Returning to the first passage from Herodotus, let us recall that the name of Queen Tomyris appears in Eminescu’s ‘The Twins’, a long-gestating poem in which, probably following Iornandes 1, the poet draws a parallel between the Massagetae (a people of Scythian origin from the north of the Persian Empire, between the Caspian Sea and the Aral Sea) and the Getae. (Tomiris is the fiancée of the Getae chieftain Sarmis). To highlight the poem’s symmetry with Herodotus’s text, we quote from the same manuscript translation: Cyrus asks the queen to be his wife, ‘but Tomiris, realising that it was not her but the kingdom of the Massagetae that he sought to take, refused to agree to the match’ (I, 204). In The Twins, Queen Tomiris agrees to marry Brigbellu, who seeks the kingdom itself through her. Even in ‘Letter III’, Eminescu remains, to a certain extent, a follower of Iornandes: after Mircea’s first reply to Bayezid, in the second ‘the old king, sedate and gentle like Nestor’ (variants) delves into the ancient history of the nation, recalling the ‘kings’ (in the final text, ‘emperors’) who ‘as soon as they arrived, became one in body and soul’. This cannot refer to Darius. He emerged unscathed from the expedition across the Ister after many vicissitudes. We find it hard to accept a historical allusion to the wars with the Romans, although the line ‘they all became one water and one earth’ is very close to the common expression in the language ‘to become one water and one earth’, which means ‘to mix together’, ‘to become indistinguishable’. The phrase ‘many longed for a bridge across the Danube in times past’ could just as easily refer to the bridge of Apollodorus of Damascus as to the bridges built by Darius (across the Ister) and Xerxes (across the Hellespont). In keeping with the tone of Mircea’s entire discourse, the poet maintains a sense of uncertainty, perhaps even with the aim of directing the sultan’s thoughts towards Latin culture, towards the Catholic West, which he had defeated – in order to give the sultan the opportunity to display his own arrogance, whilst Mircea defines himself thereafter through clear opposition to ‘that West’, condemning precisely this arrogance from a personal standpoint. In this context, the reference is to ‘kings’ and ‘emperors’. Mircea is referring to the Persians and not to the Romans or – even less so – to the Macedonians. There is ‘no room left in the world’ for them – specifically for Xerxes, who boasts as follows before his loyal councillors (quoting Herodotus, in the same translation): ‘if we can defeat these men (the Athenians and their allies), we shall set the boundary of the Persian realm at the very heavens of Zeus; for the sun will no longer see any other land bordering our land, the land of the Persians, but I shall make all lands one (‘one sea and one land’) together with you, as I advance throughout Europe. For this is how I have understood it: no city, no language of any people whatsoever will be able to stand before us’ (VII, 8). The Gothic historian Iornandes gives a brief account of the Persian kings who invaded the Goths (= the Getae), naming Cyrus, Darius and then Xerxes (his expedition against Hellas is said to have been directed against the same … Goths/Getae). Of Xerxes he says the following: “After the death of Darius, his son Xerxes, seeking to avenge his father’s wrongs... set out to war against the Goths; without even attempting battle, he prevailed in the conflict, having overcome their steadfast animosity. Thus, just as he had come, without any engagement, he withdrew with his forces” (Chapter X). The final part (“ut venerat … recessit”: just as he had come, so he withdrew, to his shame, without fighting a single battle) appears to have been well known to Eminescu, forming the basis of Mircea’s phrase (“Cum veniră…”).
However, these forays into ancient history are based on Books I and IV of Herodotus’s Histories, corroborated by Iornandes. In Book I, chapter 204 and following, we learn of Cyrus, ‘the king of the Persians’, who was killed along with a large part of his army by Tomyris on Massagetae territory. He had asked for ‘earth and water’, and the queen had replied with a curse: ‘I swear by the sun, by the King of the Massagetae, know this for certain: since you are not sated with blood, I shall sate you’ (I, 211) – a curse repeated: after the battle, the queen finds Cyrus amongst the dead, fills a wineskin with blood ‘and, cursing the dead man, says: “You, whilst I was alive and victorious in war, killed my son by tricking him. And I, as I have boasted, shall make you drink your fill of blood” (I, 213). The structure of this curse is found in variant B of ‘Letter III’: ‘I never wished for you to come to know us / Nor for the Danube to drown your armies, foaming as it does’ – Mircea says to Bayezid; and, after the battle: ‘Sighing, old Mircea says: Today you know us. / Today the Danube drowns your armies, foaming as it does’. This formula fits into the common trope I also noted in connection with Vasile Alecsandri’s ballad ‘The Tatar’: it draws on the archaic pattern of the saying coming true, of uttering a curse that is fulfilled and materialises in action. The episode in Herodotus concerning the death of Cyrus had long been familiar in European literature. In Romania, Miron Costin elaborated on it around 1673 (at the very time of the translation of Herodotus!) in the poem ‘The Life of the World’:
‘Cyrus was a king renowned for his wars, / With wealth surpassing all others. And much suffering / Did the Hindus, the Tatars and all of Asia endure. / Behold what the treacherous wheel has brought upon him: / A woman caught him, and they drenched his head in blood. / ‘Have your fill of death, Cyrus, and perish / From the spilling of blood, O fiery men, / For even the Ganges cannot / Guard its course from your enmity…’”.
