be elective; and not only do women enjoy a high position (marriage being held sacred, husband and wife being alike dampatí, or "rulers of the house," and the burning of widows on their husbands' funeral piles being unknown), but even "some of the most beautiful of the hymns were composed by ladies and queens."
Among these Indian Aryans, as everywhere in early communities, the rude beginnings of literature are found in close union with religion; and here at the very outset we meet one of the great characteristics of Indian literature—the love of Nature. The divinities of the Aryan housefathers—at once priests and warriors and husbandmen—are, as Professor Monier Williams has observed, idealised and personified powers of Nature—the wind, the storm, the fire, the sun—on which, as an agricultural and pastoral people, their welfare depended. Such deities of Nature are Dyaush-pitar (Diespiter or Jupiter of Rome, Zeus of Greece), or the sky-father; Varuna,[1] or the encompassing air; Indra, or the aqueous vapour that brings the rains, to whom many of the hymns are addressed; Agni, the god of fire, whose name is the Latin Ignis; Ushas, the dawn, the Greek Eôs; Vaya, the wind; Mitra the sunshine; and the Maruts, or storm-gods. As a specimen of the hymns we may select one to the Maruts and Indra which is peculiarly interesting from its rudely dramatic form. The translation, it should be added, is by Professor Max Müller, to whom all students of Sanskrit are so deeply indebted.
"Prologue. The Sacrificer speaks; 1. With what splendour are the Maruts all equally endowed, they who are of the same age and dwell in the same house? With what thoughts? From whence are they come? Do their heroes sing forth their (own) strength because they
- ↑ The Ouranos of Greece.
