The Life of Mashtots

...The heart of the lover remains with his beloved even after his departure. Deprived of his Teacher, he lived with his memories; he spontaneously ruminated on writing his biography, even before the order reached him.

This attachment to his Teacher appears before us at every turn in this Life; it is written with immense enthusiasm, admiration, and piety.

The Life is written as a panegyric, with a modest plan, as a reminder of a man's greatness, holiness, and self-sacrifice, and not as a contemporary History. A great struggle arose for him to distinguish the most important from the important among the multitude of incidents and creations in a life rich with events and abundant with fruits, and to present "the brief from the frequent." And he gave what he had promised to give. His credibility and objectivity are beyond all praise. We cannot accuse him of consciously committing any stumble against the truth; and he rightfully emphasized at the end of his work that it was not a fabrication. He wrote down what he saw and heard.

Koriwn is a rhetorician first and a historian second; but he did not sacrifice history to his rhetoric. He loves testimonies from the Holy Scripture; he considers this a sign of his erudition; his school's first and last textbook had been the Bible, which he did not remove from his hand thereafter. He also read the works of the Holy Fathers, which were accessible to him in Armenian translation; but most of all, he loved the "frequent Discourses" authored by his Teacher, the Prefaces of Euthalius, and the Books of the Maccabees, whose rhetorical style was dear to his heart. The author appears to have followed Hellenistic educations; the Hellenistic influence is perceptible in a number of expressions and periods. Because his book was meant to be read publicly in memory of Mashtots, it was naturally necessary to resort to devices to wake up his listeners and constrain their attention. He loves compound words, an accumulation of words, bold, inverted, and metaphorical expressions and sayings; they have the purpose of beauty and the harmony of sentences.

One must always keep in mind that he is speech-crafting and not chronicling, in order to judge his style accurately.

He has a high-soaring flight with strong wings; he is armed with newly coined, rich words; he weaves deep-flowing periods; he creates images with strong colors, but always corresponding to the Height of his Hero, pleasing to his tastes, molded in his workshop. With his descriptive style, this is undoubtedly artistic and unusual in literature, but every particle of it was harvested from the literary language, woven with literary taste, and in its entirety, it is original, sublime, and graceful. The river that flows through the plain peacefully and smoothly, when it takes a downward, rapid-flowing course, rolls along swift-running, foam-crested, noisy, and thunderously. Similarly, the lan-