A later age which was heir to all this poetry found it necessary to classify the poems according to the subjects. Later poets wished to model their poems on the works of their ancestors, and such a desire if natural in every country, was doubly so in Eastern country where reverence for custom was unqualified, and where tradition was the law. The codifiers of Tamil poetry came in and they found the bulk of poetry divisible into two main divisions as regards themes; love-poetry and all that is not love-poetry, akam and puṛam.The akam poetry contained various aspects of love, and the puṛampoetry contained various aspects of warfare and life. They found the geographical factor determinant and conclusive in the poetry. This was the result of the Tamil poets being true to Nature. Hence they classified the poetry according to the region of origin. This was easy at a time when the lives of the poets were still remembered, and their full names included the names of the villages or towns in which they were born or lived or acquired fame. These were the first anthologies of Tamil literature.

I do not believe that paalai was included in the first and original classification, because paalai as such does not exist in the Tamil country, and when it does occur is only of a temporary duration, long as the summer and no more. Further, the separation which it denotes might occur in any of the four regions, especially during courtship. Some poems which actually portray separation and classified by later editors as paalai contain no allusion at all to the flora and fauna of the desert. At a later date, a second classification made the number of regions five, and included under the paalai head the large number of poems with separation of lovers as their keynote, and under its puṛam opposite, vaahai, panegyric poems of every kind, even outside of warfare. That paalai was a subsequent addition is made plausible by the fact that its opposite vaahai, alone among the first five puram regions, includes poems outside of warfare, and by Tolkaappiyam ascribing neither a god to paalai nor a separate region.

A few centuries after these first anthologies were made, other enterprising redactors and codifiers would have found it necessary to draw up rules not only about the main