and, thanks to this
alliance and to his own prowess, he was able at his death to bequeath
real kingship to his son, Samadragupta, who, during a fifty years'
reign, A.D. 326-375, again welded almost the whole of India north of the
Nerbudda river into one empire, and once even spoiled Southern India
right down to Cape Comorin. His victories are recorded--with an irony
perhaps not wholly accidental--beneath the Asokan inscription on the
Allahabad pillar. Of his zeal for Hinduism we have a convincing proof in
gold coins of his reign that preserve on the obverse in the figure of
the sacrificial horse a record of the _Asvamedha_, which he again
revived. Strange to say, however, his fame has never been so popular as
that of his son, Chandragupta II., Vikramadytia, the Sun of Power, who
reigned in turn for nearly forty years, and has lived in Hindu legend as
the Raja Bikram, to whom India owes her golden age. It was his court at
Ujjain which is believed to have been adorned by the "Nine Gems" of
Sanskrit literature, amongst whom the favourite is Kalidasa, the poet
and dramatist. Amidst much that is speculative, one thing is certain.
The age of Vikramadytia was an age of Brahmanical ascendancy. As has so
often happened, and is still happening in India to-day in the struggle
between Urdu and Hindi, the battle of religious and political supremacy
was largely one of languages. During the centuries of Brahmanical
depression that preceded the Gupta dynasty, the more vulgar tongue
spoken of the people prevailed. Under the Guptas, Sanskrit, which was
the language of the Brahmans, resumed its pre-eminence and took
possession of the whole field of literature and art and science as well
as of theology. Oral traditions were reduced to writing and poetry was
adapted to both sacred and profane uses in the Puranas, in the metrical
code of Manu, in treatises on sacrificial ritual, in Kalidasa's plays,
and in many other works of which only fragments have survived.
Astronomy, logic, philosophy were all cultivated with equal fervour and
to the greater glory of Brahmanism. Local tradition is doubtless quite
wrong in assigning to Raja Bikram the noble gateway which is the only
monument of Hindu architecture at its best that Ujjain has to show
to-day. But to that period may, perhaps, be traced the graceful, if
highly ornate, style of architecture, of which the Bhuvaneshwar temples,
several centuries more recent, are the earliest examples that can be a