Italo Pizzi

"Ingenuously made pomp of their native beauty, and it is told of Aisha (she was shei of Muslim time, of the first however) who, reproached by her husband for not wearing a veil, replied: "God has marked me with the seal of beauty, and it 77]."

"It does not have you in the world the richest country of Persia in heroic legends."

"The Book of Kings can be divided into two parts, one of which is all heroic and legendary, while the other is historical, wandering around the exploits of Iskender or Alexander the Great in the East and telling with many fairy tales the story of the Sassanids until the 651 of the V The first part begins with the first man and first king, Gayumers, and has as its main subject a centuries-old war of the Iranians with the Turani, peoples of North Asia, and with the Devi or demons, creatures of Ahrimane, that is, of the genius of evil. There is no doubt that under this name of Devi there is not a very ancient population that the Iranians found in the long run when they descended into Iran, and that they had to subdue and exterminate in part. But this war against the Devi and against the Turani in the eyes of the Iranians had a truly great meaning. It visibly represented on earth the great struggle between evil and good, between the creator, Ormuzd, and the enemy of all good, Ahrimane, in which all men, for a moral duty, are obliged to take part. As evil one can and must fight with pious and good works, so it can also fight with weapons, and the heroes of Iran, when they take the field against Devi and Turani, they do nothing but satisfy this moral obligation."

"His reign began on a day when the sun entered Aries, and lasted thirty years. To him were submissive not only all the men, but also all the beasts of the campaign that paid homage to him."

"Firdusi describes the miserable state of Iran under the scepter of Dahàk. Every guilt, every sad work, was lawful then, while every virtue was persecuted."

"With Yezdeghird the series of Persian monarchs closes, and the conquest of the Arabs marks the entering Iran of a new faith, a new law and new rulers."

"[...] was peculiar Persian doctrine that of Sufism, a doctrine more philosophical than religious, more mystical than devout and believing, pantheistic, although in words he professed monotheism and used the terms of the Koran, atheistic and skeptical in substance, although he professed the most ardent and eviscerated divine And, really strange thing! This gloomy doctrine that longed for the annihilation of the individual being in the universal Being, assumed the most splendid and dazzling poetic form that makes the Persian lyric, even with many nonsense and fainting, an inimitable jewel!"

"It can be said that every elegy of Mimnermo is marked by the darkest pessimism. For him, what is life worth? It has value as long as the beautiful youth lasts, after which, ceases all enjoyment for the mortal. He undergoes old age, laborious at the will of the Gods, while a thousand and a thousand afflictions afflict man in his short earthly career."

"The '[Avestā|Avesta]]' is not an organic book, it is not the work of a single creative and thinking mind, yes well the collection of several works, indeed of fragments of several works that have been lost. It therefore, due to the varied nature of the parts that compose it, can interest the public and scholars in two distinct and different ways. It may interest the philosopher and the theologian as the sacred code of a religion already famous in antiquity; it may interest the historian, the literate, the poet, in that part of it that touches life and customs, the ideas of people lived in remote ages, and expresses, maxims in the poetic part, thoughts, affections, vows, aspirations."

"The Ancients [...] almost all made great praises of the Iranians. They praised his tall and beautiful person and his dignified and noble appearance. Herodotus certainly speaks of their decent and great bearing; Aeschylo notices their beautiful and thick skin; Diodorus is pleased to describe the manly beauty of some of them. The Arabs of the Middle Ages used to say that those who wish to have brave and soulful children must take a woman from Persia as a wife. And, after all, in all that strong predilection that the Iranians, according to the Greek and Roman writers, have always had for everything that is chivalrous, noble, elected, as are noble horses, noble dog suits, jurs and exercises in the gym and in hunting, sumptuous palaces and gardens, drapes, gems, perfumes, sumptuous ornaments The same sacred book attributed to Zoroaster, the 'Avesta', commands and orders every pious man to honestly enjoy life and his possessions, as long as he does not exceed anything, as a precious gift of the Creator. The same book proclaims sovereign art among all agriculture, and the Iranians have always been, and still are, of the most diligent and diligent farmers in Asia."

