In the old poem, Bhishma, the descendant of Kuru on the throne of the Bharatas, perished, at an advanced age, with his son Suyodhana, and his ninety-nine brothers, in stout conflict against the Pandus, who were at the head of the Panchalas; but his fall was due to the craft of the latter. On the other hand, the revision maintains that king Çantanu was the last legitimate Kuru; that his son Bhishma renounced the throne, marriage, and children; that Çantanu's younger son died childless; and represents the Dritarashtras and the Pandus as his illegitimate descendants. Thus the Pandus are brought into the race of Kuru, and the claims of the descendants of Dhritarashtra and Pandu are placed on an equality. It was an old custom among the Indians, not wholly removed by the law-book of the priests, even in the later form of the regulation, that if a father remained without a son his brother or some other relation might raise up a son to him by his wife or widow.[146] According to the poem, the wife of Çantanu charged her nearest relation, her natural son, to raise up children to the two childless widows of her son born in marriage. Agreeably to the tendency of the revision, this son is a very sacred and wise person; and thus it is proved that it was within the power of the priests to summon into life the most famous royal families. But great as the freedom of the revision is, it does not venture to deny the right of birth of the Kurus. Dhritarashtra is the older, Pandu is the younger, of the two sons. In order to clear the younger brother, Dhritarashtra is afflicted with blindness, because his mother could not endure the sight of the great Brahman. Even the son of Dhritarashtra, Duryodhana, is allowed to have the right of birth; it is only maintained that Yudhishthira, Pandu's elder son, was born on the same day. That this insertion of the Pandus into the race of the Kurus in the Epic poem was completed in the fourth century B.C. we can prove.[147] The revision then represents Dhritarashtra as voluntarily surrendering half his kingdom to the sons of Pandu, and this is a great help towards their legitimacy. When the Pandus are resolved on war, Krishna removes Yudhishthira's scruples by asserting "that even in times gone by it has not always been the eldest son who has sat on the throne of Hastinapura." These traits are all tolerably transparent. How weak the position of the Pandus was in the legend, how little could be told of their ancestors and of Pandu himself, is shown in the poem by the fact that the want of ancestors can only be supplemented by inserting the family in the race of the Kurus, and that no definite achievement of Pandu is mentioned. He is allowed to die early, and his sons grow up in the forest. So transparent is the veil thrown over the fact that an unknown family rose to be the leaders of the Panchalas. The insertion of Dhritarashtra is caused by the insertion of Pandu. The Indian poetry of the later period is not