Notes · Book D13Anooshirvan and the Road to the End-time

D13.1The Prelude

An aged cypress, asked why it is bowed, answers that sixty years have overcome it, and describes age as a beast with a dragon’s breath and a lion’s claws. It notes that Anooshirvan reigned forty-eight years, and counsels closing one’s worldly business.

“O lofty cypress, ravisher of hearts: The poet opens a reign by talking to himself. The cypress is the upright young body of Persian love poetry, and the voice that answers it is an old man’s. The catalogue that follows assigns a flower or a jewel to each feature, jasmine and Judas-tree for the complexion, narcissus for the eyes, pearls for the teeth, and then takes each one away.

Anooshirvan ruled forty-eight full years: The figure matches the reign as historians date it, from 531 to 579. Ferdowsi gives the total in advance, as he often does, so that the long sequence of campaigns, reforms and wisdom-scenes ahead is framed from the outset as a finished life.

D13.2Anooshirvan’s Accession and Royal Address

The new Shah takes the ivory throne and addresses his court: God is the source of good and ill, justice rewards itself, and no minister may keep a petition from him. He warns his servants that loyalty will be paid and cruelty punished. The hall applauds.

Upon the ivory throne the monarch sat: Sasanian kings were remembered for the speech they made on taking the throne, and Arabic historians preserve several of them; Ferdowsi’s versions belong to that tradition and often read like a document turned into couplets. The program announced here, open access and justice and no wealth for its own sake, is exactly what the next chapters carry out in detail.

Fear Him, not us: He rules all monarchs too: A king ordering his court to fear God rather than himself states the central claim of Persian advice literature: authority is held in trust and forfeited by misuse. The poem made the point in its most quoted lines, where Fereydoon is no angel but a man who practiced justice and giving (I, A5.9).

D13.3Anooshirvan’s Decree of Justice

The Shah divides the empire into four regions, then replaces the old share of the harvest with a land tax assessed by survey and paid in three installments, with relief for ruined crops and exemptions. Three ledgers record it. His decree to the collectors is read out.

He parted all the peopled earth in four: The fourfold division is remembered as one of this reign’s real reforms: the empire was cut into four quarters, each under its own commander, in place of a single commander-in-chief, and the provinces the poem lists fall roughly into that scheme. Ferdowsi presents it as an act of justice and good order rather than of military reorganization.

They stretched the survey cords across the land: Here is the heart of the reform, and the poem follows it in unusual technical detail: a measured survey, a fixed charge on land and on fruit trees in place of a share of the crop, payment in three parts of the year, remission where locust or storm or drought had struck, and seed advanced from the treasury. The system outlived the dynasty and the Arab conquerors took it over; the Arabic kharāj is usually traced to the Sasanian tax word, though the derivation is not agreed.

On Bahram day, in Khordad, it was penned: The Zoroastrian calendar names every day of the month as well as every month (see I, A7.1), so a document is dated by naming a day and a month rather than by counting. Dating the decree in this way is how a Sasanian chancery would have done it, and the poem preserves the formula intact.

D13.4Anooshirvan Orders the Army Assembled

The Shah builds a muster office by the palace gate for Babak, who summons the warriors and twice sends them home because the king himself has not appeared. On the third day Anooshirvan rides up armed, is inspected, and is entered on the payroll.

He had a Mobad; Babak was his name: Babak’s review is the best loved of the Anooshirvan anecdotes and was retold long afterward in Persian writing about kings: an official refuses to open the muster until the king presents himself in armor like any other horseman, and the king, instead of taking offense, raises him in his own esteem. The point is that the law reaches the man who makes it.

The Shah received one extra dirham’s pay: The joke carries the whole argument. Pay is set at one, two and four thousand by rank, and the king enrolls at the top rate plus a single dirham, so he stands on the roll as a soldier rather than above it. A ruler who draws his own wage is answerable like everyone else on the ledger.