The Romanian historian notes, in addition to the episode itself, Cyrus’s hatred of the River Ganges (an earlier episode in the life of the ‘emperor of the Persians’: his battle with Tomyris took place near the River Araxos!) – whose course, he had indeed reduced through extensive hydraulic works, just as he had boasted, ‘so that even women could cross it without getting their knees wet’ (the syncretism of motifs in Miron Costin shows us precisely the ‘success’ enjoyed at the time by the episode of Cyrus’s struggle with the water). Cyrus is the first bridge-builder mentioned by Herodotus (perhaps this is why history records his connection with rivers). We might have expected Eminescu to refer to him when he speaks of emperors who became ‘as one with the water and the earth’, and for him to be ‘that guest who endured the first crossing’ – given that he attributes Tomyris to the Getae. In reality, the poet delays the announcement of that king by four lines, and line 180 of variant B of the poem shows us that he hesitated: ‘Who endured the first crossing… is Darius, son of Istaspe’. The ellipsis and the statement ‘it is Darius, son of Hystaspes’ (Herodotus does not place such great emphasis on Darius’s patronymic: in this form, ‘Darius son of Hystaspes’, appears for the first time in the context of Cyrus’s expedition, I, 183, and four more times throughout the work) – as does the following, redundant verse, the conclusion: ‘He /in those days/ built a bridge across the Danube’ – a mnemonic device – shows us that the poet realised the anachronism and corrected himself, identifying the first invader as Darius himself. The other elements from Herodotus concerning Cyrus’s expedition and from Iornandes concerning Xerxes’s shameful retreat are retained for stylistic reasons, forming the centrepiece of an apotropaic incantation (a charm to ward off evil) which forms the basis of ‘Letter III’.
Eminescu’s satire begins with Osman’s much-discussed dream, which bears similarities—sometimes pointed out with sarcasm (Anghel Demetriescu; and ever since then, whenever the subject is discussed, invectives are hurled all too readily at the old Latin teacher, ‘clogged up’ with dead languages, who committed an act of impiety against Eminescu, etc. It is overlooked that Anghel Demetriescu revises his opinion – and, in effect, denies his own merit in having discovered a source of Eminescu’s work – with a passage from Joseph von Hammer’s History of the Ottoman Empire. Compared with the text provided by Perpessicius in the footnote on pages 291–292 of Volume II of his edition, in version B of Eminescu’s text we can easily identify two new elements: 1) ‘Diamond dust falls as fine as mist / Sparkling, it floats through the air and throughout all of nature’ and 2) ‘Eagles soaring towards the heavens never reach the leaves / Whilst the branches beat against the clouds in a long, rustling murmur’. For the second element, ‘Memento mori’ offers us a solution: ‘From the west come the gods of Rome. Drawn by a star of eagles / Zeus, the gatherer of clouds, ascends the majestic vault’ and: “Joe releases the eagles from their restraints. With their wings / Long and black, they darken the sun...” (“Zeus, gatherer of clouds” is an exact rendering of the Homeric “Nefelgeretes Zeus”; I have given both examples from ‘Memento mori’ precisely to show that in Eminescu’s work there is no confusion between the ‘gods of Rome’ (Joe) and those of Greece (Zeus), but rather a casual, symbolic use of common tropes). The same ‘eagles’ in the poem ‘Decebal’: ‘For I held Rome’s eagles in my hand’. Thus, in Osman’s dream, the Ottoman Empire (symbolised by the tree that ‘grows’ from the heart of its founder) is compared with the Roman Empire (symbolised by the eagles), with the implication that the Ottoman Empire is more powerful (the eagles of Rome – or of ‘New Rome’ = Byzantium – cannot catch up with it). The poet emphasises the similarities: ‘His dream takes shape and spreads like an eagle’ (we draw attention once more – not of vertical growth, in the strict sense of a tree, but of a ‘spreading out’, a horizontal expansion; the comparison with the eagle serves merely as a tendency to capture the Roman spirit, as an attraction to the model).
As regards the tree rising up to the clouds, we consider that, even if Hammer’s History is the immediate model that Eminescu followed, the motif has much deeper roots in the poet’s work. Of the many passages, the following are most readily at hand: ‘Whose trees move between heaven and earth’ (Memento mori); ‘I have heard a rumour that in the realm of the spirit / There is a towering forest whose roots / Reach the heart of the world and whose heavy treetops / Moving through the heavens mingle with the stars’ (Decebal); ‘Within the acorn’s kernel / There is an oak. Just as it, from its own roots, / Grows its stately trunk, so too, my people, / In you lie your strength, your rise and your downfall / ... / The barbarian peoples / Who overran the Romanians are mighty storms / Frenzied, proud, harsh like any storm / Yet as fleeting as they, And the oak / Of my strong people still raises / Its dark crown and fresh foliage in the winds today” (Mureșan; the comparison with the “acorn” is Hegelian). It is precisely this oak, as the heraldic symbol of the Romanian people, that Mircea will refer to in version B of the poem: “And that is why the whole tree, every leaf and every branch / Is a friend to me alone...” with the intention of transforming, through an apotropaic formula, the elements constituting Bayezid’s coat of arms (here, ‘the tree’; elsewhere, ‘the moon’; further on, ‘the lightning’) into beneficial elements, favourable to the Romanian army (and nation). In the same way that the soil of the homeland instils fear in the invaders through specific realities, such as a ‘collapse’ of the heavens upon the earth, the ruler will, on another level, select the common elements from the two opposing forces, directing their similarities to his advantage. In our folk literature, the tree that grows between heaven and earth is an ancient motif, symbolising the tree of life. We refer, in particular, to Romulus Vulcănescu’s work Coloana cerului (Published by the Romanian Academy, 1972) and to the following folk verses collected by the author in the field:
‘High on the mountain’s peak / Grows the mightiest of fir trees / Grand and majestic / The whole sky has clothed it / The sun in its foliage / The moon amongst its branches / Thousands upon thousands of stars / Amongst its twigs’
– verses which form the basis of the imagery in the poem ‘Decebal’, proving that, indeed, the expression ‘I heard some news’ refers to a specific, real source known to the poet.
