A literary history of Persia

1 8 INTRODUCTORYHe with an oath most solemn and most binding,Not to be loosed, had sworn upon the Fire'That whoso first should say, Shabdiz hath perished/Should die upon the cross in torments dire ;Until one morn that horse lay low in deathLike whom no horse hath been since man drew breathFour strings wailed o'er him, while the minstrel kindledPity and passion by the witcheryOf his left hand, and, while the strings vibrated,Chanted a wailing Persian threnody,Till the King cried, ' My horse Shabdiz is dead ! ''It is the King that sayeth it,' they said."Other minstrels of this old time are mentioned, whosenames alone are preserved to us :Afarin, Khusrawani,Madharastam, 1 and the 2harper Sakisa, beings yet moreshadowy than Barbad, of whose notes not so much as an echohas reached our time. Yet can we hardly doubt that those oldSasanian halls and palaces lacked not this ornament of song,whereof some reflex at least passed over into Muhammadantimes. For though the modern Persian prosody be modelledon that of the Arabs, there are typesof verse notably thequatrain (rubd l i] and the narrative poem in doublets (mathnawi)which are to allappearance indigenous. Whether, asDarmesteter seems to think,3 there is sufficient evidence towarrant us in believingthat romantic poetry existed in Persiaeven in Achaemenian times is too problematicala question tobe discussed in this place.Hitherto we have considered only the history of the Persianlanguage and the Persian powerin the narrower sense of the_.. . . tterm. We have now to extend the field ofWider view ofinquiry4 i jthe iranian so as to include the whole Iranian people andtheir literary remains. The ground on which we*Al-Bayhaqi's Kitdbu'l-Mahdsin {ed. Van Vloten), p. 363.*Nidhami of Ganja's Khusraw wa Shirin.3 Darmesteter' s Origines de la Potsie Persane (Paris, 1887), p. 3,