Though sprung from Arash and of noble right.’”: An unusual concession from this poem: descent from the great archer (see I, B3.5, B9.20) counts for nothing in a man who has not been trained. The Shah’s letters order the provinces to teach their sons rein, stirrup, bow and gorz, setting skill against birth in a work that elsewhere makes birth decisive.

D13.5The Kings Acknowledge Anooshirvan

At daybreak the Shah sits to hear the wronged, promising access at any hour and remitting all tax arrears. The court blesses him, the season turns fair, and news of his justice and his armies reaches Rum and Hind. Envoys come from Hind and Chin with tribute.

When that mound of fenugreek came in sight: An image for daybreak. Shanbalid, fenugreek or sweet clover, carries small yellow flowers, and Persian poets use it for that particular pale yellow; a heap of it piled along the horizon is the eastern sky just before sunrise.

I now remit; no more is owed for these: Cancelling arrears at the start of a reign was an instrument of government and not merely a gesture: the ledgers of unpaid tax were the standing grievance of the countryside, and wiping them bought a new king goodwill cheaply. The poem places the act immediately after the tax reform, as its human face.

D13.6Anooshirvan Fortifies the Pass

The Shah tours his realm, camping outside settlements and asking whether his officers have wronged anyone. In the Caspian forests he hears that Turkish raiders have emptied the country, and orders a great stone wall built up from the sea, with an iron gate and watchmen.

Build me a lofty wall beside the sea: This reign was remembered for its walls. The long brick barrier running inland from the south-eastern corner of the Caspian across the Gorgan plain, known locally as the Red Snake, is Sasanian work and is usually the wall meant here; the fortifications of the Caucasus passes at Darband were credited to the same king. The terms are as characteristic as the wall: pay the workers whatever they ask, and press no one.

Here Fereydoon, who worshipped You, found rest: The Shah is standing in Fereydoon’s own country, since the poem placed his hiding and upbringing in these Caspian lands (see I, A6.1). The prayer on the mountainside quietly claims the oldest of the good kings as a predecessor in the same landscape.

D13.7Anooshirvan Subdues the Borderlands

The Shah threatens the Alanons, who submit with tribute and are set to building a walled city. Hindustan sends gifts. Told that Baluch raiders and Gilan are ruining his own country, he exterminates the Baluch, storms Gilan, then pardons the survivors and takes hostages.

He left the sea for where Alanons dwell: The Alans were an Iranian-speaking people of the steppe north of the Caucasus, neighbors and raiders of both empires; the Ossetians of the central Caucasus are their descendants, and the name is generally traced to the same root as Iran itself. They belong to the northern frontier the Shah has just been walling off.

Not one among the Baluch stayed alive: The poem reports an extermination as an achievement and measures it by the shepherd who can now leave his flock unwatched. Justice here means security for settled, tax-paying life, and the reader is invited to weigh a massacre in that currency; nothing is set against it, though the same Shah spares Roman towns a few chapters later.

D13.8Monzer Seeks Justice from Anooshirvan

Monzer, the Arab chief, meets the Shah on his return and complains that the Romans lord it over the desert horsemen. Anooshirvan sends Caesar a warning; Caesar answers with contempt. The Shah musters his troops and puts thirty thousand under Monzer to burn the Roman frontier.

“Behold Monzer, the Arab chief ahead.”: Monzer is the king of the Arabs of Hira on the lower Euphrates, Iran’s client on the desert frontier; Rum kept Arab clients of its own, Ghassan chief among them. Much of the long Roman war was fought through these two Arab kingdoms, and the poem is right to have the whole campaign begin with one of them demanding justice. His house appears earlier in the poem as the family that reared Bahram Goor.

From Bull to Pisces, earth and heaven, my own: A formula for universal rule. Behind it lies the old cosmology in which the earth rests on a bull and the bull on a great fish, so that from the Bull to the Fish takes in everything from the top of creation to the bottom; compare the idiom ‘from fish to moon’ (I, A7.5).