With regard to the motif of the tree, two passages from Herodotus are usually cited for their similarity: ‘Astyages had another vision in a dream: it seemed that a vine was growing from his daughter’s womb, and the vine spread across the whole of Asia’ (I, 108) and: ‘Xerxes had a third vision in a dream: it seemed that he was crowned with olive leaves and that the branches of this olive tree spread across the whole earth, but that, afterwards, the crown placed upon his head perished’ (VII, 19). The motif is widespread in Oriental literature; in the case of Xerxes, it explains his obsession with conquering the whole earth, all countries, and with being an absolute ruler (see also Bayezid’s obsession with the crown: ‘If not, I shall exchange your crown for a thorn branch’; ‘The Pope with his three crowns placed one upon the other’, etc.). Eminescu was intimately familiar with the historically infamous figure of Xerxes. In ‘Pentru păzirea auzului’ (1876), we quote the following verses, which Perpessicius considers to be drawn directly from Aelianus’s Variae historiae:
‘And Xerxes had fallen in love all too quickly with a tree / He adorns the plane tree as if it were a bride / And hangs beautiful ornaments from its branches / In its branches he hung earrings and rings / And behold the roots adorning its arms / And the crown of the treetop with imperial garlands / To resemble a proud queen from fairy tales / And thus, having adorned it, he waters the root / With a most precious, fragrant water, / To guard his bride from any insolent gaze / He places guards at the gate, and appoints a custodian as watchman’.
The actual source, according to modern commentators, is ‘The Little Book of Advice for the Protection of the Five Senses’ by Nicodemus of Athos. Herodotus mentions in passing Xerxes’s love for a plane tree. As a matter of curiosity, however, we include another passage from the same manuscript at Coșula. The text refers to… crocodiles: “Some of the Egyptians regard crocodiles as sacred. And they too keep a tame crocodile each, and hang earrings and other gold ornaments set with gemstones from their ears, and bracelets on their front legs, and feed them with delicacies, and look after them very well in every respect” (II, 63). This example might serve as further evidence that the poet drew on multiple sources for a single image or idea. The motif of transferring ornaments to trees or animals is an ancient one and probably has no fixed origin, as it is found across very different geographical areas and in contemporaneous historical periods.
But, regardless of the poet’s source, this particular instance is of special interest to us, because the first version of ‘Letter III’ begins as follows: ‘He fell asleep at Adana beside the green plane tree / The exiled king’s son and the scoundrel Osman’. The specific phrase – ‘the green plane tree’ – shows us that Eminescu had a particular plane tree in mind, the one he had ‘studied’. Nowhere in any other versions – not even in the final text – does this totemic tree species appear again, and it is easy to understand why: on the one hand, the ‘plane tree’ is considered an exotic tree in our country – and retaining it in the text would have permanently severed the episode of the rise of the Ottoman Empire from the rest of the poem; on the other hand, the ‘oak’ is a tree representative of the Romanian people; it could not be mentioned in connection with Osman’s dream (although the ‘tree’ in the poem clearly takes the form of an oak). The poet retains the term ‘tree’ precisely to introduce a dual symbolism: there are two trees standing face to face, one mythical, explaining the empire’s rise – and the other real, ‘the whole tree, every leaf and every branch’, which ‘moves’ and lives. The symbols that – heraldically – govern the invader’s march are found in reality within the territory he invades; thus, the invader is halted by his own weapons, by his own slogans, the imperatives by virtue of which the march begins. The poet’s ‘work’ is to turn the symbols on their head, to convert the signs in favour of his favourite hero, Mircea. Of particular interest from this perspective are the defining features of the tree—or rather, its principal defining feature. ‘The shadow of the towering tree reigns supreme over all’ – so it is said of the empire’s power at its zenith, and Bayezid announces this term before the Battle of Nicopolis, claiming it for himself, making it his own by reinforcing an oath that binds him and, at the same time, bestows a halo upon him: ‘I have sworn that I shall stride proudly over them, without a care’. On Mircea’s part, the term is first mocked in order to ‘twist’ its meaning: ‘You boast that you have overthrown the swirling tide before you...’ (a line repeated to emphasise the meaning intended by Mircea: ‘You boast that the Sunset has been placed before you?’: the perspective of the movement also shifts; the action ‘reverses’ through the change of verb – it is no longer Bayezid who is advancing, but the enemies themselves who ‘lie down’, ‘spread out’ at his feet). The poet himself intervenes to restore the strength of the degraded term: ‘And behind them stretches the mighty Romanian army’. The word, used in the same adverbial function, refers to opposing aspects of movement: Bayezid swore that he ‘would pass’ proudly – the ‘Romanian army’ fulfils this oath in action; see also the contrast between ‘swarms/swarming’ – descriptive of the imperial army (‘Spreading out in swarms, they pitch their great tents’), functional for the defenders (‘The horsemen fill the field and swarm at a signal’) – or ‘banner/flag’: devoid of meaning in the first instance, a symbol emptied of content (‘In vain they raise the green banner towards the army’) – active in the second (‘And, charging victoriously, the country’s flags kept coming’: ‘flag’ here means both ‘banner’ and a cluster of soldiers) – and, finally, to return to the tree’s defining features, the dual function of the shadow: ‘In the vast kingdom beneath the shadow of a tree’ – ‘The shadow of death stretches ever wider and wider’ (an intermediate reference to this term, in the same speech by Bayezid: ‘All who stand in the shadow of the cross …’).
Finally, the tree as a determinant becomes a direct attribute of Mircea: ‘Beside the tents, one of the sons of the stately lord’. He had declared (variant C): ‘Do you boast before me? Yet I shall not boast’. The final phrase, ‘the stately lord’, explains the inner dialogue: you boast, ‘you brag’ – but I am praised; I am called ‘the stately one’.
