The "Mahâbhârata" is the oldest epic in Sanscrit literature, and is sevenfold greater in bulk than the "Iliad" and "Odyssey" taken together. This remarkable poem contains almost all the history of ancient India, so far as it can be recovered, together with inexhaustible details of its political, social, and religious life--in fact, the antique Hindoo world stands epitomized in it. The Old Testament is not more interwoven with the Jewish race, nor the New Testament with the civilization of Christendom, nor even the Koran with the records and destinies of Islam, than is this great Sanscrit poem with the unchanging and teeming population of Hindostan. The stories, songs, and ballads, the genealogies, the nursery tales and religious discourses, the art, the learning, the philosophy, the creeds, the modes of thought, the very phrases and daily ideas of the Hindoo people are taken from this poem. Their children are named after its heroes; so are their cities, streets, and even cattle. It is the spiritual life of the Hindoo people. It is personified, worshipped, and cited as being something divine. To read, or even to listen, is to the devout Hindoo sufficiently meritorious to bring prosperity to the fireside in this world, and happiness in the world to come. The western world has as yet only received the "Mahâbhârata" in fragments--mere specimens, bearing to those vast treasures of Sanscrit literature such small proportion as cabinet samples of ore have to the riches of a mine. Such knowledge as we have of the great Indian epics is largely due to Sir William Jones, and the host of translators who followed him. In its present shape the "Mahâbhârata" contains some two hundred thousand verses. The style is forcible, often terse and nervous: the action is well sustained, and the whole effect produced is that of a poem written in commemoration of actual conflict between members of rival clans who lived somewhere southeast of the Punjab. In portrayal of character the Hindoo poem somewhat resembles its Grecian counterpart--the "Iliad"; the noble devotion and chivalric character of its chief hero, Arjuna, reminds us of Hector--and the wily, sinful Duryodhana, is a second Ulysses. The "Mahâbhârata" was probably begun in the third or fourth century B.C., and completed soon after the beginning of the Christian era.