Weakening eyesight in the last few years had robbed me of the pleasure of reading books. A happy consequence of going on dialysis in recent months has been the welcome acquaintance with audio books. I can relieve the boredom of twelve hours of immobile confinement a week by listening to books.

More than forty years ago in an introduction to an English translation of the Shahnameh, in the hope of making that book familiar to the western reader, I made some comparisons between the epic of Ferdowsi and the Iliad of Homer. In that comparison I drew upon the generic similarities of the two works, pointing to the outer features of the two poems as celebrations of martial virtues. The inevitable formulaic repetitions, the detailed and personalized descriptions of weapons and armor, the crucial role of the heroes’ horses, the attachment and loyalty of younger acolytes to their older masters, the superb poetic descriptions of sunrise, and the imaginative similes drawn from the world of nature to depict the dying of heroes were noted as the uncanny affinities between the Shahnameh and the Iliad, affinities that point to the remote origins of both in oral epics.

Recently I listened to the Iliad in the magnificent translation of Robert Fitzgerald and was struck anew by comparisons with the Shahnameh, but this time by the stark dissimilarities of the inner dimensions and the intellectual core of the two poems.

Lest the reader take issue with comparison of a work versified in the 10th century of the C.E. clearly based upon a prose written source of only decades earlier with a work composed nearly two millennia earlier, I should hasten to point out that the basic subject of the early mythological episodes of the Shahnameh belong roughly to the same preantiquity as the Iliad. They are rooted in the Avesta and are the reflections of Mazdean and Zoroastrian creation myths. They constitute for the Iranian people the same attempt at self-recognition and identity as the Iliad does for the Greeks. And as I had noted in my essay of forty years ago, it is that mythological part of the Shahnameh that evokes valid comparisons.