This entire ‘stylistic inflection’ of the term (or terms), tracing its passage through key forms, its shift from the realm of the noun to that of the verb, from the perfective to the imperfective aspect of the action, is found in exactly the same way in epic poetry or in classical Aeschylean drama (Aeschylus develops the metaphor of eponymy in particular, linking the heroes’ names to the action contained within the sound structure of the word – as in the case of Baiazid in Eminescu’s work) and explains, in part, the symmetries of the heroic style, the precise proportions and relationships that give the intelligible (though not necessarily tangible) beauty of the Greek Doric temple. We are reminded of an observation by Vitruvius in his treatise on architecture: the steps of temples are rigorously calculated not to be perfectly horizontal but to have a slight incline, to be gently curved upwards to correct the optical illusion. Indeed, if they were perfectly horizontal, the eye would perceive them as curving downwards, appearing to ‘sag’ under the weight of the structure – yet, this correction made by the architect restores the temple’s organic life, the position of the human being rising effortlessly upwards, towards the heavens. Similarly, the exterior columns are given a slight inward tilt (this tilt is suggested particularly by the column’s ornamentation) so that the eye perceives a cohesive structure, with all elements drawn towards a central point that holds them together, so that it does not appear as though the walls are tending to splay outwards. Looking at the vast construction site of ‘Letter III’ and analysing the evolution of the idea through its various stages, one is certain that one is standing before the incarnations of a temple, that every expression, every word, until it finds its being and breathing space, is kneaded, chiselled, arranged in provisional forms, rearranged into other forms and places – until the final assembly imposes itself almost with natural force, submitting to an immanent law of harmony; it is this law that the poet seeks, and, once found, the parts construct themselves of their own accord, like the stones of myth to the song of the harp. In the final text of the poem, the term ‘towering’ appears only four times in these key passages: as an attribute of the tree; taken up heraldically by Bayezid; taken up by Mircea and reinforced by the poet; as a direct attribute of Mircea – whilst in the variants the symmetry is no longer strictly observed: ‘the stately lord’ appears only in the fourth variant, in passing. Intermediate forms: ‘He still keeps watch by the fire; the old lord is alert’ – which would suggest the original intention to attribute the thanksgiving service to the lord; in the final text, through the easily identifiable device of Romantic irony, the poet ‘steps out of the game’, viewing the entire construction with a certain detachment as a ‘memory’ of creation: the role of the old gentleman is passed on to a son who, himself, ‘sits smiling at a memory’. The love letter itself – as a game, within which several themes intertwine – is a rapid ‘unravelling’ of symmetries, a breaking of the seams marking the end of the first part and the resumption, in negative terms, of history as the present. This is the climax of detachment, after which the poet intervenes directly, ex abrupto, in a single voice. Another version of the verse: ‘Beside the tent, a nobleman’s son still keeps watch, dreaming’ – through the protagonist’s attitude, the poem remains within a system of strict symmetries – it begins with a dream and ends with the vision of a ‘dreaming’ nobleman’s son: the poet does not stop at the level of the dream as a play on melancholy or tranquillity: ‘and in his vivid dream the lofty mountains stretch out and rise. / A longing for his vulture’s nest is bound to his heart’. The prince’s son is ready to set against the grand symbols of Osman’s dream (the mountains, the eagles) other, more specific ones, in order to enter the contest for greatness. Of course, his ‘eagle’s nest’ should have given rise to a path opposite to that in Osman’s dream: whereas there the goddess ‘descended’, here she will ‘draw’ him towards the heights. A rough draft in manuscript 2277 sketches out the lines: ‘gathering their harvests / they from the snake’s nest, you from the eagle’s nest’, contrasting a world of the desert with one of fertile heights (unless the poet has in mind the ‘great sign’ (mega semeion) from the Iliad: the serpent coiling up the tree trunk into the eagle’s nest to snatch its young; the image thus turns to stone by the will of Zeus, and Calchas interprets the sign as favourable for the Achaean armies. As there is no further context, we cannot draw definitive conclusions regarding these verses sketched out by the poet. The ‘they/you’ opposition may be reworked within the framework of ‘Letter II’, for example, where ‘they’ refers to the world and ‘you’ to the poet. Be that as it may, in the variants of this ending we witness a dramatic struggle to break free from the dominant motifs of ‘dream’, ‘eagles’ and ‘mountains’ – that is, from the beginning; there is a very strong tendency for the poem to close within a solid circle, for the whole to solidify into the form of pure heroism, rendering the other, satirical voice superfluous. Only the playfulness of the love letter, driven by the ‘smile’ and ‘memory’ of the nobleman’s son, makes it possible to transform the circle into a spiral, the transition to the other side as the second part of the whole. The ‘fortune-telling slip’ which defines the very literary genre the poet has in mind, that of the ‘letter’ – or ‘satire’, as it was called in the Junimea circle: for otherwise the epic of Rovine would not live up to its name; nothing in the struggle there bears the hallmarks of a social satire. There had to be a breaking of the dams, an unleashing of the energies confined to the system of underground channels, a disruption of the symmetries organised almost spontaneously in the heroic section so that the outburst from the social section might seem just as natural; what there is a stone structure, here it becomes organic growth, a springtime frenzy of vegetation sustained by continuous violence. No order – yet it is precisely this manifest disorder that achieves – not contrast, as is usually claimed – but wholeness, the atmosphere necessary for breathing, for life. Formally speaking, the ‘note’ links the two parts of the ‘Letter’, drawing the content it concludes towards the form it begins.
But this same ‘note’ has a specific function within the structure of the first part: before it is a ‘letter’, it is ‘writing’, ‘written’ – and it is this aspect that interests us first and foremost. The ‘Sultan’ in the final text of ‘Letter III’ bears no resemblance whatsoever to Osman from the first draft, the ‘exiled prince’, who lies beneath a plane tree and receives from Muhammad the dream of the greatness of the kings of Asia. Such attributes – ‘the exiled prince and the scoundrel’ – would suit Xerxes, son of Darius, far better: exiled from his own land following his defeat at Salamis, after he had dared to overturn the natural order of things by subjugating the sea, mixing earth with water through the haughty bridge he threw across the Hellespont.
