “collective authority” or “collegial cooperation.” Inherent in this model is tension between the competing claims of position and standing, which must be mediated by “collegial cooperation.” For Donlan, the argument between Achilles and Agamemnon is a paradigm of this conflict.

    Donlan admits that his analysis is structural, not literary. But from the literary structure of the Iliad, it would seem that Donlan's structural analysis does not give us the entire picture. He makes sense of Achilles' conflict with Agamemnon and the restoration of collegial cooperation in the funeral games of Iliad 23, but he can do very little with what to me is the more striking part of the poem: the conflict between Achilles and Hektor and the restoration of harmony in Iliad 24.

36. See, for example, Hägg, ed., The Greek Renaissance. The word “renaissance” was initially proposed because it was presumed that the appeal to Mycenaean antiquity inspired the cultural revival.

37. Anthony M. Snodgrass, Archaic Greece: The Age of Experiment (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980), 20-24, 35-37; Morris, Burial and Ancient Society. For a critique of Snodgrass's methods and views, see Chester G. Starr, The Economic and Social History of Early Greece, 800-500 b.c. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 43-46; and Coldstream, Geometric Greece, 313-14. Snodgrass replies briefly in “Two Demographic Notes,” in Hägg, ed., The Greek Renaissance, 167-71. See also Starr, Individual and Community, 38-40.

38. For these developments in general, see Murray, Early Greece, 69-79 and 100-119, and The Oxford History of the Classical World. Among specific studies, see esp. John Boardman, The Greeks Overseas (Baltimore, Md.: Penguin, 1964).

39. For a brief, general account of this development, see the Oxford History of the Classical World, 19-26.

40. These three are conveniently discussed together in Snodgrass, Archaeology and the Rise of the Greek State, 24-33.

41. Because the relation between the world of the Iliad and that of Homer's audience is at most that of analogy, the precise sociological forms cannot be determined from the Iliad but only from historical studies. For an alternative to traditional views of developments during this period, see Morris, Burial and Ancient Society. Starr discusses various anthropological models applied to the period in Individual and Community, 42-46.

42. Snodgrass, Archaic Greece, 61, and Archaeology and the Rise of the Greek State, 9. Compare Murray, Early Greece, 36-68.

43. Murray, Early Greece, 60. See my “Verbal Craft and Religious Act in the Iliad,” Religion 18 (1988): 293-309, for an analysis of Il. 11.807-8.

44. On allegory, see Robert Lamberton, Homer the Theologian: Neoplatonist Allegorical Reading and the Growth of the Epic Tradition (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986).

45. The best example of the former is Robert P. Goldman's introduction to his translation The Rāmāyana of Vālmīki, vol. 1, Bālakānḍa, 14-23. The latter date was advocated by the premier Indian archaeologist, H. D. Sankalia, in Ramayana: Myth or Reality? (New Delhi: People's Publishing House, 1973); but see his reassessment in The Ramayana in Historical Perspective (Delhi: Macmillan India, 1982).

46. Gregory D. Alles, “Reflections on Dating ‘Vālmīki,’” Journal of the Oriental Institute, Baroda 38 (March-June 1989): 217-44.

47. Ibid., 227.

48. Arthur Berriedale Keith, “The Date of the Ramayana,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 47 (1915): 318-28; Camille Bulcke, “About Vālmīki,” Journal of the Oriental Institute, Baroda 8 (1958-59): 121-31, and “More About Vālmīki,” ibid., 346-48.

49. The first Maurya, Candragupta, was also the first grand unifier in Indian history. As a result, he can be made into a kind of the grand ancestor of the modern Indian state. See K. A. Nilakanta Sastri, ed., A Comprehensive History of India, vol. 2, The Mauryas and Satavahanas, 325 b.c.-a.d. 300 (Bombay: Orient Longmans, 1957); R. C. Majumdar, ed., The Age of Imperial Unity, vol. 2 of The History and Culture of the Indian People (Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1968); and Jawaharlal Nehru, Discovery of India (New York: John Day, 1946), 123-26 (note esp. the quotation from H. G. Wells on 126). On Aśoka, see the classic study by Romila Thapar, Aśoka and the Decline of the Mauryas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), which also translates the edicts. For a general collection of the edicts, see G. Srinivasa Murti and A. N. Krishna Aiyangar, Edicts of Aśoka (Priyadarśin), intro. K. V. Rangaswami Aiyangar (Madras: Adyar Library, 1950).

