Page:History of India Vol 2.djvu/288

 250 THE GUPTA EMPIRE " kingdom-taking " is the business of kings, and imme- diately after his succession to the throne plunged into war, which occupied many years of his unusually pro- tracted reign. When his fighting days were over, he employed a learned poet, skilled in the technicalities of Sanskrit verse, to compose a panegyric of his achievements, which he caused to be engraved on one of the stone pillars set up six centuries before by Asoka and incised with his edicts. Samudragupta, an orthodox Hindu, learned in all the wisdom of the Brahmans, and an ambitious soldier full of the joy of battle, who cared nothing for preachings of the monk Asoka recorded in an antique script and an unfamiliar dialect, made no scruple about setting his own ruthless boasts of san- guinary wars by the side of the quietest moralizings of him who deemed " the chief est conquest " to be the conquest of piety. Samudragupta 's anxiety to provide for the remem- brance o^his deeds was not in vain. The record com- posed by his poet-laureate survives to this day prac- tically complete, and furnishes a detailed contemporary account of the events of the reign, probably superior to anything else of the kind in the multitude of Indian inscriptions. Unfortunately the document is not dated, but it may be assigned with a very near approach to accuracy to the year 360 A. D., or a little earlier or later, and it is thus, apart from its value as history, of great interest as an important Sanskrit composition, partly in verse and partly in prose, of ascertained age and origin.