Notes · Book D4Dara and Iskandar

D4.1Dara, Son of Darab, Lectures His Chiefs

Dara mourns his father, takes the throne, and tells the chiefs he needs no counselor, will tolerate no dissent, and grudges other men their wealth. He sends threatening letters to neighboring kings, pays and arms his troops, gives out provinces, and founds Zarnush.

I need no counselor to guide my hand: In the Shahnameh a king who dismisses his advisers is already lost; Kavus’s disasters all begin that way. Ferdowsi condemns Dara in a dozen lines before a blow is struck, and then gives the next chapter to Arastatilis telling Iskandar the exact opposite (D4.2). The reader is told which brother will win, and why, before either army moves.

A khanjar of a letter, sharp in tone: Royal letters in this poem are usually luxuries — musk in the ink, reed pens from Rum, silk of Chin to write on (D4.7, D5.2) — so a letter that is a khanjar is felt as an insult before it is read. This is the tone in which the tribute is demanded from Rum in the next chapter.

D4.2Faylaqus Dies and Iskandar Gains the Throne

Iskandar succeeds Faylaqus and takes the sage Arastatilis as his counselor. He refuses Dara’s tribute, calls his legions to cross the world, beats Mesr in eight days, and arms for Iran. Dara musters at Istakhr and lines the Farat with troops.

Arastatilis, with a searching mind: Arastatilis is Aristotle, Alexander’s tutor in the Greek tradition and the first of the sages of the Iskandar cycle. Nothing he says is Greek philosophy: his speech is andarz, the Persian advice-literature the poem gives every good reign — take counsel, we come from dust, no throne keeps one head for long. The tradition kept the name and filled it with its own wisdom.

The bird that laid those golden eggs has died: The answer to Darab’s tribute of golden eggs (D3.3), and the sentence that starts the war. A version of the joke is old in the Alexander legend. Ferdowsi’s Iskandar delivers it like an accountant declining a renewal, and the herald leaves the hall as though he had wings.

From Rum to Mesr the legions thronged the way: Iskandar’s first conquest is Egypt, as in the record — though the record puts the Egyptian campaign after the second of the three great battles rather than before the first, and Dara himself faced Alexander in only two of those fields. The poem keeps the campaigns and loosens their order. Ferdowsi received this material as history, not as a chronicle he could check.

D4.3Iskandar Visits Dara Disguised as an Ambassador

Iskandar rides into Dara’s camp as his own envoy, delivers his master’s defiance, and is nearly recognized. He pockets the gold cups, claiming envoys keep them, until a returned tribute-seeker names him. He leaves at dusk and outruns a thousand pursuers.

I go as envoy to the Iran throne: The king who carries his own dispatch into the enemy’s camp is one of the best-loved episodes of the Alexander legend, and it comes to Ferdowsi with the story. What is his own is the long dangerous stare that follows — ‘I think Iskandar you yourself must be’ — and the answer, which is that no prudent king would ever do such a thing.

And in his lap each emptied cup was found: The cup joke: he keeps the gold as it comes round, and when challenged explains that in Rum an envoy keeps the goblet he drinks from. Dara laughs and sends him a jeweled one with a ruby on top. It is the only laughter in the whole war, and the guest is robbing the table while he counts the squadrons.

D4.4Dara Fights Iskandar and Is Worsted

The armies meet with elephants in the van. After a week of fighting, dust blinds the Iranians on the eighth day; Dara leaves the field and his chiefs follow. The survivors recross the Farat, and Iskandar’s troops cut them down along the bank.

His beaten troops crossed Farat in their flight: Ferdowsi gives Dara three defeats — this one, D4.5 and D4.6 — which answer roughly to the three great battles of the historical campaign; but he sets them on and about the Euphrates and then in Pars, where the record puts the decisive fields in Syria and in northern Mesopotamia. On Farat, see D2.1.

The sun rose from the raven’s back; its light: One of Ferdowsi’s dawn figures: night is a raven and the sun climbs off its back. He keeps a deep store of these and seldom repeats one at close quarters, and noticing them is among the quiet pleasures of reading a poem this long. Here the image of a black bird opens a chapter that ends in a river full of bodies.

D4.5Dara Fights Iskandar a Second Time

Dara pays and re-musters, crosses the river, and loses three more days of battle. Iskandar proclaims the civil population safe, rests four months, and gathers the spoil. Dara reaches Jahram, then Istakhr, and asks his chiefs to stand with him or lose everything.

Abandon hope; we share in Jamshid’s plight: Dara says what Zoroastrian tradition thought of Alexander and what the poem itself never says: Iran has fallen to a Zahhak. It is the one moment in the cycle when the conqueror is named as the arch-usurper of the old story, and Ferdowsi gives the line to a man who is about to be murdered, not to the narrator.

Iran’s folk found their safety now restored: What the line reports is a policy: the fighting men are hunted down, while farmers and townsmen are guaranteed their houses and their lives.

D4.6Iskandar Fights Dara and Dara Flees

A third battle breaks Dara, who withdraws to Kerman. Iskandar enters Istakhr and proclaims protection for all who submit. Dara finds two-thirds of his chiefs gone, and the survivors advise him to write for peace, since the wheel will turn on Iskandar too.