50. Niharranjan Ray, Maurya and Post-Maurya Art: A Study in Social and Formal Contrasts (New Delhi: Indian Council of Historical Research, 1975); D. C. Sircar, Inscriptions of Aśoka, 3d rev. ed. (New Delhi: Government of India, 1975), and Asokan Studies (Calcutta: Indian Museum, 1979).

51. Minor Rock Edict 1.7-8 (Sircar, Aśokan Studies, 11).

52. Consider Aśoka's program carefully. He banned killing, which precluded brahminical sacrifices (Rock Edict 1.2). Rāma kills demons who prevent the sages in the forest from sacrificing. Aśoka banned religious assemblies (samājās) except for those that propagate his dhamma (Rock Edict 1.3-5; Rock Edict 9.7-9), and he looked down on religious festivals and women's rites (Rock Edict 9.2-6). Vālmīki says that festivals and assemblies (utsavāśca samājāśca) thrive in a state with a king (2.61.13). Aśoka propagated his dhamma, at times personally, through images of celestial cars, elephants, and hell-fire and through abstract moral discourses, just the opposite of Vālmīki's approach (Rock Edict 4.3). The minor edict at Bhabra recommended didactic rather than narrative discourse: in addition to dhamma, sermons on “the Excellence of the Discipline, the Lineage of the Noble One, the Future Fears, the Verses of the Sage, the Sūtra of Silence, the Questions of Upatissa, and the Admonition spoken by the Lord Buddha to Rāhula on the subject of false speech” (Thapar, Aśoka, 261). And of course Aśoka appointed Dharma-mahāmātras active in all religious groups (he singles out brahmins for special mention) to insure his dhamma is propagated and obeyed (Rock Edict 5.9-15, esp. 10-11 and 14).

53. S. P. Gupta, The Roots of Indian Art (Delhi: B. R. Publishing, 1980).

54. For the Śunga period generally, with copious citations of the documentary evidence, see Bindeshwari Prasad Sinha, The Comprehensive History of Bihar (Patna: Kashi Prasad Jayaswal Research Institute, 1974), vol. 1, part 1; Binod Chandra Sinha, History of the Śunga Dynasty (Varanasi: Bharatiya Publishing House, 1977); and Nilakanta Sastri, ed., A Comprehensive History of India, vol. 2, The Mauryas and Satavahanas.

55. B. B. Lal and K. N. Dikshit, “Sringaverpura: A Key-Site for the Protohistory and Early History of the Central Ganga Valley,” Puruttatva 10 (1978-79): 1-8; also see the successive progress reports in Indian Archaeology—A Review, for the years 1977-78, 1982-83, 1983-84, and 1984-85.

56. Lal confirmed the identity of these coins in a personal conversation, May 1989, Purana Qila, Delhi.

57. G. R. Sharma, The Excavations at Kauśāmbī (1957-1959): The Defences and the Śyenaciti of the Puruṣamedha (Allahabad: University of Allahabad, 1960).

58. Especially detailed is Himanshu Ray, Monastery and Guild: Commerce under the Sātavāhanas (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986). The inscriptions at Bharhūt and Sān̄cī would indicate that significant wealth was in the hands of monastics, too. Compare Heinrich Lüders, ed., Bharhut Inscriptions, Corpus inscriptionum indicarum, vol. 2, part 2, rev. E. Waldschmidt and M. A. Mehendale (Ootacamund: Archaeological Survey of India, 1963); and Debalal Mitra, Sanchi, 2d ed. (New Delhi: Archaeological Survey of India, 1965).

59. See Ray, Maurya and Post-Maurya Art, and Gupta, Roots of Indian Art.

60. According to the Aśokavadāna, Aśoka became extremely generous in his old age and as a result was removed from office; see Thapar, Aśoka and the Decline of the Mauryas, 192.

