Notes · Book C8The Tragedy of Rostam and Esfandiyar

C8.1Esfandiyar Presses His Claim

Drunk and bitter, Esfandiyar tells his mother he means to claim the crown his father promised, and dismisses her counsel with a proverb against women. When the demand reaches Goshtasb, Jamasp reads the charts: the prince will die in Zabulistan by Rostam’s hand.

In Zabulistan comes his final breath: Ferdowsi gives the end away before he tells it, as he did with Siavash (I, B9.40). What is new here is the use a king makes of the knowledge: from this moment Goshtasb knows where his son must go in order to die, and two chapters later he sends him there. Jamasp’s own answer, that neither strength nor wisdom escapes the wheel, leaves the blame with the father rather than the stars.

Tell women nothing secret; what you say: The maxim is not Ferdowsi’s verdict. It is put in the mouth of a man refusing the soundest advice he is offered, by a mother who is proved right, and he uses it again to shame his own son for bringing back a true report (C8.10). Both times it marks the moment he stops listening.

C8.2Esfandiyar Demands the Kingdom

Before the court Esfandiyar recites his service: the oath against the idol-worshippers, the battle with Arjasp, the chains his father put on him, the Seven Stages, the sisters brought home. He ends by asking what pretext is left for withholding the throne.

Against the Faith, with Chin’s assembled might: Esfandiyar is the first hero in the poem to fight under a religious vow — he has sworn to cut down at the waist any man who leaves the faith for idols — and the war with Arjasp is the Shahnameh’s one holy war. It is also what makes him dangerous to Rostam, whose world of covenants, patents and service knows nothing about creeds.

My blood was capital; grief paid for all: The man who took the Ruyin Dezh dressed as a merchant (C7.9) now audits his father in a merchant’s language: he advanced the blood, the profit is locked in the royal treasury, and he has come to be paid. Ferdowsi lets the disguise come back as a metaphor.

C8.3Goshtasb Replies to His Son

Goshtasb grants that his son has no peer but Rostam, then names his price for the crown: march to Sistan and bring back Rostam, Zal, Zavareh and Faramarz in bonds. Esfandiyar protests the injustice, is refused twice, and leaves in anger.

Goshtasb’s crown is new, and we are old: The king quotes the sentence that is the real grievance. Rostam’s house in Sistan is older than Goshtasb’s branch of the line, has made kings and buried them, and has never once come to this king’s court. What follows is not a quarrel between champions but a dynastic one: an old warrior province against a new king with a new religion.

Set out for Sistan with your chosen train: The order comes from a father who was told two chapters ago that his son dies in Zabulistan (C8.1). Ferdowsi does not remind us; he simply lets the reader hold the horoscope while the king talks about broken covenants and the sins of Kavus.

C8.4Katayun Counsels Esfandiyar

Katayun begs her son not to ride against Rostam, reciting his deeds and warning that no crown is worth his life. Esfandiyar agrees that binding Rostam would be shameful, refuses to disobey the Shah, and insists on taking his sons with him.

He tore the White Div’s liver out by force: Katayun’s warning is Volume I in brief: the White Div (I, B5.6), the king of Hamavaran, the long vengeance for Siavash. Ferdowsi measures the two heroes against each other before they meet, and does the measuring through a frightened mother who knows the older stories better than her son does.

His deeds, like sacred Zand, you read and tell: The Zand is the Pahlavi translation and commentary of the Avesta — scripture, in Esfandiyar’s own religion. To say that Rostam’s deeds are read like Zand is an enormous compliment from the prince who fights for that faith, and he pays it in the same speech in which he agrees to go and bind the man.

C8.5Esfandiyar Marches to Zabul

The army marches at cockcrow. At the fork below Gombadan the lead camel kneels and will not rise; Esfandiyar has it killed to keep the ill luck with it, camps on the Hirmund, and tells Bishutan over wine that he will send a scribe to Rostam.

The foremost camel sank upon the ground: The lead camel of a caravan refusing to rise at a fork is a plain evil omen, and the prince’s remedy is to kill the beast so that the ill luck stays with it. Then he argues himself out of the fear on religious grounds: good and evil alike come down from God. The poem lets him be right and wrong in the same breath.