The first element with which the poet enriched Hammer’s version: ‘Diamond dust falls as fine as a mist’ – brings to mind precisely this Aeschylean character. The ‘diamond dust’ falling like ‘frost’ to mark the birth of the Ottoman Empire reminds us of the ‘rain of gold’, an element featured in Xerxes’ coat of arms. The impetuous King of the Persians (‘thurios’) is, in Aeschylus, ‘king of kings’, ‘equal to the gods’, ‘light’, ‘sun’ (just like Agamemnon in the play of the same name: ‘King Agamemnon arrives to bring you light like a sun in the dead of night’) – whilst Bayezid in version B: ‘A demigod amongst men and a sun amongst kings’ – a combination of the expressions ‘isotheos fos’ (man/sun equal to the gods) and ‘basiles basileos’ (king of kings – for ‘king of kings’). Sultan Bayezid sits upon his ‘gilded, proud throne’ just as Xerxes watched the Battle of Salamis from a golden throne; he ‘roars like a lion in a rage’ when he sees his army defeated, just like the King of the Persians who ‘roars’ in pain and rage, tearing his robes and ordering the army to retreat, ‘each in the direction their eyes could see’ (It is clear from Eminescu’s text that Bayezid does not actually take part in the battle: he raises the green banner ‘towards’ the army from behind the ranks, for ‘it is beset by destruction both in front and on the flanks’. Indeed, the description of the battle adopts the sultan’s perspective; his position serves as a landmark, a ‘milestone’ around which the tide of battle turns: the Romanian army ‘comes’ towards him, then ‘drives’ the infidels further on, towards the Danube).
For the ancients, the ‘golden rain’ symbolised the fabulous wealth of the Persian Empire. Aeschylus calls Xerxes ‘the one born of the golden rain’ (‘hrysogonos genas’, v. 79) as a reflection of the myth (also recounted by Herodotus, VII, 61) according to which the name ‘Persians’ derives from Perses, the son of Perseus, who in turn was the son of Danaë (Zeus descended to her in the form of a golden rain; the relationship is reversed in Osman’s dream, where the goddess descends to her favourite – but mediated, as it happens, in both the myth and the poem, by the same ‘rain/dust’). In Eminescu’s work, the image is multifaceted and occurs frequently enough to constitute the strongest argument for a direct borrowing. Deeper, structural similarities, however, show us that the poet conceived of the Bayezid model within the framework of the moral philosophy of Aeschylean ‘hubris’. As an internal technique, the portrait of the sultan closely follows the model of the great arrogant figures who espoused this philosophy. Eminescu gives Bayezid the opportunity to announce his own epithet in a fateful phrase that will prove to be an ill omen for the Crescent: ‘The lightning bolts have gathered against the lightning bolt which / In its stormy fury has engulfed land and sea’. Eminescu scholars regard this passage as a mere play on words and cite (D. Murărașu), by way of comparison, a passage from Alecsandri’s ‘Despot Vodă’. In order to suggest a vivid symbolic interpretation of this phrase, as the core of the entire poem, we imagine that the poet drew inspiration from the epistolary formulae of the popes: the letters condemning the Turks often ended with an imprecation such as ‘Anathema sit!’ (Eminescu uses this phrase in ‘Cugetările sărmanului Dionis’) or ‘Fulguret!’, etc. (The Pope of Rome, of course, adopts the lightning bolt as a personal attribute from Jupiter.) Now, speaking of a Christian coalition, Bayezid the Lightning Bolt means to say that the princes of the West have gathered their “lightning bolts” (the letters, the ‘documents’ summoning them to battle) against a real bolt of lightning—which is his epithet—a fact that is confirmed in a pivotal moment. The technique is similar to the way in which Mircea, through the magic of words, robs the sultan of his real power; in other words, Mircea acts in exactly the same way as Bayezid, who deprived the Western knights of this power. It is the apotropaic formula so frequently used by Aeschylus and which is found, as a formula, in folk incantations and in popular beliefs in general. In ‘The Seven Against Thebes’ – a play particularly favoured by Eminescu – the herald describes one of the besiegers (Tydeus):
‘His most magnificent coat of arms is this:
the sky ablaze with stars is crafted
upon his shield, and in the centre, the full moon, in all her splendour
—she, the eye of the night, the choicest of the stars’
Eteocles, as king and high priest, turns the effect of the coat of arms back upon its bearer:
‘A man’s armour does not frighten me.
The coat of arms alone cannot inflict wounds.
As for that night which you say is painted
upon his shield, by the stars that guard the
heavens, it may be the sign of a mind gone astray:
for if night falls upon his eyes as he dies,
This overbearing coat of arms rightly becomes
the measure of the proud man who bears it –
and then Tydeus himself prophesied his own downfall.”
We quote this passage for the king’s very clear response; in fact, another coat of arms interests us more closely, that of Capaneus.
“His arrogance exceeds all human measure:
He cries out that he will destroy the city and defy
the gods: Even if Zeus himself were to descend onto the plain
, he would not stop him! What, lightning, thunder?! – Trifles:
they are no mightier than the midday sun.
His coat of arms is the Naked Man wielding
a burning torch as a weapon. On his shield, in gold, is written
‘I shall burn the city’.
Eteocles:
‘When men’s will runs unchecked, at once
Their tongue betrays them, an honest accuser.
So too Capaneus, who is ready to do
What he says: hating the gods, he drowns himself in words
For a brief moment’s joy. A mortal hurls pompous words towards the heavens
for Zeus to hear!
I am certain that Justice will send
down upon him the thunderbolt – so that he alone may see whether there are others like
him, with the heat of the sun at midday.”
Each of the seven besiegers of Thebes (apart from the prophet Amphiaraos) harbours such arrogant thoughts, the play being structured along these lines: the herald announces the nature of the evil, Eteocles is asked to provide a remedy, and the king turns the evil back upon its bearer, the formula used being: ‘so-and-so shall rightly become the eponym of his coat of arms’, which is repeated by both the herald and the chorus, thus acquiring the force of an imprecation, of a spell.
In ‘Letter III’ we also find this formula in the reply to Bayezid the Thunderbolt, who ‘in his stormy fury encompassed land and sea’. Mircea says:
“Emperors whom the world could no longer contain
Came even to our land, demanding earth and water
And I do not wish to boast, nor do I wish to frighten
you For as they came, they all became one with the earth and water.”
