Italo Pizzi Quotes

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)

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 <nowiki>'</nowiki> 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)

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)

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.

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.