being made to celebrate the deeds of any hero who was
not somehow or other connected with any of the incarnations of the gods; they have certainly left us no play,
—with the exception,perhaps,of the Viddhaśâlabhanjikâ,
that belongs to the eleventh century ,of the Ratnâvalî that
may be referred to the beginning of the twelth century,
and of the Mrigânkalekhâ, which Professor Weber aptly
styles “a mixture of Ratnâvalî, Urvaśî and Mâlatîmâdhava,
”–that has for its subject the domestic love-affairs
of an (to us) insignificant king like Agnimitra. The fact, therefore, of the subject of the present drama being very unlike any that modern writers were likely to choose to write upon, seems to point to a very much earlier period than the tenth or eleventh century as the age to which the production of the play under notice should be referred.
Again, as Professor Wilson says, the history of the hero, Agnimitra, as described in the play, is of considerable weight towards determining approximately the age when the drama must have been composed. The full history of Agnimitra or his father Pushpamitra is nowhere given in the Sanskrit works that have come down to us. The Puranas1 mention Pushpamitra as the founder of the Śunga dynasty, but they nowhere give any more detailed account of him than that he dispossessed his master, Bŗihadratha, the last of the Maurya dynasty, of his crown, and usurped it, probably, as Professor Wilson supposes, in favour of his son. But nothing is said of Agnimitra, the hero of our
1 Cf., for instance the Bhagavata Purana XII., 1. 15. Also Wilson's Vishnu Purana, (pp.470, 471 ).
