ABSTRACT
This elegantly phrased but cynical view of panegyric poetry, the comment of a Persian-speaking European in Iran during the declining years of the Safavid empire (1084-8/1673-7), though it contains an element of truth, is not how practitioners of the art of court poetry saw their own achievements. Two examples, separated by more than a thousand years but surprisingly similar in phraseology, will suffice. The Roman poet Horace, who addressed panegyrics to the Emperor Augustus and his minister Maecenas in the second half of the first century BC, claimed that with his poetry he had built a monument more lasting than bronze and grander than the Pyramids; it would outlast the ravages of weather and time and preserve his fame throughout the known world (Odes III, 30). Firdausı-, not strictly a court poet, made a comparable claim in a passage of panegyric to Mah.mu-d of Ghazna (vol. V, p. 238, ll. 64-65):
Noble buildings are ruined by rain and by the heat of the sun. I have laid the foundations of a high palace of poetry which will not be damaged by wind and rain.