He marched until two roads appeared ahead: The Seven Stages also opened at a fork, where he took the short road and survived it (C7.2). This time one road runs back to the fortress where his father chained him and the other toward Kabul, and he takes the second. Ferdowsi lines the two journeys up down to the crossroads.

C8.6Esfandiyar Sends Bahman to Rostam

Esfandiyar dresses Bahman as a prince and sends him with ten priests to Rostam, bearing a long message: a sermon on good and evil, a charge of never attending court, and a promise to plead for him once he has submitted to the chains.

You never came to bow before his feet: The charge against Rostam is not rebellion, or any act at all, but absence: he never wrote, never came to the gate, never brought the homage kings expect. In this poem’s political world attendance at court is the substance of service, and Rostam’s long ease in Zabul has left a new king with nothing to show his nobles.

He wins the garden where the blessed go: The embassy preaches before it comes to business: the world is a lodging, deeds are a crop, the spirit goes to God. Rostam’s answer (C8.9) will be a service record with documents attached. The quarrel is audible in the two styles before either man has stated a demand.

C8.7Bahman Arrives in Zabul

Bahman crosses the Hirmund in royal state. Zal meets him without knowing him and asks his errand; told whose son he is, Zal dismounts and does homage. Bahman refuses wine and rides on to the hunting ground with a guide.

Son of the brazen-bodied prince of fame: Rūyīn-tan, ‘brazen-bodied’: Esfandiyar’s body cannot be pierced, a gift later tradition traces to a blessing of Zardosht. The epithet answers the rūyīn dezh, the brazen fortress he had to break (C7.8). An invulnerable hero must have one way in — the pattern that gives Achilles his heel and Siegfried the spot between his shoulders — and the next book finds Esfandiyar’s.

And from his heart there rose a sigh of fear: Zal sighs at a banner and a robe before a word has been spoken. The old men of this poem read the future from small signs, and Zal has been doing it since Volume I; he offers the boy wine and rest, is refused, and gives him a guide to Rostam instead.

C8.8Bahman Delivers Esfandiyar’s Message

From the height Bahman sees Rostam at the hunt and rolls a boulder down at him; Rostam kicks it aside without setting down his meal. Awed, Bahman delivers the message, eats almost nothing while Rostam eats a whole wild ass, and marvels at him.

He loosened from the height a flinty mass: The first thing Esfandiyar’s son does in Zabul is try to kill Rostam from cover, on nobody’s orders, because what he sees frightens him. Nothing comes of it and nothing is said of it again — but Bahman will be Shah, and he will come back to Zabul in that character later in this volume (II, D1.1–D1.5).

A hundredfold was Rostam’s appetite: The meal is where the two worlds first measure each other. Rostam eats a whole wild ass, on the scale his epithet promises (on Tahamtan see I, B5.1), and the prince’s son answers with a courtier’s maxim about temperance in kings. Rostam’s reply, that no man should hide his manhood, is as near to a challenge as this chapter comes.

C8.9Rostam Answers Esfandiyar

Rostam sends back a careful answer: he honors Esfandiyar and will come without troops, bringing his ancient royal grants, on foot and in a leopard skin with a halter over his own arm — but he will not be brought in another man’s chains.

A halter on my arm, bound by my hand: Rostam offers everything except the one thing demanded. He will come on foot, in a hunter’s leopard skin, with the halter over his own arm and his hands bound by himself; what he will not take is a chain put on by someone else. The next book turns on that distinction, which both men understand perfectly and neither can give up.

I bring the ancient royal grants I hold: Rostam answers a charge of disloyalty with paperwork: the patents by which the Shahs from Kay Qobad down to Kay Khosrow granted Sistan to his house (on the royal manshur, see I, A7.5). Where the embassy preached about the fleeting world, he produces documents and a record of service.

C8.10Bahman Returns to Esfandiyar

Rostam sends word to Zal to prepare a royal welcome and rides to the Hirmund. Bahman reports Rostam’s answer and his strength; Esfandiyar shames him in open court, then tells Bishutan privately that the old lion is still preparing for war.

His secrets to a woman at his side: He throws his mother’s proverb (C8.1) at his son for the offense of reporting accurately. Bahman has seen Rostam, judged him formidable and said so in front of the chiefs; Esfandiyar answers by calling him a child who has not heard a fox cry. The pattern is set: in this story every true warning is punished.

