Notes · Book E3Bozorgmehr’s Fall and Restoration

E3.1Bozorgmehr Falls from Favor

Hunting, the Shah sleeps with his head in Bozorgmehr’s lap, and a bird steals the jewels from his armlet. Accused of theft, the sage keeps silent through prison, dungeon and a spiked cage, answering each time that his lot is better than the Shah’s. He is freed, but broken.

A sable raven swooped down from the sky: What frightens Bozorgmehr is not the accusation, which has not yet been made, but the omen: he reads the theft as the turn of his own fortune and is dumb with it before a word is said. The wisest man in the kingdom is destroyed by a bird, and by his own silence, and the poet lets the accident stand without explaining what the sage could have said instead.

I am not Ormozd, privy to your game: On Ormozd, see I, A9.2. The Shah’s point is that only God can see into a man, and it is the very argument he used to excuse himself over Mahbud — “Yazdan of all alone can pierce the guise” (E1.2). He has learned the sentence and not the lesson, and once again he passes judgment within the hour.

“My days are better than the Shah’s,” he said: The answer that is repeated three times is the wisdom of the banquets turned against the throne. The sage who taught that the court is a dangerous sea and that a servant must never presume on favor (D13.20.8) is now proving it in an iron oven full of spikes, and the one sentence that finally frightens Anooshirvan into mercy is this: leaving a prison is easy, and the fear belongs to those who wear the ring.

E3.2Caesar’s Locked Casket

Caesar sends a sealed casket and challenges Anooshirvan’s sages to name its contents; none can. The blinded Bozorgmehr is fetched from prison, questions three women on the road, and declares three pearls — one pierced, one half-pierced, one whole. He is right, and restored.

The sage discerned the riddle they implied: The three women — one pregnant, one married and childless, one a maiden — are the answer: pierced, half-pierced, whole, as the sage himself now spells out. The sealed-riddle contest between kings is an old international tale, and this is its best-known Persian form.

These sufferings have robbed me of my sight: Bozorgmehr is blind because of the affair of the armlet, the bird and the king’s sleep (III, E3.1), which he recounts to the Shah at the close of this chapter. The sage who cannot see and must borrow another man’s eyes on the road, yet reads what is sealed in a box, is the point of the whole episode.

He filled Bozorgmehr’s mouth with pearls of light: Filling a man’s mouth with jewels recurs in the poem as the way good speech is paid what it is worth, and here the reward is literally the thing he named. The Shah’s shame in the second half of the couplet is Ferdowsi’s: the wisest man in Iran had to be brought out of a prison to save the crown’s honor.

E3.3Anooshirvan’s Wise Replies

Reports reach the Shah and he rules on each: a hardened sinner hanged, a careless captain dismissed, Roman captives freed, extorted taxes returned to Marv and Balkh, pensions fixed for a dead warrior’s children. Ferdowsi closes by thanking Mahmud for noticing his poem.

Set down this question for the royal pen: This chapter is not a story but a file: some forty cases submitted in writing and answered in writing, with no narrative thread and no scene. Books of the judgments and sayings of Khosrow were current in Pahlavi and were still being quoted in Arabic centuries later, and what Ferdowsi has done is put such a docket into verse almost unaltered.

The Shah replied, “I had no teeth for long: One of the most quoted of the Shah’s answers. Asked why the mild king of his youth has grown imperious, he replies that he was toothless once and lived on milk, and now has teeth and eats meat. It is a defense of hardening as growth rather than corruption — and Ferdowsi lets it stand without comment, in a chapter otherwise full of mercy.

The Jews and Christians bear you hidden spite: An informer offers the Shah a sectarian grievance and is answered with a principle: a king who lets those who seek his protection be despised has no greatness left. The empire Anooshirvan ruled held very large Jewish and Christian populations, especially in Mesopotamia, and the reply is the poem’s clearest statement that protection is what kingship is for.

E3.4Anooshirvan’s Counsel to Hormizd

Anooshirvan has a letter of counsel written for Hormizd: rule by knowledge, keep no false oath, take no subject’s property, keep one wise adviser always at your side, arm no unworthy man. He stores the letter away, and Ferdowsi closes in praise of Mahmud.

In Pahlavi these counsels are addressed: The letter announces its own language, which is Ferdowsi’s way of showing his source. Pahlavi literature is full of such testaments fathered on kings and sages, and the Sasanian books of the Shahnameh draw on them heavily — four of the chapters in this stretch of the poem are wisdom documents rather than narrative.

This lucky month, upon Khordad’s fair day: Each of the thirty days of the Zoroastrian month bears a name of its own, as the months do, so that a day can be spoken of as Khordad’s the way a month can; and a crowning was set for an auspicious day — the record has the ceremony held at the first Nowruz after an accession, and sometimes at Mehrgan. On Khordad among the divine names, see I, A5.6.

Give battle-gear to no unworthy man: The sharpest maxim in the letter, and the one the poem is about to test. Arms given to the wrong man, the father warns, will be turned against the troops they were meant to save. Hormizd will hand the armories of Iran to Bahram Chubin (E5.6) and live to see the warning come true.

E3.5Anooshirvan Answers the Mobad

A Mobad questions the Shah on prayer, greed, the kinds of speech, old age, death and grief. Anooshirvan answers each, denies that the stars send good or ill, and closes with a long charge to walk the straight road and keep company with the wise.

And do not charge your fortune to a star: The Shah’s theology in one line: the sky is old and knowing but created, and good and ill come from above it, so no one may blame a star. It sits oddly in a poem whose kings never move without consulting an astrologer, and whose narrator blames the turning sky on every other page — a tension Ferdowsi keeps rather than resolves.

But when a man has come to sixty years: The catechism quietly becomes a life. Asked why he fought hard in the east and patiently in the west, the Shah answers by his age: a young man forgets what suffering costs, a man of sixty takes the gentler road. It is the only place in these wisdom chapters where Anooshirvan sounds like someone with a biography.