D13.9Anooshirvan’s Letter to Caesar

The Shah dictates a letter to Caesar: God turns the heavens and grants victory, Rum must not meddle with Monzer’s people or step a cubit beyond its border, and if it does, throne and crown will be trampled. The letter is sealed and a bold envoy chosen.

Kay Qobad’s reviver, conqueror of earth: The style is a genuine piece of chancery, since a Sasanian letter opened with the sender’s full titles. Notice what these titles do: they give the Shah’s father the Kayanian prefix Kay, borne by the ancient king Kay Qobad whom Sofrye had named among the models of good rule (D11.4.2). The poem folds the new dynasty into the old one without saying so.

Step not a single cubit past your bound: Frontier language, and not only poetic. The treaties that repeatedly closed these wars fixed a boundary, settled who paid whom, and assigned responsibility for the passes of the Caucasus; the tribute Caesar sends in D13.15 is the epic’s version of such a settlement.

D13.10Caesar Answers Anooshirvan

Caesar reads the letter, pales with anger, and dictates a reply: no Roman ever paid tribute to the kings of Iran, he has crown and troops of his own, and Iskandar’s conquests prove whose sword was greater. He demands tribute himself and dismisses the envoy.

You know Iskandar’s deeds across your land: Caesar turns the poem’s own previous book against it. The Iskandar cycle that fills the end of Volume II and the opening of Volume III (II, D5.1–D5.39; III, D5.40) is Iran’s great humiliation, and a Roman claiming that conqueror for his own side makes the one argument Anooshirvan cannot answer from the record. Ferdowsi gives it to the enemy without comment.

“May Christ and Cross go with you where you tread.”: Ferdowsi marks Rum’s religion by a parting blessing rather than by any description of it. Christians are about to matter greatly in this reign: the Shah’s own wife and son (D13.16), and the Christian governor he installs in his new city (D13.14).

D13.11Anooshirvan Marches against Caesar

Anooshirvan takes counsel for three days, then marches with Kaveh’s banner. At Azargashasp’s fire-temple he prays and gives alms, writes to his border lords to keep watch, and appoints his commanders. He enforces strict discipline: no plunder, no harm to crops, no leaving one’s post.

He asked his Mobad for the barsom boughs: The barsom is the bundle of twigs the priest holds throughout the Zoroastrian liturgy, in later practice a set of metal rods. A king who asks for it and weeps is taking part in the rite rather than watching it: the campaign is opened as an act of religion, at the empire’s greatest fire.

He built a burial chamber where he lay: A soldier’s honors, given without regard for Zoroastrian law, which required exposure rather than burial and kept the bones in an astōdān (see I, B1.9). Burying a man with his bow, helm, belt and kamand belongs to an older warrior practice, and the poem records it approvingly, as part of the Shah’s care for his troops.

D13.12Anooshirvan Seizes the Roman Forts

The army takes the great fortress of Shurab with catapults, killing its garrison and binding its notables on elephants. A second stronghold holding Caesar’s treasure is stormed and burned, its wealth given to the troops. Its surviving people beg mercy and the Shah spares them.

From four sides catapults began to pound: Siege engines are rare in the Shahnameh, whose wars are usually decided by champions on an open plain. They appear in the Roman book because the Roman war was a war of fortified towns, fought by two armies that both used artillery, and because the poem’s source for these campaigns stood closer to a record than to a legend.

Were bound on elephants, a captive sight: Deportation was state policy and not merely plunder: Sasanian kings moved captured populations into Iran and settled them where their skills were wanted, the Roman prisoners of Shapur I and their great weir at Shushtar being the earlier instance (see I, B14.28). The prisoners taken here become the population of a new city two chapters on (D13.14).

D13.13Anooshirvan Defeats Caesar’s Army

A Roman army under Farfuriyus is routed. The Shah levels the citadel of Kaliniyus but forbids his men to plunder it, then pardons its people, and after three days’ grace takes Antakiya in three battles. He admires the city’s gardens and sends its captives to Madain.

