date. He was a native of Uraiyur and lived in the reign of the Chola king Perunarkilli[1]. If Dittan the father of Perunarkilli was identical with Dathiya the Tamil usurper of the Singhalese annals (B.C. 90), it may be said that he flourished about B.C. 75. Again the present edition of the Ramayana which was recast about 100 B.C. mentions in its geography the Pandya country and its capital Kapatapuram. Nothing further is known about Tolkapyar, whose Tamil grammar is with us, than that he was a Brahman student of Agastya and that he lived in a village near Madura during the reign of the Pandya king Makirti. All the works of this academy have also been irretrievably lost, except the grammar of Tolkapyar and a few poems which luckily found their way into the anthologies compiled at the third academy.
From the foregoing it will be seen that the first and the second academies were more or less continuous, and that they existed occasionally sometime between the fifth century B. C. and the second century A. D. This conclusion seems to me irresistable as we find no references to the Yavanas or Romans in any of the works composed by the poets of these academies, especially when we know that in the heyday of the early Pandyas there was a colony of Roman merchants two or three miles east of Madura from the second to fifth century A.D.
So much for the first two academies. We shall
- ↑ The Killi line of Cholas appear to have reigned in Uraiyur during the first century before and after Christ.
