Italo Pizzi Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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 <nowiki>'</nowiki>Avesta', but also by the law and custom common to all the Iranians, were justice, charity, generosity, piety, the horror of lying.

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

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.

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.)

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].</ref>

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.

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)