The first and last lines of the excerpt maintain an air of doubt, being based on the popular curse ‘the earth could no longer hold you!’ The second line serves to objectify Mircea’s position; the ruler speaks of ‘our country’, stating a factual truth, invoking the elements to prove for themselves the purpose they have demonstrated in similar circumstances; whereas Eteocles called upon the goddess of Justice to demonstrate the power of the thunderbolt against Capaneus, Mircea invokes the elements themselves for the same purpose. It is thought that the phrase derives from Homer: ‘But you all turn into earth and water’ – in G. Murnu’s translation – though in Homer the correct rendering is ‘you turn into water and earth’ (Hector speaks to the army: water and earth, as elements of inanimate nature, symbolise death, the dissolution of the human body into its constituent elements; the Trojan commander accuses the combatants of fear and cowardice – he invokes ‘fire’ as the counterpart to valour; better death than a sluggish life leading to submission). There is no point in seeing Homer here when the phrase ‘to ask for earth and water’ is generalised by Herodotus and, furthermore, when in the poem it is symmetrical to the praise of the sultan who encompassed ‘earth and sea’. The reversal of terms is dictated by the system of metaphor and is found, as it happens, in the Homeric verse. Mircea defines Bayezid as a ‘hybristes’, whom ‘the world can no longer contain’. ‘World’ means ‘civilisation’; anyone who no longer fits into the civilised world is a scoundrel, a madman who flees into the material elements of the cosmos; yet, from the civilised world’s perspective, to mix these elements is to commit a grave error – hybris. This was how the ancients punished the barbarians’ claims to demand moral submission through the symbols of life – earth and water: the Athenians and Spartans inflicted precisely this punishment on Darius’s envoys, who had come ‘to them too’ with a message of submission: ‘the Athenians threw the envoys into a deep pit and the Spartans into a well, ordering them to bring earth and water from there to the king’ (Herodotus, VII, 133) – and, despite all the threats hanging over them as usurpers of the envoys’ rights, they themselves found no fault: they gave the envoys exactly what the envoys had asked for. The popular saying: ‘You reap what you sow’ explains this method of carrying out punishment, for which the executor cannot be held accountable, given that they are merely fulfilling the request. One might reply, ‘Fair enough, but there is a contradiction: the envoys are asking for symbolic quantities of those items; how can you combine them into what they are asking for? There is, however, a counter-argument: their request is a contradiction in itself: how can you ask for a handful of earth and a jug of water, and then claim that you have been given all the earth and all the water? Vlad Țepeș, incidentally, acted in no different a manner to the Athenians and Spartans, Vlad Țepeș, who nailed the turbans of Turkish envoys to the wall because they were forbidden to uncover their heads in greeting: the prince claimed that this would help them keep their turbans securely fastened. Beyond the anecdotal, we see here Vlad’s claims to negotiate, through ambassadors, on equal terms, and to be received by them in accordance with the customs of the ‘civilised world’ – just as, in the envoys’ arrogance, we see the Sultan’s express order not to concede anything, not to make even the slightest gesture of submission. With both sides holding inflexible positions, the conflict is resolved in this manner through the sacrifice of the envoys.
The same struggle of the barbarians against the elements, which Herodotus observes not without wonder, is developed by Aeschylus in The Persians, where Xerxes’s capital offence, for which Darius is summoned from the dead to bear witness, is that of having subjugated the sea, of having mingled earth with water through the haughty bridge thrown across the Hellespont over which he led his armies. We know that the bridge had walls on either side so that the pack animals would not be frightened by the waves and so that the Hellespont, the sacred throat of the sea, might not see what was happening, nor feel the onslaught of the Persian hordes towards Europe. Eminescu’s verse ‘At a signal, one shore linking to another, ship to ship they link’ seems to be translated directly from Aeschylus, despite the scepticism of commentators regarding the poet’s knowledge of the Greek language. The very motif of the ‘yoke’ that keeps a river in unconditional submission whilst, at the same time, concealing from its depths what is unfolding above it – is familiar to Eminescu, and we find it again in the poem ‘Decebal’:
‘On horseback! On horseback! The war is ready!
Place a wooden
yoke upon the Danube So that it may bellow like our
bulls That ancient and daring sea
Which flows between us and the Romans’
The passage from Aeschylus to which we refer describes the crossing of Xerxes’ armies into Europe: ‘The army that strikes terror into the world (see, in Eminescu: ‘If a multitude of people have passed, striking terror into the world’) has crossed to the neighbouring shore, linked to these by vessels tied together’ (Latin translation, after Ahrens, 1842: ‘utrimque colligatum utrique terrae communem maritimum projectum transgressus’). Darius will marvel at his ‘faithful ones’ who have raised him from the dead to witness the catastrophe: ‘How dare he have harnessed the waters of the Hellespont through which a god flows?!’) In reply, recalling precisely this sacrilege committed by Xerxes against the water, Mircea will say to Bayezid: ‘I would never wish for you to come to know us / Nor for the Danube to drown your foaming armies’. The prince seems to be ‘informing’ the river of what has taken place on the bridge of ships ‘linking the banks together’; in fact, he is telling Bayezid – alias Xerxes – that he knows why he has covered the water, in other words, what he fears most – the argument being decisive (and therefore the last in the prince’s speech) for the enemy to withdraw peacefully the way he came, to turn back. Otherwise, ‘Today you know us / Today the Danube drowns your armies, foaming’ – as the saying goes in version B of the poem.
An analysis of the rhetorical elements in Mircea’s first reply to Bayezid demonstrates that Eminescu was highly skilled in the art of oratory. The confrontation between Bayezid and Mircea constitutes a type of conflict that preoccupied the ancient rhetoricians: a very great force is pitted against another, much smaller one. In this situation, following a meeting between the ambassadors, the discussion follows a typical pattern: the aggressor demands submission without resorting to the use of arms, his mere presence being the decisive argument – the victim, on the other hand, offers an alternative: either the aggressor’s withdrawal from the victim’s territory, or battle – at any cost. This type of conflict has been analysed in our specialist literature, amongst others, by Florea Fugariu on the basis of a text by Thucydides; the method employed and the results are well known. We cannot follow Professor F. Fugariu’s method in its entirety (although we shall agree on many points with the conclusions he reached) because we are not dealing with a historical text but with a literary one, in which the poet does not set out to reconstruct the truth point by point but arranges the elements of the discourse according to the known facts.