He carries lightly all the weight of time: The last word of the batch is Esfandiyar’s, said aside to his brother, and it is admiration. Each man now knows what the other is and neither will step back: Rostam is laying out a feast, and Esfandiyar hears the feast as a preparation for war.

C8.11Rostam and Esfandiyar Meet

The two meet at the Hirmund. Rostam greets Esfandiyar warmly and invites him home; the prince returns the courtesy but insists Rostam must come before Goshtasb in chains. Rostam refuses the bonds, and they settle instead on one day of feasting.

Rakhsh neighed aloud upon the nearer side: Ferdowsi opens the tragedy with the two horses calling to each other across the Hirmund, the river that marks the edge of Rostam’s Sistan (see I, B1.9). Almost everything in the episode happens on one bank or the other: the prince will not cross over to be a guest, and Rostam crosses three times, the last of them on foot and full of arrows.

You seem like Siavash, and none beside: Each man greets the other with the name of a beautiful prince already dead. Rostam sees Siavash, whom he reared and could not save; Esfandiyar answers by seeing Zarir, his uncle, killed in the first war with Arjasp. The courtesies of the meeting are made out of griefs, and both men are praising what the crown destroyed.

Set bonds upon your feet without delay: The whole quarrel turns on one word. To Esfandiyar the bonds are a formality he can undo by evening, an order to be carried out and then forgiven; to Rostam they are the end of a name six hundred years in the making. Neither man is lying and neither can yield, and the greatest debate in the poem is a disagreement about what a chain means.

C8.12Rostam Is Slighted by Esfandiyar

Alone with Bishutan, Esfandiyar decides against inviting his guest and sends no summons to the meal. Bishutan pleads for peace in vain. Rostam waits at home until the hour passes, then orders his own table laid and rides out to confront the prince.

Then Bishutan, his counselor, drew near: Bishutan, the brother who argues for peace through the whole book, is the Pēšyōtan of Avestan and Pahlavi tradition, a son of Vishtaspa. Zoroastrian belief made him one of the immortals, waiting in a hidden stronghold to restore the faith at the end of time. Ferdowsi gives him no miracle, only the thankless clear sight of a man who cannot die and cannot be heeded.

He sent no man to bid Rostam to share: A withheld invitation is the hinge of the story. Having agreed to a day’s truce, Esfandiyar avoids becoming Rostam’s guest and refuses him the standing of one, because bread and salt between them would forbid the fight (on nān o namak, see I, B12.24). The insult is at once petty and legal, and Rostam, who has sat waiting at a laid table, does not forget it.

C8.13Esfandiyar Makes Excuse to Rostam

Rostam crosses the river, and the watching troops pity him and blame Goshtasb. Esfandiyar excuses the missing summons. Seated on the prince’s left, Rostam refuses the lesser place, recites his lineage and deeds, and is given a golden chair on the right.

He placed great Rostam on his left-hand side: At a Persian court the seat at the host’s right hand was the place of honor and the left the lesser one, so this is a second and quieter insult after the missing summons. Rostam has his own chair set on the right instead, and the prince must send for gold to make it fit. Precedence at table is the day’s real battlefield.

The king must have a mind bereft of light: The verdict on Goshtasb is put in the mouths of the watching soldiers, who say what neither champion will: an old king is spending his son to keep a crown. Ferdowsi uses an anonymous chorus of this kind at several crises of the poem, letting the army pronounce what a narrator should not.

C8.14Esfandiyar Insults Rostam’s Race

Esfandiyar repeats a tale he says he had from the Mobadan: that Zal was Div-born, exposed by Sahm, reared on carrion by a contemptuous Simorgh, and that from this base stock came Rostam and a family that reaches after kingship.

That Zal was base, and from a Div was born: Esfandiyar retells the exposure and rearing of Zal (I, A7.2, I, A7.3) as an insult, adding what the poem never said: that the bird despised the child and fed him carrion scraps. The most marvelous thing in Volume I becomes the worst slander in Volume II. That the champion of the faith cites the Mobadan for this gossip is a sharp touch.