The Shah allowed them three days’ respite still: The poem is careful to give this Shah a code of war: warning before assault, three days for a city to reconsider, a ban on looting and on harming crops and fruit trees, mercy for those who cannot fight. Set beside the Baluch campaign of D13.7, where no one was spared, it shows how differently the poem judges a raiding people and a walled city.

“Is this young spring, or Antakiya’s sight?: Antakiya is Antioch on the Orontes, the greatest city of the Roman east, famous for its gardens and its water. The Shah’s astonishment is not decoration: he goes home and builds a copy of it (D13.14).

D13.14The Founding of Zib-e-Khosrow

The Shah has a city built in Antakiya’s likeness, named Zib-e-Khosrow, and settles his Roman captives there as free men with houses and gifts. A homesick shoemaker complains that he has no mulberry tree; the Shah orders trees planted. A Christian is made governor.

And named the new-built town Zib-e-Khosrow: History knows this city. After sacking Antioch in 540 the Shah built a replica of it near his capital for the people he had deported, under a name meaning that Khosrow’s Antioch was the better one; Arabic writers know it as the Roman town. The poem keeps the essential point, that the conqueror admired the city so much that he made another.

A mulberry whose shade I loved and knew: The best thing in the chapter, and the kind of detail that survives only because someone wrote it down: a deported cobbler stands in a purpose-built paradise and tells the king it is no use to him, because the tree that shaded his old door is missing. The Shah has trees planted. Homesickness, not gratitude, gets the last word.

The Shah then chose a Christian, wise and fair: A Christian population is given a Christian governor. The Church of the East was long established in Mesopotamia and its members served the Sasanian state at every level; the poem takes the arrangement for granted, and then shows the same king’s tolerance failing badly when Christianity reaches his own household (D13.16).

D13.15Caesar Sends Tribute to Anooshirvan

Caesar repents and sends sixty learned envoys under Mehras with treasure and hostages. Mehras argues that a king’s worth lies in his people, not his wealth. Anooshirvan accepts, fixes an annual tribute in dinars, bars Rum from Yemen, and marches on through Sham.

Full sixty wise Mobadan, pure in soul: Ferdowsi dresses the Roman embassy in Iranian clothes: its philosophers are Mobadan, and their spokesman delivers a speech of counsel on the vanity of wealth. Foreign courts in the Shahnameh are furnished with the institutions the poet knows, which is why Rum has Mobadan and Hind has sages.

Ten ox-hides’ worth of dinars as his share: Tribute measured in hides stuffed with coin. Something like it really did change hands: the treaties between the two empires regularly had Rum paying for peace and for the defense of the Caucasus passes, a payment its own government preferred to call a subsidy. The poem, naturally, calls it tribute.

D13.16The Birth of Anooshirvan’s Son Nushzad

The Shah’s Christian wife bears a son, Nushzad, raised in luxury, who takes his mother’s faith and is baptized. His father shuts him up at Gund-e-Shapur. When the Shah falls ill on his return from Rum, a rumor of his death reaches Nushzad, who rejoices.

That moon-faced woman worshipped at Christ’s shrine: A Christian queen was nothing unusual: the empire’s western provinces were largely Christian, and captives from Rum had been settled in Iran for three hundred years. That a son of Khosrow revolted is reported on the Greek side as well, though there the cause given is disgrace at court rather than religion; the Christian coloring of the rising belongs to the Arabic and Persian accounts, and that is the story the poem is about to tell.

Of Christ, of Esdras, and what Zardosht showed: Esdras is Ezra, named here for the Jewish scriptures, so the prince is given a Christian, a Jewish and a Zoroastrian education: the three faiths of the Sasanian heartland, learned by one boy. The line is a compact picture of how mixed that world was.