Iskandar came to Istakhr, pride of Pars: Istakhr (I, B3.5) is the town beside the ruins the Greeks called Persepolis. Every Greek account has Alexander burn the palace there, and Zoroastrian tradition accused him of burning the Avesta at Istakhr and scattering the priests who knew it. Ferdowsi’s Iskandar arrives and proclaims protection for the province instead. Nothing shows more plainly what the Persian romance made of Alexander.

The circling sky will turn on him in time: The counsel of submission rests on the poem’s own theology: no crown stays long on one head, so a beaten people can afford to wait. The chiefs are arguing the argument the whole Shahnameh makes — and they are right. The cycle they are opening ends with a young king dead a long way from home.

D4.7Dara Proposes Peace to Iskandar

A scribe writes Dara’s letter: fate, not weakness, has undone him. He offers Goshtasb’s treasure and his own service for peace, and asks for his wives and children back. Iskandar replies that the family is safe and that Dara may have Iran again.

But let my wives and children now depart: Here the poem and the record agree. The Persian king’s mother, wife and daughters did fall into Alexander’s hands, and were treated with conspicuous honor; letters did pass between the two kings about ransom and terms. What belongs to the romance is the reply: the Alexander of the historians refused every offer, while Ferdowsi’s Iskandar promises to hand the kingdom back.

With paper, black musk ink; his writing gear: Ink scented with musk is a real luxury of the chancery and a standing detail of the Shahnameh’s letters, with reed pens from Rum and silk of Chin to write on (D5.2). The scribe’s yellow cheeks and blood-wept eyes are Ferdowsi’s own touch: the letter is written by a man who knows what it costs to send it.

D4.8Dara Is Slain by His Chiefs

Dara appeals to Foor of Hind for help. Iskandar learns of it and attacks at once; Iran’s worn army gives way and Dara flees with three hundred riders. His counselors Janusiyar and Mahiyar judge him finished, and Janusiyar puts a khanjar through his breast.

He wrote to Foor, deserted now by all: Foor, king of Hind, is the Poros whom Alexander fought on the Indian frontier, and the poem treats the name as dynastic — he is of the Foors’ descent. Persian tradition brings him into the story early, as Dara’s last hope, and Iskandar will meet him in his own right later in the cycle. The letter is never answered.

Then Janusiyar gripped his khanjar fast: In the Greek accounts the last Persian king was cut down by his own officers as Alexander closed in, the satrap Bessus chief among them, and the conqueror came up to find him already dead. The poem keeps the murder by his own men but not the timing: the tradition wanted the two kings to speak together once, and history had given them no opportunity (D4.9).

D4.9Dara Tells His Last Wishes to Iskandar and Dies

Iskandar reaches the dying Dara, lifts off his crown and jowshan, and weeps. Dara preaches on fortune, asks him to guard his family, to marry his daughter Roshanak, and to keep the fire and the faith. He dies; Iskandar buries him royally and hangs the murderers.

Her mother named her Roshanak; her birth: Roshanak is Roxana, ‘the shining one’, from rowshan, ‘bright’. History makes her the daughter of a Bactrian lord, married during the eastern campaign; Alexander did also marry a daughter of the last Persian king, late in his life, and the tradition appears to have merged the two women. Making her Dara’s own daughter turns a conquest into a succession, which is the whole point of her father’s dying gift.

Perhaps from her shall come a prince of fame: Dara’s last wish is a graft: a son of Roshanak who will tend Zardosht’s fire, take the Zand-Avesta in his hand, and keep Nowruz and Sadeh (see D2.6). It makes the conqueror the guardian of the faith he was elsewhere remembered for destroying (D4.6) — and, as the rest of the poem shows, it is not granted.

He built a tomb to suit the monarch’s creed: Zoroastrian practice was exposure, not burial (on the dakhmeh and the astōdān, see I, B12.25 and B1.9), and Ferdowsi covers the difficulty in half a line: the tomb was made to suit Dara’s own rite. What follows is the Shahnameh’s standard royal funeral — blood washed off with rosewater, camphor, Roman brocade, a golden coffin, and a crown set on the dead head.

D4.10Iskandar Writes to the Chiefs of Iran

A messenger brings Iskandar’s terms to Isfahan: he stands in Dara’s place, mourns him, and lays the blood on the murderers. His letter to the Mobadan orders tribute, coins struck in his name, market guards, border watchmen, bondmaids, and honor for holy mendicants.

From kaf and nun; His “Be”; two worlds arose: Kāf and nūn are the two letters of the Arabic kun, ‘Be!’, the word by which God creates in the Quran; the phrase is a commonplace of Persian verse. It stands here at the head of a letter from Alexander of Macedon to the Zoroastrian priesthood of Iran, which is the kind of thing this book does at every turn.

The scroll was from Iskandar, Faylaqus’ son: He signs himself by the father the world believes in. The poem has told us he is Darab’s son (D3.4), and that is why Iran can accept him; but the public style never changes, and every document in the cycle comes from Faylaqus’s son. Ferdowsi keeps both paternities alive to the end.

Their hearts are pure; they bear the Sufi name: Sufis in a rescript of Alexander’s. The whole letter is a document of Ferdowsi’s own world: officers set over the markets who act in the king’s name, watchmen on the roads against robbers, dues sent to a treasury, silver struck with the ruler’s name as the sign of sovereignty, and mendicants placed first on the register of petitioners. The poem does not describe an ancient chancery, because it knew only one kind.