OUTLINES OF THE HISTORY OF SANSKRIT 53 appear in a language of a much later date with no archaic forms preserved. The recitation and transmission of the Epic legends was not the business of the Brahmans, but of the Sutas, a class of royal servants whose duties had originally included that of charioteer. It was natural that their language should be of a more popular nature than that of the educated classes par excellence , the Brahmans. At the same time it is interesting that all along, in spite of the competition of Prakrit, Sanskrit was cultivated in much under circles than in the priestly schools for whom Panini's work *was intended. Outside the brahmanical schools the knowledge of grammatical theory must have been ele- mentary to say the least, and in the early period at least the knowledge of Sanskrit on the part of the epic reciters must have depended primarily on usage and not on formal instruction. From this arose the tendency to approximate the language to some extent to the prevailing type of Middle Indo-Aryan. Later when the gulf between the two became greater formal instruction in Sanskrit became a universal necessity, but by this period the epic style and the epic language had already established itself in its own right, and linguistic features such as those mentioned above were accepted and retained. The language of the Epics served also as a model for the lan- guage of the Puranas, of which the earliest core dates to the same period. It is continued in the numerous later compila- tions, and further in a variety of sectarian dgamas , etc. Lin- guistically these compilations are not of great interest, except occasionally in the matter of vocabulary, and many, particu- larly the later ones, testify to the deficient education of their authors in grammar. §5. The Sanskrit of the Classical Literature The special characteristics of classical Sanskrit arise from the fact that most of the literature dates from a period very much later than the period in which the form of the language was fixed. If Kalidasa is to be dated c , a.d. 450 a period of no less than eight hundred years separates him from the grammarian Panini. The work of Kalidasa stands almost at the beginning of the body of classical literature which is preserved, and the greater part of this is separated by more than a millennium from the regulator of the language. This accounts largely for the