His prison-house at Gund-e-Shapur lay: Gondeshapur in Khuzestan was another city peopled with deported Roman captives, founded by Shapur; later tradition made it the seat of a celebrated school of medicine. The poem wants it only as somewhere far enough from the capital to hold a prince and a crowd of other prisoners.

D13.17The Revolt of Nushzad

Ferdowsi condemns a son who fights a just father, then tells how Nushzad, believing the Shah dead, frees the prisoners, gathers Christians and troops, takes his mother’s treasure and the revenues of Ahvaz and Shushtar, and declares for Caesar. Word reaches the Shah, who calls for a scribe.

I shaped the dehqan’s lore to leave behind: Ferdowsi steps forward in the middle of a reign to sign his work. The claim is double and only apparently contradictory: the matter is a dehqan’s (see I, B14.1) and the shaping is his own, and it is the shaping he expects to be remembered by. Compare his insistence at the close of Volume I that he has left nothing out (I, B14.28).

A sage of six-score years, austere and wise: The poem’s authorities are old men who remember, and a sage of a hundred and twenty years is produced here to pronounce that whoever makes war on a just king comes of Ahriman and not of human stock. Rebellion against a good ruler is not politics in the Shahnameh; it is a defect of nature.

D13.18Anooshirvan Orders Nushzad’s Capture

Anooshirvan writes to Ram Barzin about his rebel son Nushzad. He praises God, reflects that death levels all alike, and orders the prince taken alive and housed in comfort, while the marzbans who joined him are to be cut down.

If earth revealed the secrets in its breast: The Shah steadies himself with the oldest of Ferdowsi’s consolations: earth’s bosom is full of buried kings, its soil soaked with the blood of heroes. On the ubi sunt motif, see I, B9.39. The irony is that this meditation on universal death is the preamble to an order for his own son’s capture.

The letter sent by Caesar to his hand: That a son of Khosrow I revolted while his father was occupied elsewhere is recorded on the Greek side as well as in the Arabic and Persian tradition. Only the eastern accounts give the rising a Christian coloring; the Greek one puts it down to disgrace at court. Ferdowsi keeps the shape of the story and turns it into a study of a father’s judgment. The poem makes Caesar’s letter the cause; the histories are less tidy.

As for the Christians serving in his ranks: Christians were a large and tolerated minority in the Sasanian lands, most thickly settled in Iraq and Khuzestan, with their own bishops and law. Notice that the Shah argues against the rebels from their own scripture rather than condemning their faith: his charge is treason, not heresy, and he forbids anyone to curse the prince for it.

D13.19The Death of Nushzad

Ram Barzin marches from Madain; Nushzad arrays the Christians and the men of Rum under Shammas. Old Pirooz pleads with him in vain. An arrow strikes the prince; dying, he asks for Christian burial and sends word to his mother, and Ram Barzin weeps over him.

Raise me no dakhmeh, set no royal throne: The prince’s last request is the sharpest thing in the chapter. On the dakhmeh, see I, B12.25. To a Zoroastrian, burying a body in the earth defiles the earth itself, so asking for Christian rites is not a preference but a renunciation: he refuses the exposure that belongs to his father’s faith and to his royal rank together.

For such a bane no nush-daru is near.”: On nush-daru and the proverb of the antidote that comes too late, see I, B8.22. Nushzad uses it of himself while still able to speak, which is a grim kind of wit: the cure is not late, it does not exist.

Gund-e-Shapur wept bitterly that day: Gondeshapur in Khuzestan had a large Christian population and a bishop of its own, and later became famous as a center of medicine and translation. The Arabic and Persian accounts of the revolt of Khosrow’s Christian son place it in this city, which is why its grief closes the chapter rather than Madain’s.

May Mahmud, king whose deeds are crowned with praise: Ferdowsi breaks off the story to address Sultan Mahmud of Ghazna, the patron he had hoped to win with the poem, and to ask that his good favor “bring me comfort here.” These personal codas belong to the poet’s own voice, not the chronicle’s; another comes at the end of E2.4.

