Page:The Sanskrit Drama.djvu/134

Rh died at the age of a hundred years and ten days. We have a good deal more information of a sort regarding his personality; he was to Kalhaṇa in the Rājataran̄giṇī a figure to be set beside Vikramāditya; the Skanda Purāṇa makes him out the first of the Andhrabhṛtyas; the Vetālapañcaviṅçati knows of his age as a hundred, and gives as his capital either Vardhamāna or Çobhāvati, which is the scene of his activities according to the Kathāsaritsāgara, which tells of the sacrifice of a Brahmin who saves him from imminent death and secures his life of a hundred years by killing himself. In the Kādambarī he is located at Vidiçā, and in the Harṣacarita we hear of the device by which he got rid of his enemy Candraketu, prince of Cakora, while Daṇḍin in the Daçakumāracarita refers to his adventures in several lives. The fact that Rāmila and Somila wrote a Kathā on him is significant of his legendary character in their time, considerably before Kālidāsa. A very late tradition in the Viracarita and the younger Rājaçekhara brings him into connexion with Sātavāhana or Çālivāhana, whose minister he was and from whom he obtained half his kingdom, including Pratiṣṭhāna.

These references seem to suggest that Çūdraka was a merely legendary person, a fact rather supported than otherwise by his quaint name, which is absurd in a king of normal type. Nevertheless, Professor Konow treats him as historical, and finds in him the Ābhīra prince Çivadatta, who, or whose son, Içvarasena, is held by Dr. Fleet to have overthrown the last of the Andhra dynasty and to have founded the Cedi era of A.D. 248-9. This remarkable result is held to be supported by the fact that in the play the king of Ujjayinī is Pālaka, and is represented as being overthrown by Āryaka, son of a herdsman (gopāla), and the Ābhīras are essentially herdsmen. But this is much more than dubious; we have in fact legendary history in the names of Pālaka, Gopāla – to be taken probably in the Mṛcchakaṭikā as a proper name – and Āryaka. The proof is indeed overwhelming, for Bhāsa, who is the source of so much of the Mṛcchakaṭikā,