In such situations the poet describes the munificence of the patron by contrasting the poverty and hunger with which the bards arrive at the court of the chief or king, and the sumptuous feasting and gifts which the chief or king provides for them. These poems have been used by writers to illustrate the poverty of the bards without adverting that they were conventionalised poems. In actual life during the bardic period, they appear to have enjoyed social prestige, importance and patronage both among rulers and the people. Their degeneracy set in when, with the advent of a more complex society, the poet outshone the bard as the representative of literary and intellectual life, and the functions of the bardic troupe were differentiated and new types of professional solo dancers, musicians and artistes appeared.

The bards being panegyrists by profession were extremely eloquent persons. When poets gained ascendancy in society and the bardic institution degenerated, the bards were used in the poems of a subsequent stage of development as conventional pimps and as companions to young men in love, obviously because of their gifts of persuasive speech. For the same competence in language, the bards were conventionally used by chiefs and kings to carry messages from the battle field or battle camp to their queens in the palace.

The long panegyric poems as a whole deal with the wealth and affluence of the court and of the king's land and cities, the intellectual, religious, and moral life of the people, and the bravery of the patron and of his warriors.

Of the earliest anthologies, about fifteen thousand lines of poetry have survived to this day to represent the poetry sung in a bardic or panergyric strain. One collection is entirely in praise of sovereigns of the kingdom of the western coast, that of the Ceras, and such similar anthologies which contained poems concerning the other two kingdoms may have been compiled. The Ten Idylls, of long verses, praise mostly kings of the Pandya or Cola line, or some outstanding chiefs, their exploits and their territories. The third anthology of four hundred bardic poems, corresponding to an anthology of love poetry of four hundred poems, contains a great deal of panegyrics, as well as didactic poetry, laments, elegies and ethical reflections. The panegyrics, of local and limited interest as they were, are of less universal appeal, and were probably not preserved with the same enthusiasm as the love poems.

Laments and Elegies

A French scholar has remarked, and very much to the point too, that in all ancient Indian literature, it is only Tamil poetry which