iche

orf

of the family of Rustam, and with it a version in which
the whole credit of the avenging of Siyawush was given
to this new hero. Both versions were duly incorporated
in the Persian Book of Kings, where they stood side by
side, to be poeticised by Firdausi. It was, in fact, this
incorporstin of the stories of the house of Sám, his
son Zal, and his grandson Rustam, which raised the
Book of Kings to the level of an epic, such as the
Khodainamak, in the main a court-chronicle, can only
in small measure have afforded. It is from this part
that come the passages best known to Western readers,
and to our taste the most poetical-the wooing of
Balaba by Zal and the tragedy of Rustam and Suhrab.
In another considerable portion of the epic the old
radition has been entirely suppressed in favour of a
foreign intruder. The conquest of Alexander was too
humiliating to be related, and too notorious to be
suppressed, in the national records. The Persians there-
This end they

fore boldly made Alexander a Persian.

commonly known as the 'pseudo-Callisthenes.' This curi-
attained by an adaptation of the Alexander romance
ous tale had a wide vogue in the East, and exists, so Prof.
Browne tells us (i, 118), 'in Syriac, Egyptian, Abyssinian,
and Arabic, as well as modern Persian, versions.' As
told in the Shahnama, it opens thus. Darab (Darius I)
makes war on Failiqus of Rum (Philip of Macedon) and
defeats him. As a condition of peace he demands the
hand of Philip's daughter, and takes her back with him
to Persia; but after a short time he is disgusted with
ber, and returns her to her father's house, where she gives
Birth to a son. In order to conceal the slight, Philip gives
w that the son is his own by one of his own wives. Thus,
The Alexander invades Persia, it is a merely domestic
air; the rightful heir has come to claim the crown

from his half-brother Dara (Darius II), son of Darab by
another wife. The rest of Alexander's career is pure
romance; his pilgrimage to Mecca to worship at the
a shows that the legend came through Muslim

es, and was

Washer it was in the Persian Book of Kings, or was
induced by Firdausi himself, may remain doubtful.
Within such narrow limits as these is speculation on the
Soures of the Shahnama confined.

certainly not in the Pahlavi book.

Vol. 211.-No. 420.

B

With the completion of the Shahnama the Persia national epic may be said to have come to an ene Persian epics have indeed been written ever since it amazing profusion; but none of them has any clair to be national. Firdausi's success raised up a host o imitators. Their first impulse was to extend the Shab nama. It might be presumed that they would have large amount of popular tradition at hand, exactly lik that which had been worked up into the Book of Kings. for that compilation can hardly have been exhaustive, There is, however, no reason to suppose that any sucl genuine material underlies the epics which still exist they seem to be the outcome of the poets' imagination or rather of their imitative power-mere rifacimenti of the Shahnama itself. Such at least is Nöldeke's opinion Some portion of the longest of them, the Burzonama has been printed by Macan. It relates the adventures of Burzo, a son of Rustam, of whom the Shahnama` knows nothing. The external imitation of Firdausi, says Nöldeke, is pretty good. In spite of many verses which are not so bad, the poem, as a whole, is far below its original. It is probable that we should speak in identical terms, did we possess it, of the Telegonia, which told, in continuation of the Odyssey, the story of Telegonos, Odysseus' son by Circe.

For our present purpose, however, it is more to the point that not all of these excrescences on Firdausi were independent poems; many of them were merely episodes or extensions of episodes in the Shahnama itself, designed for incorporation in it, and in many cases actually incorporated. Firdausi's text is, critically speaking, in a shocking state; it swarms with interpolations. Manuscripts are numerous, and all are at variance with one another. Of some thirty manuscripts of which the lines have been counted, one contains as many as 61,266 couplets, another as few as 39,851, the majority between 48,000 and 52,000. Macan's edition has an appendix of some 5000 couplets-nearly as much as the Odyssey'which,' in the editor's words, ' are found in some manuscripts, but are not certainly from the pen of Firdausi, and indeed are probably not by him.'

Firdausi is in fact still awaiting his Aristarchus, and most probably will never find him. The task has

།

grown too gigantic. The oldest manuscripts are not
greatly, if at all superior to the later in respect of inter-
polations. The papyri of Homer show that the same
process of interpolation had begun with the Greek text;
but it had never reached any such proportions as these.
The additions to Homer, of which we have evidence,
never amounted to more than a few lines here and
there; the task of restoring the official text was com-
paratively trifling. Yet with Firdausi we can say, what
cannot be said of Homer, that the author's authentic copy
was one in existence, and that there is a fixed text of a
fired date, a text which the critic must aim at restoring.
It's indeed possible that some of the variations may come
from the author himself; for, as we have seen, there
are two dedications of the poem, differently dated and
probably implying a recension. This would be a matter
to consider, if things had got far enough to give any
hope of finding traces of alteration. But, while the
manuscripts vary to such an extent that it is apparently
impossible even to begin the work of classifying them
into families, the very critical principles on which
enquiry must be based are incapable of expression.