D13.20Bozorgmehr’s Seven Feasts

D13.20.1Bozorgmehr Interprets the Dream

The Shah dreams of a royal tree and of a boar drinking from his cup, and no interpreter can read it. An envoy finds the boy Bozorgmehr at Marv. He reveals a youth hidden among the harem women; the pair are hanged, and his name goes on the royal roll.

The Zand-Avesta guides what I can see: Zand is the Pahlavi translation-with-commentary on the Avesta, and “Zand-Avesta” became a name for scripture and commentary together — the form in which Europe first met the Zoroastrian books. The schoolmaster means that his competence stops at the text he teaches; dream-reading is another trade.

Was Bozorgmehr, intent to learn still more: The name is Middle Persian Wuzurgmihr, “great Mehr,” and it belonged to a minister remembered in Pahlavi literature as the wise man of Khosrow’s court. A short Pahlavi work of his counsels is preserved, and Arabic and Persian collections of maxims are attributed to him: for later tradition he is less a statesman than the voice of andarz, advice.

Came into Marv to seek a sage of fame: The envoy who finds him is named Azad Sarv, and he finds him at Marv. Elsewhere in the Shahnameh Ferdowsi names an Azad Sarv of Marv among the keepers of old books about Rostam — one of the informants he cites for his material. Whether the coincidence is his joke or his source’s, the man who discovers the sage carries the name of a man who preserved the epic.

A snake draw back the mantle from his head: The creature that visits a sleeping child and marks him for greatness is an old story-pattern; antiquity told it of bees settling on the lips of the infant Plato. Here it does real work in the plot: the envoy has nothing but a boy’s word, and the omen is what makes him worth bringing to court.

D13.20.2The First Banquet

The Shah spreads a board for the Mobadan and bids them display their learning. Bozorgmehr asks leave to speak and gives counsels on brevity, contentment and the knowledge of God, then on loyalty to the crown. The court marvels, and his name is set first on the roll.

One day the board was spread; the Shah decreed: The seven banquets that follow are the poem’s great set-piece of wisdom literature. Narrative almost stops, and Ferdowsi gives seven sittings of andarz, the Persian genre of counsel of which a good deal survives in Pahlavi. Anooshirvan’s court was remembered above all as the place such sayings came from, and a reader in Ferdowsi’s day would have expected them here.

A wise man, though your foe, does you less ill: The maxim that a clever enemy is safer than a devoted fool is one of the durable sayings of Near Eastern wisdom, and it is the kind of line these banquets exist to deliver: portable, unsentimental, and quotable out of context. The whole chapter is built to be raided for sentences.

D13.20.3The Second Banquet

A week later the sages question Bozorgmehr in turn on fate and livelihood, greatness, generosity, patience, self-command, the four faults of kings, and contentment. He answers each briefly, and the assembly praises him with one voice.

What you dislike, impose on none below: The golden rule in its negative form — do not do to others what you would not have done to you. This is the shape the maxim takes across the ancient world, from Confucius to Hillel, and it is characteristic of andarz that it arrives as a rule of conduct rather than a commandment.

No poverty weighs heavier than greed.”: Contentment as the only real wealth is the conclusion these banquets return to more than any other, and this is its sharpest phrasing. The sage says it to a court that has just been told to honor the rich and despise the needy (see the answers on wealth a few lines earlier), and lets the contradiction stand.

D13.20.4The Third Banquet

On the eighth day the Shah turns again to Bozorgmehr, who speaks on merit against lineage, the five means by which a man rises, the five virtues of the sage and the seven faults of the fool, and the worth of silence and of hearing others out.

I will set forth five virtues of the sage: The numbered list is the signature form of Pahlavi andarz, which taught by countable sets: here five means of rising, five virtues of the sage, seven faults of the fool, with four faults of kings in the last banquet and ten blameworthy men in the fifth. The counting is a memory aid, and the reason so much of this literature survived at all.