Thus he gained kingship, swollen in his pride: Beneath the abuse lies a real grievance. Zal’s house rules Sistan as a hereditary power, keeps its own treasury and army, takes tribute from Kabul, and has crowned and uncrowned Shahs. To the Kayanian court that is a subject behaving like a king, and the demand for chains is the throne’s answer to it.

C8.15Rostam Defends His Race and Deeds

Rostam answers with his pedigree: Nariman, Kariman, Hushang, and Sahm who killed a dragon and a Div. He claims descent through his mother from Zahhak, recounts his own wars, including the killing of Sohrab, and turns back to his wine.

Five fathers back, her lineage reached the crown: Rostam’s boast ends in a strange place. Through his mother Rudabeh, daughter of Mehrab of Kabul, he descends from Zahhak, the tyrant Fereydoon chained inside Damavand (I, A5.9). The defender of Iran carries the arch-enemy’s blood and says so with pride, and Ferdowsi lets the claim stand without comment.

Six hundred years and more have passed away: Rostam’s lifetime is the poem’s measure of an age. He is born in Volume I under Manuchehr and dies in this one, having served Kavus, Kay Khosrow, Lohrasp and Goshtasb. The figure is scale rather than arithmetic, the same scale as his appetite and his sleep (I, B5.1), and it is also an argument: he was old before this dynasty existed.

C8.16Esfandiyar Vaunts His Lineage

Esfandiyar answers with his own line, from Goshtasb through Lohrasp, Aurand, Kay Pashin and Kay Qobad to Fereydoon, and through his Roman mother to Salm. He recounts his war for the Faith, his Seven Stages, and the taking of the Ruyin Dezh.

For Faith I cinched my belt and cleared the land: Here is the fault line of the episode. Esfandiyar’s claim is religious: he is the sword of Zardosht’s revelation, and his wars have been against idol-worshippers. Rostam belongs to the older world the poem began in, and every deed he can name is from before the faith. Neither can be right without the other being obsolete, and the debate is really between two Irans.

Pursue my line to Fereydoon, whose throne: The two pedigrees are matched like weapons, in a formal exchange of ancestry and deeds that has parallels in Norse flyting and in the boasts before combat in the Iliad. Esfandiyar traces himself to Fereydoon through Salm and the Caesars of Rum; Rostam has already answered with Hushang, the second king of the world, and so claims a line older still.

C8.17Rostam Boasts of His Valor

Rostam counters with Mazandaran, the White Div and Hamavaran, and argues that without him no Kayanian king would have reigned. The two crush each other’s hands until blood runs from the nails, then each promises to unhorse and crown the other tomorrow.

Had blood poured from Kay Kavus’s neck, how then: Rostam’s sharpest argument is genealogical. Had he not saved Kavus there would have been no Siavash, no Kay Khosrow, no crowning of Lohrasp, and so no Goshtasb and no Esfandiyar. The prince who demands his chains owes him his existence. It is the old servant’s answer to a dynasty that has forgotten how it came by the throne.

He squeezed the hand of Rostam as he spoke: The hand-crushing is one of the great set-pieces of the poem, and it is exactly symmetrical: each man grips, each man’s nails run, neither shows the pain, and both laugh. Ferdowsi settles the question of strength before the fighting starts by declaring it a tie, so that what follows can only be decided by a trick.

C8.18Rostam and Esfandiyar Drink Together

Food is served, and Rostam’s appetite astonishes the camp; he demands his wine unwatered. Weighing his choices in silence, he finds shame in all of them, and warns Esfandiyar that Goshtasb has sent him to die. The prince fixes battle for dawn.

They watched amazed at how the chief could eat: The lambs and the cup a ship could sail on belong to the giant’s scale established in the Seven Stages (I, B5.1). The comedy is placed with care: Ferdowsi gives his audience one last look at Rostam enormous, hungry and entirely alive, in the chapter before he begins to bleed.

Why must your water in this wine reside?: Wine was normally served watered, and Ferdowsi’s own lines set ‘cooked’ wine against raw as the tamer of the two; Rostam wants his neither weakened nor softened, and gets his way. The small scene has a point beyond the joke. At this table the old man still sets the terms, and it is the last thing in the story he will be granted.

Both courses are inglorious and base: Rostam’s soliloquy is the clearest statement in the poem of a hero trapped by his own reputation. Chains disgrace him, killing the prince disgraces him, and dying ruins Zabul. He concludes that the one thing left within his power is to be quoted well afterward, and so goes on arguing for two more chapters.