61. For such speculations, see the general histories cited in note 63. H. D. Sankalia has even suggested that the dissolution extended far beyond the royal court. He noted a marked increase in the evidence of drinking and the import of Roman wine into India during the first century b.c.e. See Sankalia, The Ramayana in Historical Perspective, 47-48, 94. Unfortunately, Sankalia did not detail the statistical calculations necessary to support his conclusion. It is important to note, however, that they are not invalidated by an occasional Roman wine-jug that happened to find its way to India prior to the first century.

62. See, for example, Aśoka's First Minor Rock Edict.

63. Ayodhyā stone inscription of Dhana[deva], in D. C. Sircar, Select Inscriptions Bearing on Indian History and Civilization, vol. 1, From the Sixth Century b.c. to the Sixth Century a.d., 2d ed. (Calcutta: University of Calcutta Press, 1965), 95.

64. Madhav M. Deshpande, Sociolinguistic Attitudes in India: A Historical Reconstruction (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Karoma Publishers, 1979), 7, ascribes a similar attitude to Kātyāyana, according to whom dharma can be acquired only through using Sanskrit.

65. I doubt very much whether the śramanas, the wandering mendicants who followed heterodox traditions like Buddhism, would have criticized brahminical dharma much. For all their differences, they at least had one thing in common with the advocates of a brahminical dharma: the ideal of dharma itself, action not motivated by a desire for results.

    True, Buddhists may have had better days to look back on. True, too, their later mythographers were harsh on Puṣyamitra. But relations between Buddhists and brahmins cannot have been quite so strained as later generations remembered. All along the trade routes patrons of Buddhism, together with Buddhist clerics, built great monuments that still astound people today, such as Bharhūt and Sān̄cī. We also know that advocates of heterodox and brahminical traditions could and did live side by side in peace, sometimes under the same royal roof.

    On śramanas in general, G. C. Pande, Śramana Tradition: Its History and Contribution to Indian Culture (Ahmedabad: L. D. Institute of Indology, 1978), is tightly packed with insights.

66. See Walter Ruben, “The Minister Jābāli in Vālmīki's Rāmāyana: The Portrait of One of the Indian Materialists,” in Studies in Ancient Indian Thought (Calcutta: Indian Studies, Past and Present, 1966), 1-24. Long ago K. T. Telang noted that “some of the stanzas in the speech of Jâbâli bear a striking resemblance to some of the stanzas quoted in the Sarvadarśanasangraha as belonging to Brihaspati, the ringleader of the Chârvâka movement” (Was the Rāmāyana Copied from Homer? 40).

67. Himanshu Ray (Monastery and Guild) contains good discussions of the archaeological and literary evidence.

68. On ritual activity out of desire for fruits, see G. U. Thite, Sacrifice in the Brahmana-texts (Pune: University of Poona, 1975), esp. 230: “One may have as many desires as one can. It is never too much in desires (na vai kāmānām atiriktam asti) (Ś[atapatha-]B[rāhmana] 8.7.2.19; 9.4.2.28, 3.15, 5.1.40).” Compare page 226: “In the Brāhmana-texts, there are so many results [of successful sacrifices] told that it is almost futile to attempt their classification.” For Krṣna's contrary advice, see Bhagavad-gītā 2.47. Deshpande points out that the mythology of Paraśurāma would have provided an ideal justification for overthrowing Brhadratha (Sociolinguistic Attitudes in India, 7, see also 6). Puṣyamitra seems to have come from the regions south and west of the Ganges, but if he was a Śunga, as at least one later relative was, he belonged to the lineage of Bharadvāja, not Bhrgu. For an as yet tentative identification of an anti-Bhārgava faction in the Mahābhārata, and one whose concerns are reminiscent not only of the Rāmāyana but also of Aśoka's edicts (a similar phrase appears in the edicts), see Norvin Hein, “Epic Sarvabhūtahite Rataḥ: A Byword of Non-Bhārgava Editors,” Annals, Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute 67 (1986): 17-34.

69. For actual evidence of this wealth, see H. Lüders, ed., Bharhut Inscriptions. Gregory Schopen has pointed out how these inscriptions leave no doubt some Buddhist clerics were wealthy, although that would violate the precepts given by the texts; see “Archaeology and Protestant Presuppositions in the Study of Indian Buddhism,” History of Religions 31 (August 1991): 1-23.

