ABSTRACT
It is Only when it is drawing to its close or even after it has passed away that a creative age will receive that literary representation that will be felt thenceforth to constitute the valid embodiment of its spirit, its aspirations, and its self-interpretation. Iliad and Odyssey follow rather than accompany the efflorescence of the civilization that has come to be known, for them, as Homeric. Virgil sings the mission of Rome at the very moment when, to him, this mission has been accomplished and when, to us, stagnation and decline are about to set in. Camoes finishes the Lusiad only a few years before the Portuguese fight and lose their last battle to extend their possessions overseas. The glory of the Samanids was paling when Firdaust undertook his work; it had been a memory for almost a generation when he completed it. Yet it is the Samanid period in which the Shah-N…mah belongs, whose dreams it lent body and whose spirit it immortalized without ever devoting a single verse to honoring its deeds.