C8.19Rostam Returns to His Palace

Leaving the tent, Rostam addresses it as the house of Jamshid, Kavus and Kay Khosrow, shamed by its present tenant. Esfandiyar answers with a roll of those who sit in it now. Bishutan pleads once more, and the prince will not hear him.

Your door of farr is shut; no worth is shown: Rostam addresses the royal tent as a survivor of better reigns, naming Jamshid, Kavus and Kay Khosrow: the lament for vanished greatness that runs through the poem (see I, B9.39). Speaking to a thing rather than a person is a habit of his in this book, and a few pages on he will talk to his armor.

On one side sits Zardosht; from Paradise: Esfandiyar answers the roll of dead kings with a roll of the living: Goshtasb on the throne, Jamasp beside him, Zardosht with the Zand-Avesta, Bishutan, and himself. Each man argues with a list of names about which Iran is the real one, the heroic past or the new dispensation. It is the whole episode in miniature.

C8.20Zal Advises Rostam

Rostam calls for his armor and speaks to it. Zal begs him to submit, to buy the prince off, or to hide; Rostam answers that he will lift Esfandiyar unhurt from the saddle and crown him himself. Zal calls the plan madness and prays all night.

O zereh, you have rested for a while: The arming of the hero is a fixed scene in epic, and Ferdowsi makes this one a farewell. Rostam greets his zereh like an old comrade called out of retirement and asks it to be his good fortune in what is coming. He has never before had to ask.

They will uproot the house of Zal and throw: Zal’s fear is exact prophecy. Whichever way the duel goes, Sistan is finished, and it is Esfandiyar’s son Bahman, whom Rostam is about to be given to rear, who will bring the army that ends the house of Sahm (II, D1). Zal’s advice, to submit or to disappear, is the only counsel in the story that would have worked.

C8.21Rostam Battles Esfandiyar

At dawn Rostam posts Zavareh with the troops and rides out alone. He offers to let the armies fight instead; Esfandiyar refuses, and the two agree that no one will help either of them. Spears, swords and gorzes break, and their wrestling ends in deadlock.

The champions agreed that none should aid: The pact of single combat, made here and broken within hours by Zavareh and by Esfandiyar’s sons, is what turns a duel into a blood feud. Neither champion breaks his word; their relatives do it for them, and both men then fight on terms neither of them chose.

They gripped a leather belt, prepared to strain: Single combat in the Shahnameh runs through a fixed order of arms: spears until they shatter, swords until they break, gorzes until the hafts give way, then the belt and bare strength. Here the whole sequence is exhausted without a decision, Ferdowsi’s way of saying that this fight cannot be settled in the ordinary manner.

C8.22Zavareh and Faramarz Slay Esfandiyar’s Sons

Zavareh taunts the waiting Iranians and Esfandiyar’s sons answer. Zavareh kills Nush Azar and Faramarz kills Mehr-e-Nush. Rostam swears he gave no order and offers his brother and son for punishment; Esfandiyar refuses the exchange and promises to pin him to his horse.

His name was Nush Azar, renowned and bright: Both of Esfandiyar’s sons carry fire-names, joining āzar, fire, to nush (I, B6.5) and to Mehr. The name Nush Azar stands elsewhere in this book for what Arjasp destroyed at Balkh, and Rostam will swear by it two chapters on. The prince who fought to restore the fires loses both sons named for them in one afternoon, in a private quarrel he was sent into.

To shed snake’s blood for peacocks in my sight: Rostam offers to hand over Zavareh and Faramarz to be killed for the two dead princes, and Esfandiyar refuses with an image of unequal worth. It is a rejection of the ordinary machinery of the feud, blood price and substitution (on khun-bahā, see I, A6.18), and it closes the last door before the archery begins.

C8.23Rostam Flees to the Heights

The archery begins. Esfandiyar’s arrows pierce Rostam and Rakhsh while Rostam’s cannot hurt him. Rostam takes to a height on foot, refuses Zavareh’s horse, and crosses the river bleeding. Esfandiyar mourns his sons, sends them home, and marvels at his enemy.