"We, long bred in the ideas of classical culture, because we know that the Greeks defeated the Persians at Marathon, at Thermopylae, at Salamis, we also aged ourselves to consider these people as a bunch of cowards taken to the slaughter by the ambition of a tyrant, while it is also known that they, in those battles, fought as va Herodotus himself makes it, with praise, beautiful and open testimony, nor, bear in mind that, they were all Persians or Iranians the soldiers that Darius and Xerxes were then with them; he was, on the other hand, an infinite bevy, ill-ordered, of distant and very different people. Alexander, it is true, took the kingdom from Dario Codomanno, but and Darius and his people, while yielding, yielded as valiant; and the Arabs who in the seventh century of our Era invaded Iran and destroyed the ancient empire in 650, certainly did not enter without a blow injuring the rich and glorious country, even if the kingdom was torn."

"It belongs to the historian to say worthily of this great prince and to judge him in political and warrior, administrative and civil respect. It is enough for us to note how all antiquity praises it very high, not excluding the Greeks, as can be seen from the pages of Aeschylus and Herodotus."

"Neither Serse, nor the others who came later, had the mind, the wisdom, the fortune of Darius.* They would like the Sassanids, with noble boldness, to restore the glory of the empire of Cyrus and Darius, but they could not so much. However, they noted the fallen national sentiment and reinvigorated it; they recalled in honor, as it was said, the village religion; they favored studies, founded schools, restrained the nobles, overbearing and greedy, and with them the ministers of worship, intolerant and fanatical, and even sometimes thought of the miserable disedeed plebs."

"This great prince, to whom the West owes not a few things, acquired a beautiful glory of righteousness, so much so that he was long celebrated as such in the Persian and Arab novels, protected the arts and letters, welcomed to his canteen the philosophers that Justinian emperor had driven out of Constantino Thus, for him, it began that literary movement that four centuries later, or a little more, had to put head to the poetic composition of it book by the work of Firdusi."

"However, the Iranian ingenuity was not extinguished; which on the contrary, as always happens when a civilized people is subject to a stronger, but still barbaric and crude, those crude and barbaric inhabitants of the desert all, or almost everything, had to learn what is about political, military and literary art."

"If not even the Arabs, the Muslims all, of whatever nation they were, had the pride in the Middle Ages of finesse and splendor in life, of skill sought in everything that touches pomp and luxury, from the fantastically crafted palaces to the most delicate essences and scents, of all costs they owe to the Persians from whom they took it and appropriated Even the science that came to us from Asia in the Middle Ages, in great part was Persian; and Persians are almost all philosophers, doctors, astronomers, mathematicians, whose names we read in the pages of our middle age, such as Agazel and Alrasi, Albatenio, Avicenna, Alfarabi. They wrote their works in Arabic, this being the learned language of the Muslim empire; and we therefore, with manifest error, called them Arabs and yet we consider them to be so."

"Three moments of maximum splendor had the Iranian culture and civilization, and these are pted and added up, so to speak, in three equally glorious and illustrious names that are Zarathustra, Dario, Firdusi. The first two belong to the ancient age, and one is a great legislator, also the founder of a novel religion; the other is a great prince, unifier of the patrio kingdom. He belongs to the third to the Middle Ages, and is a great poet, worthy of standing next to the majors of the West."

"The Hadesta' which we now have it, is far from what it was supposed to be at one time when it formed as a wide and vast encyclopedia. Nor was it the sacred code, the sacred book of all Irans, yes good of a single part of the nation. He was not of the Persians in antiquity, because from what Herodotus says about their religion, and from what is evident from the inscriptions of the Achaemenids, it appears that they professed a very similar religion, but not that of the Avesta. The Persians, on the other hand, embraced it much later, that is, after the Vulgar Era, when the Sassanids solemnly proclaimed it, with the 'Avesta', the official religion of the kingdom."

"He was, on earth, propagator of faith and initiator among the men of agriculture."

"There is no well-founded reason to accuse Alessandro of the dispersion of the 'Avesta' and the consequent loss of many among the books of it, even if the Parsi accuse him of this, they who usually call him, for the hatred they have, the cursed. Coming from hatred, the accusation cannot be entirely right, and on the other hand it is known that Alexander was not intolerant of the religions of the peoples he visited and defeated, he did not deal with either their rites or their beliefs, which, while he had many other things to expect, he cared little or nothing. Indeed, if they cared, they cared in a favorable sense, because it is also known that the Macedonian soldiers who had followed him in the East, accused him, as crude as they were and uncultured, of assuming Asian customs and rites, the Persians in particular."