For noble birth alone brings no acclaim: On honar against gohar, acquired merit against inherited worth, see I, B11.1. In this mouth the old debate is autobiography: the speaker is a village schoolmaster’s pupil who has reached the Shah’s right hand, telling a hereditary aristocracy that lineage without merit sinks to shame.

D13.20.5The Fourth Banquet

Two weeks on, the Shah asks about lineage, intellect and kingship, and no answer pleases him until Bozorgmehr speaks: fear God in judgment, let no one sleep wronged, free prisoners by the sacred law, uproot a son’s first crooked impulse. The Shah fills his mouth with pearls.

Let none sleep wronged within the king’s domain: Justice is the Sasanian king’s first duty, and Anooshirvan is its pattern: Arabic and Persian writers call him simply the Just, and for a thousand years afterward mirrors for princes made him the king against whom other kings were measured. The reputation rests less on the record than on passages like this one.

And filled the sage’s mouth for what he taught: Filling a speaker’s mouth with pearls, or with sugar, was a courtly gesture of reward for fine speech, and it survives in Persian as an idiom for praising eloquence. Ferdowsi means it literally here; three chapters later the same court pays for good talk by the bagful.

D13.20.6The Fifth Banquet

The High Mobad and Yazdegard the scribe each set out counsels — seven marks of good rule, the faults of angry judges and mean rich men. Bozorgmehr then names ten kinds of men the learned blame, among them the sick physician and the boasting pauper.

Came Ardeshir, the Mobadan’s high priest: The banquets are peopled with the real great offices of the Sasanian state: the chief of the Mobadan, the head of the scribes, the court astrologers. Ferdowsi gives the posts names — Ardeshir, Shapur, Yazdegard — and lets them speak in character, the priest on piety and the scribe on the temper of judges and the meanness of the rich.

The ailing healer; how can he restore: The physician who cannot cure himself is one of the oldest jokes in moral literature; the Greeks had it as a proverb and Luke’s Gospel quotes it back at a preacher. In a list of frauds — the lying judge, the hoarding chief, the shirking soldier — it is the one that needs no explaining in any language.

D13.20.7The Sixth Banquet

The Mobad and the scribe put riddling questions. Bozorgmehr praises eating little, names fault-finding, envy and slander as guests to keep out of the breast, sets out the two roads of rashness and wisdom, and ends with a long praise of the scribe’s calling.

Much eating harms; a little strengthens more: Rise from the table while some hunger is left: the counsel is moral here but it is also medicine, the moderation in diet that Greek physiology taught and that reached Iran with the medical books. The sage giving it is described at his first appearance as a master of the healing arts (D13.20.1).

Teach your son well the calling of the scribe: The banquet ends with a scribe’s self-portrait: of all professions none is higher, it raises men of low birth, it seats a man where royal counsels are made. The scribes were a distinct estate in Sasanian society, and the same praise of the secretary’s art fills later Persian and Arabic manuals for the dabir. Ferdowsi, whose poem depends entirely on written books, gives it the last and longest word.

D13.20.8The Seventh Banquet

The Shah asks how men should serve him, and Bozorgmehr answers with a courtier’s rule-book: obey without delay, keep the crown’s secrets, never presume on favor, and stay away while anger is in your heart. The Shah pays him forty bags of silver for two words of praise.

Account the royal court a sea, and know: A sustained allegory, unusual in the Shahnameh’s plainer manner: the court is a sea, accomplishments are the ships, words the anchors, wit the sail. Its verdict is bleak — one man takes grains of sand from that sea and another a pearl — and the sage who draws it will himself be shipwrecked in E3.1.

For “Good!” four bags were granted at his call: Ferdowsi gives the tariff exactly: four bags of silver for “Good,” forty for “Good! Very good!”, each bag ten thousand coins. Whether or not the figures are historical, they belong to a court where largess was formal and reckoned by the word. On the Sasanian silver coin, see I, B11.3.