Esfandiyar has brass for flesh and hide!: Esfandiyar’s standing epithet is ruyin-tan, brazen-bodied, and tradition holds that he was made proof against weapons, the gift usually credited to Zardosht. Ferdowsi does not stop to explain it. He lets Rostam discover it in the middle of a fight, arrow by useless arrow, which is far more frightening than any account of how it was done.

Like some great ship, he crossed the river’s tide: The finest thing in the chapter is the enemy’s reaction. Esfandiyar, having shot him nearly to pieces, watches Rostam wade the Hirmund and praises God for making such a man. Ferdowsi keeps the admiration mutual to the end, so that neither of them can be read as the villain.

C8.24Rostam Consults His Family

At home Rostam’s wounds are dressed while Zal, Rudabeh, Zavareh and Faramarz grieve. He admits that neither his sword nor his grip nor his arrows can touch the prince, and speaks of flight. Zal proposes summoning the Simorgh instead.

Was like a citron resting in my clasp: Rostam measures his lost strength against the fruit he was holding at the feast two chapters before (on the toranj, see I, B8.1). A stone in that hand was a citron, and Esfandiyar’s belt would not move. Ferdowsi builds the horror of the episode out of small domestic objects rather than prodigies.

I shall summon the Simorgh as our guide: The feather burned here is the last of the bird’s gifts to the house she reared (I, A7.2), and it is spent not on a birth but on a killing. Zal’s remedy for everything since his childhood has been the Simorgh. This is the final time, and what she brings him is a weapon.

C8.25The Simorgh Comes to Rostam’s Aid

Zal burns the Simorgh’s feather. The bird draws out the arrowheads and heals Rostam and Rakhsh, warns that Esfandiyar’s killer is doomed in both worlds, then leads Rostam to a tamarisk beside the sea and teaches him to make the fatal arrow.

A tamarisk stood rooted, rising high: The gaz or tamarisk, a scrubby shrub of salt flats and riverbeds, is the one thing on earth that can kill a brazen-bodied man. The pattern is old and widespread: Balder, safe from everything that had sworn not to harm him, dies by the one plant nobody thought to ask. Ferdowsi’s version is bleaker, since the wood must be cut, straightened, steeped in wine and feathered by the man who will use it.

Whoever sheds that hero’s sacred blood: The Simorgh heals Rostam and in the same breath names the price: whoever kills Esfandiyar will have no peace in this world and no ease in the next. She hands him the means anyway, and he takes it. The curse is not decoration but the plot of the next book, where Rostam dies in a pit dug by his brother (C9.3).

Aim both your hands, as gaz-parast men do: The phrase is obscure and has been read in several ways; the gaz in it is the tamarisk of the fatal arrow, which the translation keeps. Whatever the archers so named actually did, the instruction that follows it is plain enough: both hands, and the eye.

C8.26Rostam Faces Esfandiyar Again

Rostam rides out with the arrow and calls the prince to battle. Esfandiyar, alarmed that he is on his feet, blames Zal’s sorcery. Rostam pleads once more, offering his treasure, his men and his own submission at court; the prince answers that only bonds or battle remain.

Have you forgotten, Sagzi, how I wage: Sagzi for a man of Sistan (I, B13.29) is the word Esfandiyar reaches for whenever he is frightened, and he is frightened here, having just learned that Rostam is standing. At the feast he called him by his name; on the field he calls him this.

A thousand Khallokh maidens I shall bring: The Khallokh are the Qarluq Turks of the eastern steppe, and a Khallokh beauty is a stock figure of Persian verse, as conventional as the moon. The inventory Rostam offers, gems, pages, maidens, his whole treasury and his own person at court, is a ransom for the one thing no ransom can buy: the right not to be chained.

C8.27Rostam Shoots Esfandiyar in the Eyes

Rostam prays, then shoots the tamarisk shaft into Esfandiyar’s eyes. The prince falls, draws the arrow out, and tells the grieving Bishutan and Bahman that the wood, the Simorgh and Zal’s craft, not Rostam’s strength, have killed him. Rostam weeps over him.

Creator of the moon and Tir, I pray: Tir is the planet Mercury, and the same word means arrow. Rostam calls on the maker of the moon and Tir at the moment of setting a tir to the string, and asks not to be charged with the shot. Ferdowsi rarely lets a pun carry so much weight.

