in battle,
the restoration of Sita, the return of Rama and Sita to Ayodhya, and
the crowning of Rama in place of Dasa-ratha, who had died of grief
during his exile. Finally comes the Uttara-kanda, which relates that
Rama, hearing some of the people of Ayodhya spitefully casting
aspersions on the virtue of Sita during her imprisonment in the palace
of Ravana, gave way to foolish jealousy and banished her to the
hermitage of Valmiki, where she gave birth to twin sons, Kusa and
Lava; when these boys had grown up, Valmiki taught them the Ramayana
and sent them to sing it at the court of Rama, who on hearing it sent
for Sita, who came to him accompanied by Valmiki, who assured him of
her purity; and then Sita swore to it on oath, calling upon her mother
the Earth-goddess to bear witness; and the Earth-goddess received her
back into her bosom, leaving Rama bereaved, until after many days he
was translated to heaven.

Such is the tale of Rama as told in the Valmiki-ramayana--a clean,
wholesome story of chivalry, love, and adventure. But clearly the
Valmiki-ramayana is not the work of a single hand. We can trace in it
at least two strata. Books II.-VI. contain the older stratum; the rest
is the addition of a later poet or series of poets, who have also
inserted some padding into the earlier books. This older stratum, the
nucleus of the epic, gives us a picture of heroic society in India at
a very early date, probably not very long after the age of the
Upanishads; perhaps we shall not be far wrong if we say it was
composed some time before the fourth century B.C. In it Rama is simply
a hero, miraculous in strength and goodness, but nevertheless wholly
human; but in the later stratum--Books I. and VII. and the occasional
insertions in the other books--conditions are changed, and Rama
appears as a god on earth, a partial incarnation of Vishnu, exactly as
in the Bhagavad-gita and other later parts of the Mahabharata the hero
Krishna has become an incarnation of Vishnu also. The parallel may
even be traced further. Krishna stands to Arjuna in very much the same
relation as Rama to his brother Lakshmana--a greater and a lesser
hero, growing into an incarnate god and his chief follower. This is
thoroughly in harmony with Hindu ideas, which regularly conceive the
teacher as accompanied by his disciple and abhor the notion of a voice
crying in the wilderness; indeed we may almost venture to suspect that
this symmetry in the epics is n