70. Readers without Sanskrit may consult the translation by Edwin Gerow in the wonderful Theater of Memory: The Plays of Kālidāsa, ed. Barbara Stoler Miller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 253-312.

71. Quoted from Romila Thapar, Aśoka and the Decline of the Mauryas, 266.

72. Romila Thapar, From Lineage to State: Social Formations in the Mid-First Millennium b.c. in the Ganga Valley (Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1984).

73. Vālmīki's efforts adopted a literary and artistic form that achieved new popularity in the Śunga period, the monumental narrative. But within the parameters of that form he managed to invoke the self-evidence of age-old tradition. He mystified the conflict implicit in a brahminical conception of dharma by employing distinctly recognizable and venerable brahminical themes. To be sure, a gulf separates Vālmīki's citified brahminism from the older brahminical ritualism, associated with a village-based lineage-society. Vālmīki has virtually no use for the Vedic gods. He is more well disposed to sacrifice, but his attitudes are ambiguous. Rāma may protect brahminical sacrificers; but demons, too, sacrifice successfully (cf. Indrajita), and results everyone longs for—the results of Rāma's rule—are obtained only when Rāma's ritual installation is interrupted. Nevertheless, as Madhusudan Madhavlal Pathak notes in his Similes in the Ramayana (Vadodara, India: Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, 1968), Vālmīki's metaphors show him to be a brahminical loyalist. Of greater significance here, the architecture of the Rāmāyana's defining narrative quotes five important brahminical motifs.

    First, Vālmīki's world, like that of the Vedic sacrificers, was at its very core bipartite. It consisted of the inhabited world, where a person enjoyed the fruits of action (in the Vedas the village, for Vālmīki the city), and the uninhabited world where one acted by way of renouncing enjoyment (the sacrificial ground, the jungle).

    Second, in contrast to the heterodox śramanas, who rejected violence, Vālmīki, like the ancient Vedic seers (rṣis), discerned in violence the source of human good (e.g., the famous puruṣa-sūkta, Rg-veda 10.90). In Vedic tradition, violence and division created the world; in the Rāmāyana—and in the Vedas, too—violence and division recreated the world.

    Third, in both Vedic practice and Vālmīki's virtue one acquires the fruits of action in the same, paradoxical manner; tyāga, renunciation. As a result, Rāma's actions are strikingly reminiscent of the sacrifices he takes pains to protect: he renounces, and through renunciation he receives even more.

    Fourth, Vālmīki adopts the Vedic mythology of evil. He envisions evil as incarnate in the demonic nightstalkers (the rakṣās or rākṣasās), who defile sacrifices, devour flesh, and, in Rāvana's case, desecrate dharma. Unlike Buddhist storytellers, neither the Vedas nor Vālmīki hold out much hope for persuading these demons. They must be killed.

    Fifth, the effects of observing dharma are similar to those of Vedic practice: both eliminate faults (doṣas). But whereas the purity gained from Vedic practice accrues primarily to the sponsor of the rites, the purity of observing dharma is available to all. Later Indians would tell how Rāma's victory eliminated evil and initiated a wonderful new age.

    In the Rāmāyana, Vālmīki objectified and enacted the threat that brahminical dharma would, if taken seriously, lead to society's dissolution: Then he used the resources of ancient brahminical tradition to construct a narrative that transmuted the problems into opportunities. In the forests of renunciation Rāma faced and defeated the demons of personal desire. In this way, Vālmīki provided ancient Indians with a convincing social fiction.

    On the Vedic tradition generally, see esp. J. C. Heesterman, The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985); Brian K. Smith, Reflections on Resemblance, Ritual, and Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Frits Staal, Agni: The Ritual of the Fire Altar (Berkeley, Calif.: Asian Humanities Press, 1983); and more prosaically, Thite, Sacrifice in the Brahmana-texts.

74. See D. C. Sircar, “The Decline of Buddhism in Bengal,” in Studies in the Religious Life of Ancient and Medieval India (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1971), 183-205.

75. See Walter Ruben, Die homerischen und die altindischen Epen, Sitzungsberichte der Akademie der Wissenschaften der DDR, Jahrgang 1973, no. 24 (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1975); see also Die gesellschaftliche Entwicklung im alten Indien, 6 vols. (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1967-74).