The text we shall analyse consists of symmetrical verses: a statement with incantatory force followed by a development anchored by rhyme (we transcribe the development in brackets, following the example of Garabet Ibrăileanu – although we do not agree with the notion of a ‘parenthetical verse’ because, in this fragment, with a redundant line that might, perhaps, be sublimated: the lines of elaboration create a distinct, well-cohesive system, which we shall study in particular).
‘I have come to make
you bow down to me (If not, I shall turn your crown into a branch of thorns)
Whatever your thoughts, O Emperor, and however you may have arrived
(Whilst we are still at peace, I say to you, “Welcome”)
As for the part about bowing down, however, O Lord, forgive
us(Whether now you wish to rebuke us with an army and war)
Or whether you wish to turn back from your path as of now
(Give us too a sign of Your Mary’s mercy…)
Be it one thing or the other… Whatever is written for us
too (We shall gladly bear it all, be it peace or war).”
For the last two lines, however, we prefer a different division into columns that is more suited to our analysis:
Be it one thing or another… (Whatever is written for us
, we shall bear it all gladly,) be it peace or war.
Indeed, the main clause here forms the ‘core’ of the two lines and is framed on both sides by random possibilities. The break in symmetry compared with the preceding developing lines marks the end of the statement, a conclusion which formally synthesises both categories of statements. Organised according to Bayezid’s words, Mircea’s speech can be summarised as follows:
I II
I HAVE COME FOR YOU TO BOW DOWN TO ME
(development):
If not, I shall exchange your crown for a branch of thorns
Whatever you may think, O Emperor, and however you may have arrived
a) (elaboration):
Whilst we are still at peace
, I say to you, ‘Welcome’
————————————————————
As for the matter of worship, however, Lord, forgive us
(elaboration):
Either you will now seek to chastise us with an army and war,)
b) Or whether you wish to turn back from your path
as of now (development):
Grant us a sign of Your Majesty’s mercy.
————————————————————
WHETHER IT BE ONE, WHETHER IT BE THE OTHER,
(elaboration):
whatever is written for us
too c) we shall gladly endure it all
, WHETHER THERE BE PEACE OR WAR
The elaboration of Bayezid’s two statements – ‘If not, I shall exchange your crown for a branch of thorns’ – contains a powerful curse. The allusion has a double meaning:
1) It refers to the martyrdom of Christ. The Sultan had fought against ‘all that lies in the shadow of the cross’, against ‘the Pope with his three crowns’; in the context of that battle – recounted in the final text by Bayezid himself, though in variations by the poet – there is no allusion to the crown being transformed into thorns; rather, the sultan symbolises his victory through a play on words based on the notion of lightning. The allusion to the Christian faith had no place there either: those knights are far removed from the teachings of Christ; they fight for glory, for their coat of arms, merging the symbol of the crown into another, older one: ‘They wanted totear them from your iron brow’ – as Mircea himself would correct Bayezid, whilst avoiding the term in the context of that skirmish, drawing the sultan’s attention to the fact that he now wants the very same thing his adversaries had wanted before; they seek ‘the triumph of the faith’, using religion as a shield in the shadow of which they pursue personal interests. Whereas the Romanian ruler presents himself before Bayezid’s throne as ‘such a simple old man’, suggesting through his very presence the stance of the apostles, and accepting sacrifice as a matter of principle.
2) But this allusion also refers to the figure of the supplicant. Mircea’s arrival at Bayezid’s court reminds us, from ancient literature on the figure of the messenger, of the priest Hryses, who comes bearing the required tokens – the crown and the staff – to Agamemnon to ask for his daughter’s hand in marriage. Agamemnon replies brutally:
‘Old man, if I catch you near our black ships
today or tomorrow or in the coming days, wandering about at will
, neither the divine sceptre nor the crown upon it will save you’
(= the symbols of a supplicant will no longer grant you parliamentary immunity: Agamemnon spares Hryses’s life only out of respect for these symbols). In his grief, the priest will utter a curse against Apollo, and the god will unleash a plague upon the army, hurling a ‘shower of arrows’ upon the warriors. Nothing in the poem proves that Mircea, “such a simple old man”, wears the crown – the symbols of power – upon his head; on the contrary, Bayezid does not recognise him (‘Are you Mircea?’) – which justifies our viewing the old lord in the guise of an ancient supplicant who has come to claim his estate from the invader. The ‘crown/thorns’ contrast suggests this position: the green branch, the opposite of the withered branch. In some versions, this contrast stands out more strongly in the relationship between ‘Bayezid and the knights of the West’:
‘They come, darkening the earth, trampling the fields in the plains
; Bayezid, gazing upon the Christians, would, with a single breath, swallow
them whole; for his terrible host is, as numerous as leaves, as numerous as grass
—all the renowned flower of the entire West
—and it too lies mingled with the earth of the plain”
(and the empire’s expansion into the desert is seen as the casting of a shadow over the peoples (= tribes), a blight, in contrast to the orderly, vegetative growth of the Basarab and Mușatin estates, the battle of Rovine bearing the distinct appearance of a ritual to purify the crops.) In contrast, Bayezid’s army is destroyed by the alliance between the north wind and the frost, which suggests the destruction of vegetation. In the final text, the opposition between Bayezid and the knights is transferred from the plant realm to that of the elements (earth and water), but the opposition between Bayezid and Mircea remains firmly rooted in the plant realm. This is, moreover, strongly emphasised in the political pamphlet that follows the Battle of Rovine, which lends, once again, unity to the entire poem. The politicians of the time are the ‘withered’ replica of the ‘green’ people’s glorious past. They are ‘with withered faces’, ‘withered before their time’, ‘chaff’, ‘all that bears the stain of nature’s decay’. Moreover, the ‘dregs’ of the politicians (‘They’ve all drained here…’) are seen as ‘poisonous scum’, ‘a plague upon the world’ (variant: ‘Black Plague’) which infests the people; ‘you have sucked this country dry’ (see the discussion of the ‘vampire’ who ‘sucks the blood of the people’ in I. L. Caragiale – with reference to folk spells). The spatial characteristics of the Ottoman Empire (its horizontal expanse) take on a temporal dimension in the minds of the politicians of the time. Finally – in response to Mircea’s constructive, driven animism aimed at eradicating the enemies who have spread like a plague across the Danube – the poet calls for a cleansing of the present through a Homeric-style purification: ‘Set fire to the prison and the madhouse’. The continuation of symmetry in the political pamphlet is one-sided; nothing balances out the opposites, only the poet’s voice—which flows on from Mircea’s discourse—is heard everywhere.
