History of Vardan and the Armenian War

and impressionable nature, and a sociable and lovable character, through which he had found hospitality in very many provinces of the Armenian land. He had not only become personally acquainted with the nobles and the warriors, but he also "knew by name from the oldest to the adolescents, the blessed virtuous women, and those bound and fallen in the war, to the number of five hundred." A person who was an embodiment of the feelings and ideas of that same time, and his writing, could only be a true-to-life picture of the general situation.

It is superfluous to ask whether Eghishe wanted to write history or an epic. In similar circumstances, works produced by other poetic geniuses were later placed in the category of national songs, even though the authors had thought only to tell the event and pass it on to their compatriots, and were unskilled or even indifferent to the rules of epic poetry. Eghishe also wanted to retell for us what he saw and felt without artifice. But if an epic is a poetic history of a significant undertaking 1, his work attained all the qualities of a national epic on its own. Even his prose style attained such harmony and proportion that we search for it in vain among other choice writers of the Golden Age.

Indeed, to present a magnificent and awesome appearance of the chosen subject, to fabricate a concept or a "machine" a literary device, and to insert entertaining episodes to give relief to the reader's mind, has been customary in enchanting poems. The lack of the former is not felt in Eghishe. The root cause of the events he narrated was the will of the Persians to erase Christianity. Therefore, it was necessary for us to show ceremoniously who conceived that evil thought, and how, over which his whole writing would revolve. While poets of a closer time, in similar circumstances, invented a council of the Sandaramets underworld spirits/demons, Eghishe, with more simplicity and truth, assembles before us the Council of the Magi, which the King of Kings presided over in person, and in which that design was truly established.

1. Blair's Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres. 507.