"He has few dogmas, but he brings to the faithful very high teachings; he admits the future life, he promises the coming, at the end of the world and when the dead will rise again, of a Savior, he announcing the prize that will touch the good, and the penalty of the wicked."

"Whatever it may, it is a well-ordered and engineered system of religion that, like Mosaism, Christianity and Islamism, proceeds from the preaching and fruitful work of one person."

"The name Ahura, like the name of Yahveh that the Bible gives to the God of Israel, means Being, that is, Being par excellence; and it is obvious to understand that such a concept, high and sublime, mere and pure metaphysical abstraction, can only proceed from an elected speculative mind, can belong to the And would this idea come to Zarathustra from the Semites, indeed from the Jews?"

"His work [...] in addition to being essentially evil, is also a kind of deliberate contamination of the good created by the adversary, just as for example [...] that, if Ahura Mazdao created fire, he induced ashes and smoke."

"Anra Mainyu tries by all means to destroy, to annihilate the work of Ahura Mazdao, and there, in the bottom of the cold and gloomy north, stands the seat of the demons he procreated, while under the shining plague of the southern sky, there is the way traveled by the alone, there is the happy seat of the blessed."

"The Daēvi of Zoroastrianism are not in origin other than the Devis of the correspondent, indeed related Indian mythology and theology. Other than the Indian Devi are good deities, protective friends of man, where the Iranian Daēvi are evil beings, true evil geniuses. This is probably due to the fact that some religious cleaver, as can reasonably be assumed, troubled Aryan or Indo-Iranian society or life before the exchangeable separation, that is, that ancient religious concepts had to gradually change and alter deeply for reasons that it is very difficult, not impossible, to trace."

"He has all the attributes of a most high God, because he is omniscient, very wise, custodian and defender of his creatures, inaccessible to deception because he sees and knows everything, creator of light, of men and of the so-s callous heifer that is, as you will see, the His throne stands in the highest heaven, and he sits there surrounded by celestial militias. The latter concept is common, it can be said, to almost all religions; but the attributes now enumerated are of a philosophical and theological nature, such that Ahura Mazdao approach it to the Semitic god, to the Yahveh in particular of the Jews, while they diverge him from any other Indo-European god to whom, usually, they must always, or"

"He is not subject to sleep, but he sees and hears everything, he is omniscient, and nothing in heaven or earth can escape him. He is armed with a club, and with it, well fused and well-savve, he goes sweaping the armies of demons and all those who deny him, whose weapons are thrown in vain by them at him."

"In ethical and moral respect, Mithra is regarded as a jealous custodian of the covenants that mortals conclude among themselves, a displeaunted of justice and mutual faith, a punisher of traitors and frighteds; and Xenophon attests that the Persians used to swear in his name."

"Anra Mainyu is very clever, nor could it be anything else, because, being evil par excellence in its totality, if it had a little bit of wisdom, it would also have in itself some good. Satan on the contrary, if not always, very often appears cunning and cunning and acute troubadour of deception and devious arts, identified then, for easy and fantastication of thought, to the scrutineering and inquiring spirit of man. One day, at the end of the world, both will be defeated; but, where Satan will forever remain the lord of the painful kingdom, Anra Mainyu, since then only the absolute reign of good will begin, will remain annihilated. It will be so then for ever the existence of evil."

"Dahaka means the snake that bites. In the naturalistic sense, it is the aerial monster that, according to the primitive concepts of a naturalistic religion, contends the celestial spaces to the Gods of light, and yet rejoins his brother of the Rigveda who is the serpent Ahi. LAvesta', adjoining the frightening and horrible traits due to the imagination of the vulgar, designates it from time to time as the worst and most eliitial Drugia that Anra Mainyu has created, and describes it with three heads, with three jaws, with six eyes; but then, rising"

"Perhaps the hot fantasy of the Iranians in some prince of Semitic, cruel and tyrannical lineage, who infested them, saw in it the living and visible image of the evil infernal Drugia procreated by Anra."

"The morality taught by the 'Avesta', beyond and above its theological, dogmatic, ritual precepts, is still a very high and pure morality that rightly places Zoroastrianism among the most elected religions in the world. The same threefold precept of never sinning in thoughts, in works, in words, which is also among the precepts of Christianity, encloses in its rigidity and summarizes every other precept that is intended to guide man down here. The greatest virtues that, moreover, were recommended not also by the 'Avesta', but also by the law and custom common to all the Iranians, were justice, charity, generosity, piety, the horror of lying."

