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In the Enemy's Camp: Homer's Helen and Ferdowsi's Hojir

This paper will attempt to compare a famous scene in Ferdowsi's Shāhnāmeh with an equally well-known one in Homer's Iliad. There are broadly three ways in which such a comparison can be made. Similarities and differences can be ascribed to reasons of genre, or to the nature of the underlying mythical material and sources utilized by the poets in question, or to a consciousness of, and use by, the later poet of the earlier poet's work, at whatever stage of remoteness. Elsewhere I have touched on genre as a cause for apparent similarities between the two superficially quite different epic traditions of Greece and Iran, indicating that the king/champion conflict described by W. T. H. Jackson as typical of the European epic is also a characteristic of the Iranian Shāhnāmeh.