Let us suppose for a moment that all the existing manuscripts had descended from one of the interpolated copies, the one which contains over 60,000 couplets; and that we had, as in the case of Homer, no independent manuscripts or contemporary literary history by which to check it. If we endeavoured, from internal evidence alone, to reconstruct the history of the work, it is possible that we might arrive at the conclusion that it was the wrk of many hands expanding an earlier poem; and ould of course be right. But who can doubt that e number of critics would be found to cry out at faith that whatever is between the twa boords of the sch blasphemy, and to be ready to suffer all for the hit must be Firdausi's? It would be useless to point to them, without the fuller knowledge which we ally possess, that the very existence of a poem of f style and metre, is certain to invite expansion, compass and vast popularity, written in a uniand expansion of a sort which renders detection by internal evidence extremely difficult and at times im

possible.

4

Every nation that has created a national epic h done it in its own fashion; and no direct deduction ca be made from the methods of one country as to those another. Lachmann signally failed when he tried t explain the genesis of the Odyssey by that of the Nibe lungenlied. Thus any idea that the known history o the origin of the Shahnama can cast a demonstrativ light on the genesis of the Greek epic may be at once abar doned. The mere fact that the Shahnama sprang fro a prose work places it at once leagues away from Home No one has ventured to suggest that the Iliad eve existed in a prose form out of which it was versified and all that we know of it renders such an hypothesi hardly conceivable. M. Bérard, indeed, maintains tha in certain passages of the Odyssey he has found trace of direct translation from a Phenician Mediterranear Pilot'; and that certain glaring discrepancies betweer his Island of Calypso and Homer's description of it can be traced to a misunderstanding of certain Semitic ex· pressions. But most people have held that this is the weakest point of a generally brilliant book; and, in any case, this prose original can have been followed nowhere but in the short passages of description of landscape, and can have no bearing on the Odyssey as a literary creation. We may in theory go back to an Odyssey told without metrical form over the winter fire; but that lies as far behind the hexameter of Homer as the old Persian folk-tale behind the Book of Kings to which it gave rise.

Prose implies a literary age; and the age which gave birth to the Shahnama was not only literary, but it was in the full middle-life of literature; it was scientific and critical of all things, literature included. While Firdausi was composing, his contemporaries were busily engaged in translating and commenting upon Plato and Aristotle, Galen and Ptolemy. The great Persian Abu Ali Ibn Sina, the Avicenna who was to embody for medieval Europe and Asia alike the very spirit of science and philosophy, was a contemporary of Firdausi-a considerably younger contemporary, it is true, though he outlived the aged poet by only some twelve or fifteen years. Daqiqi was murdered some five years before Avicenna was born. This one fact alone is sufficient to show the

THE MAKING OF AN EPIC

abyss that lies between the influences surrounding the cradles of the Greek epic and the Persian.

Yet the history of the Shahnama is not without
instructive sidelights illustrating tendencies which have
their importance for the endless problem of the Homeric
poems. Not the least interesting of these is the proof
which is gren us of the speed with which a conventional
epic language is formed; a language so conventional
that inators without number can acquire it and use
it in a way which makes detection extremely difficult.
We are seen, not only that Daqiqi's work was incor-
posted by Firdausi without any conspicuous difference
rl, but that later interpolators have inserted episodes
for the discovery of which we are driven to means which
in the case of Homer are entirely absent-manuscript
authority and literary history. The conventional style
is deliberately archaic; it is not the contemporary lan-
guage either of speech or of literature. We must add that
the archaeology of the epic seems to be also deliberately
archaic, at least so far as Firdausi is concerned. It was
doubtless taken into the epic armoury from the old Pah-
lavi chronicles, and was the more easily used with consis-
tency because Firdausi seems to have had no actual
experience of fighting, and evolved his battles, like his
sea-stories, entirely out of his inner consciousness.

he should speak of Alexander as a Christian is perhaps
A few cases of anachronism have been noticed. That
hardly to be counted among these, for in Firdausi's day
'Greek' and 'Christian' were almost convertible terms.
It is more serious that he should make Kai Khusrau
ainted with the Avesta, though the Shahnama itself
s the coming of Zoroaster a hundred and fifty years
Tons in the course of his narrative the city of Baghdad,
And he certainly makes a historical slip when he
than the Arab conquest, the last event related in the
Pely Muslim foundation dating from a century later

with

Whether his archaism be fully consistent or not there
perhaps, at least at present, insufficient material for
Tent. Orientalists will have to study the question
something like the loving labour which has been
upon Greek poetry and antiquities before a
be pronounced. But, whatever

Laristed

definite decision

can