"If it was rightly said that India gave the world the priests, and that Greece and Rome gave the civil man, no less rightly it can be said that Persia gave instead the type of man who believes, who works, who fights."

"As for breadth, all other epics yield by far to the Book of Kings of Firdusi, finding that the Iliad' and theOdyssey are restricted to two single facts, one before, the other after the This same thing can be said of the Nibelungen of the Germans and the Kalevala of the Finns; and only the Edda' of the Scandinavians could be an exception, starting from the origin of all things and descending then to narrate the facts of the Gods, the Giant [...] But the greatest value of the Book of Kings, for which it acquires great importance, is to be a national epic, an epic that is, the subject of which was not found and elaborated by a poet in the silence of his room and with the escort of his books, such as the Jerusalem and the '"

"The Book of Kings is a faithful image of the ingenuity, soul and heart of the Persian people, if not of our times, at least of that age when he had not yet been impregnated by the Muslim doctrines, and still felt the beneficial strength of the ancient religion of Zoroastro, infiant, energetic and, after Christianity."

"If the Homeric poems are a faithful mirror of the heroic life of the Greeks, of the feelings and ideas of that age, the Book of Kings is no less the faithful image of the soul, heart and ingenuity of the Persian people. (pp. X-XI)"

"The pârsi has not accepted any words from foreign languages and differs little from the language of Firdusi, of the greatest Persian epic poet who lived around the thousand of the vernacular era, who can be considered as the first who with an immortal work, as Dante did for the Italians, has honored the language of Persia of his From then on the Persian went more and more corrupting with accepting Arabic words; and nowadays in the works of modern Persian writers it is nothing but a jargon, of which two thirds are Arabic, while the language has been preserved much purer in the countryside and in the villages, where it is not uncommon to meet some good farmer who in his pure Persian dialect, which by some was 17.)"

"The religion of the Vedi for the Indians and that of Homer and Hesiod for the Greeks was but the expression of the ideas of the people, often subject to change and contradict each other because they were never fixed or determined by any sacred book of the nature of the Bible or of the The Iranian religion is on the contrary the work of philosophers and priests, founded, he is true, over the popular idea of the continuous struggle between good and evil, but reduced in a system by elected and speculative minds and confirmed with a sacred code, immutable, which was said to be revealed by Ormuzd to his prophet Zarathustra or Zoroaster. (p 26)"

"While the Arsacids and Sassanids specially cared for the prosperity and good condition of their people, and the Sassanids put on the ancient religion in honor, thus awakening the memory of the ancient myths and ancient heroes, the Achemenids were instead like strangers to their people. Who did not know the king of kings who sat in Persepolis, except for the tributes he was to send him; and because the tributes were burdensome, and because the youth was sometimes obliged to leave the native country to go to fight in distant countries, where the repugnant the ardor of conquest of the king was repugnant; so the king was hat."

"It is not [...] to wonder if the memory of the Achaemenids has completely disappeared from the minds of the people who did not know them and did not love them; and if their names, their exploits and the order of their succession are now known, this is due to the diligence of the Greek and Latin historians and especially of Herodotus, and to the care 71)"

"Talking about the merits of Firdusi is certainly not light and easy; but having to keep our word about it, we will start with the language which by the Persian writers who came after him, was increasingly corrupt with Arabic words. Firdusi instead knew how to use the real Persian language by abstaining, as much as he could, from the Arabic words that were introduced into Persia after the conquest of the Arabs. His way of expressing himself is robust, nervous and devoid of those games of words and those uncertain grigami that we so often encounter in the imitatory poets of the Arabs, such as Hâfiz, Khâkâni, Saadi and Giâmi. They met again often in their songs, figures and really grandiose similarities, which, however, never touch the monstrous like those that are needed in Indian poems, especially if of old age, as are the Purâni, nor do they go to the ridiculous and the silly like some of the Arabic and Persian poetry that imitated it on. (pp. 121-122)"

"Although he was a Muslim of religion and although he had to live in times, in which of the ancient and glorious Persia only the name remained, he could, however, he alone, understand all the glory and the inherient and warlike nature of his homeland. (p. 123)"

"Italo Pizzi, Epic tales from the book of kings of Firdusi, Ermanno Loescher, 1877"