The dominating influence on Bhāsa’s style was clearly that of the epic and in special of Vālmīki, whose great work inevitably impressed itself on the minds of all his successors. The effects are visible not merely in the dramas with epic subject-matter, but extend throughout Bhāsa’s plays. The results of this influence are all to the good; the necessities of the drama saved Bhāsa from the one great defect of the epic style, the lack of measure, which permits the Rāmāyaṇa to illustrate by twenty-nine similes the sorrows of Sītā in her captivity, while in the Abhiṣekanāṭaka the dramatist is content with one. On the other hand he owes to it the relative simplicity of his diction, and his freedom from the excesses of the poetic equivalent of the nominal style, which comes to dominate later Sanskrit literature. The use of long compounds is obviously and plainly undramatic; carried to excess it must have rendered a Sanskrit drama unintelligible even to a highly cultivated audience as far as the verses were concerned, and it is an essential dramatic merit in Bhāsa that his expression is far easier to follow than in much of later dramatic poetry. He possesses in fact that clearness, which is theoretically a merit of the Kāvya style, but which is signally neglected by the average Kāvya writer in his anxiety to display the complete familiarity which he possesses with every side of the art of poetry. As far as we can judge from the scanty fragments of Açvaghoṣa’s dramas, that poet was more complex than Bhāsa, and certainly so in his epics, which aided powerfully in the formation of Kālidāsa’s epic and dramatic style. Bhāsa, of course, is not in the slightest degree akin to a poet of the people; he is an accomplished master of the art of poetry, but one whose good sense and taste preserve him from adopting in drama the artifices which are permitted in the court epic and lyric which were intended to be studied at leisure. The simple and sententious is beloved of Bhāsa: thus Karṇa repels the objections of Çalya to his parting with armour and earring to the disguised Indra: [213] çikṣā kṣayaṁ gacchati kālaparyayāt: subaddhamūlā nipatanti pādapāḥ jalaṁ jalasthānagataṁ ca çuṣyati: hutaṁ ca dattaṁ ca tathaiva tiṣṭhati. ‘Learning decayeth with the passing of time; though firm their roots, trees fall; the water of a lake drieth up; but sacrifices and gifts endure.’ When Sītā is forced to undergo the ordeal by fire Lakṣmaṇa exclaims: [214] vijñāya devyāç çaucaṁ ca çrutvācāryasya çāsanam dharmasnehāntare nyastā buddhir dolāyate mama. ‘I know the queen’s chastity; I have heard the bidding of our preceptor; like a swing, my mind doth move ’twixt duty and love.’ When Rāma falls at his father’s feet on the order being given for his coronation, he tells us: [215] samaṁ bāṣpeṇa patatā tasyopari mamāpy adhaḥ pitur me kleditau pādau mamāpi kleditaṁ çiraḥ.