The arrow struck his eye and quenched the light: A body proof against every weapon but for one unguarded place is among the oldest shapes a story can take: Achilles and his heel, Siegfried and the spot between his shoulders. Here the place is the eye, which makes the death an image as well as a wound, since the argument between these two men has been about what each of them is able to see. The scene is a favorite of manuscript painters.

The wood was but the pretext; mine the name: Rostam understands his position exactly. The tamarisk, the bird and the appointed hour will all be named in the telling, but the name that stays fastened to the deed is his. It is the same clear sight he showed over Sohrab’s body (I, B8.22), and the last book of this volume proceeds to prove him right.

C8.28Esfandiyar’s Last Wishes

Dying, Esfandiyar names Goshtasb as his true killer, gives his son Bahman into Rostam’s keeping to be reared as a prince, and sends bitter messages to his father, mother, sisters and wife. Zavareh warns that the boy will destroy them.

You were the pretext; father was my fate: The dying prince acquits his killer and names the real one. Ferdowsi has been building the charge since the Goshtasb chapters earlier in this volume: a king who will not step down, an heir who must be kept at war, and an errand to Sistan designed not to be survived. It is the poem’s harshest word about kingship, and the most obedient man in it speaks it.

Teach wine and music, polo, work, and mirth: Esfandiyar’s charge to Rostam is a curriculum: the ordering of an army, the seating of a feast, hunting, wine, music, polo (on chowgān, see I, B6.6) and the enjoyment of the world. This is what a Persian prince was expected to be taught, and the irony is that the best teacher of it left alive is the man who has just killed his father.

If you should raise a lion’s cub, behold: Zavareh’s proverb is the story’s own warning, and Rostam sets it aside. Bahman will be reared in Zabul, crowned in Iran, and will march on Sistan to avenge his father (II, D1). Esfandiyar’s last act plants in his killer’s house the thing that will destroy it, and nothing in the scene suggests he does not know it.

C8.29Bishutan Brings Esfandiyar Home

Rostam seals the prince in an iron coffin and sends him home with his shorn horse. Goshtasb mourns, but his nobles, his sisters and his mother turn on him, and Bishutan reproaches both the Shah and Jamasp. Iran mourns for a year.

Its forelock, tail both shorn; a mournful deed: The funeral is a catalogue of real mourning practice: torn clothes, dust cast on the head, the tabiras overturned and banners torn, blue and purple worn for grief, and the dead man’s horse led in front with mane and tail cut, the saddle turned backward, and his helmet, arms and robes strapped to it. Iranian Moharram processions still lead a riderless horse in much the same way.

And Katayun wept blood upon its hair: Katayun, whom the poem makes a daughter of Caesar, is usually identified with Hutaosa, the wife of Vishtaspa in the Avesta. Ferdowsi gives her the two scenes that matter: the one in which she begs her son not to go to Sistan, and this one, in which the only thing left for her to reproach is the horse.

He turned to Jamasp, crying in disdain: Jamasp is the Avestan Jāmāspa, counselor to Vishtaspa, and in Pahlavi tradition the sage to whom the future was disclosed; a whole apocalyptic book goes under his name. Ferdowsi keeps him as the court astrologer and makes foresight itself the instrument of the disaster, since it was his reading of the stars that told Goshtasb where his son could be killed.

C8.30Rostam Sends Bahman Back to Iran

Bahman grows up in Zabul under Rostam’s teaching. Rostam writes to Goshtasb and is pardoned. Years later Jamasp urges the Shah to send for his grandson; Rostam loads him with treasure and escorts him on his way, and Goshtasb names him Ardeshir.

He called him Ardeshir from that day’s turn: The second name and the long arms belong together: he is Ardeshir derāz-dast, the long-handed, and later tradition tends to identify him with the Artaxerxes whom Greek writers called Longimanus. The detail is the poem’s way of pinning its new king to the historical record, just as the legendary ages come to an end.

Two stages Rostam rode along the way: Riding two stages of a departing guest’s road is the courtesy Kay Khosrow once showed Rostam himself (I, B14.28). Rostam now pays it to the son of the man he killed, having first loaded him with arms, horses, gems and slaves. The account is settled in every form except the one that will matter.