Crown/thorn, vegetation/anti-vegetation, fertility/desolation – these are the major oppositions in ‘The Seven Against Thebes’ between the invaders and Eteocles, who defends the city (the chorus of the tragedy is, not coincidentally, made up of young women).
The practice of incantation requires that evil be banished as soon as it is uttered, so that it has no time to reach the deity in its spoken form (or to materialise); hence Mircea’s reply: ‘Whatever you may think, O Emperor’ refers to the latter part of Bayezid’s speech (‘You must bow down to me’) and only afterwards to the first part, ‘and in any case you will have arrived’ (the prince altering the meaning of the verb ‘I have come’, which, in the sultan’s intention, means ‘I am present with my armies—the decisive argument for you to submit’. After a line that elaborates on the meaning of the verb ‘to arrive’, the symmetry is resumed: ‘As for the matter of bowing down, however, O Lord, may God forgive us’ (a response to the second column: ‘bow down to me’; in the second part of the discourse, the replies are the length of a full verse for each column). The expression ‘may God forgive us’, on which this verse is modelled, also carries the meaning ‘I do not understand; there is something incomprehensible at the heart of it’. The same expression refers directly to the popular phrase ‘Lord, forgive me’, which serves to halt the action: see, for example, in Ion Creangă: ‘May the earth swallow him up, Lord, forgive me!’: the mother is speaking of her sons – the words that slipped from her lips must not come to pass; they must be nullified as soon as they are uttered. The invocation of the divine (“Lord” has nothing to do with the sultan here!) in a form of address comes as no surprise: it is a common practice in Aeschylus’s works, where the heroes invoke the gods without arousing suspicion among their interlocutors; see the case of Clytemnestra, for example, who accuses Agamemnon and names the murder weapon right in her speech of welcome to the king.
This is followed by a new line which elaborates on the meaning of the verb ‘to bow down’ (symmetrically: the first elaboration referred to the first column – ‘I have come / welcome’ – the second to the second – ‘bow down to me / rebuke us’; we thus observe the interweaving of the statements and the alignment of the elaborations) – after which Mircea responds, in order, to the first colon: ‘Or you will wish to turn back from your path even now’ (this time the verbs are in direct opposition: ‘to come / to turn back’). This verse, too, is built upon a polivalent expression in the language: ‘to turn back’ means ‘to have come in vain’, ‘not to have found what you were looking for’ – whilst ‘to go as far as the turning point’ also means, ironically, ‘to lose one’s way and return to where one started’, etc. Taken literally, the phrase also means ‘to reach a place where the path turns back, from where there is no further way forward’. The Sultan rules the territory he has come to by virtue of the invader’s right, not by divine right; he crosses the boundary of the empire (set, in Osman’s dream, at the Danube) – Mircea therefore having the right to invoke his destiny, ‘written’ upon this land. This line forms a stark contrast with the preceding line: ‘Either now you will seek to confront us with an army and war / Or you will choose to turn back from your path at once’. Furthermore, the term ‘to chide’ in this context refers to the divine. God ‘chastises’ the world with the flood, with drought, etc. – or, more gravely, what causes the ruler to wonder, to harbour this inner question ‘Either now you will wish…’, through war and a foreign army in the country. ‘Now’ in the first line is an adverb accompanying the conjunction ‘or’, reinforcing its doubtful meaning – whilst ‘from now on’ in the following line is an adverbial phrase accompanying the verbal phrase ‘to turn back’, reinforcing its imperative sense, so that the symmetry of the discourse is … preserved even in these seemingly minor articulations. Apparently, because the phrase ‘Now / from now on’ has a hypnotic effect on the sultan, his excessive astonishment being redundant in light of the terms put forward by the ruler: ‘What?! When the world is open to me…’
Within the structure of the discourse, the elaborative lines play a specific role, creating a system of their own that acts upon the statements, clarifying them. ‘Whilst we are still at peace, I say to you, “welcome”’: a contrast to ‘I have come’ – a threat to the sultan, transformed by Mircea first into ‘In any case, you will have arrived’ and now revived with the meaning of a greeting and an allusion to the hospitality of the place (by transforming an imperative verb, Mircea seeks to alter the sultan’s entire purpose, to turn his military expedition into a mere ‘visiting’ party). It is, on the other hand, also a warning to the character that he does not use the customary forms of address between equals, that he does not alter his attitude when he realises who he is facing: how can you, who demand submission using a Christian term (‘worship’), are unaware of the most basic norms of conduct in the civilised world? Through this verse, the ruler propels the action towards the conflict precisely in order to utter his invocation to the gods: Bayezid already considers himself to be in conflict by virtue of his ‘arrival’ from beyond the Danube.
The other line: ‘Or do you now wish to use an army and war to challenge us?’ expresses bewilderment, a rhetorical question intended to establish contact with the divine. From the perspective of rhetorical art, we must imagine Mircea delivering part of his lines to his direct adversary and another part to the divine; he looks alternately at Bayezid and upwards, towards the sky, gradually shifting the conflict from the horizontal plane to a vertical one: the space between the armies has already been bridged, and two centres now face each other – Bayezid invoking, in his support, ever-wider expanses, ever-larger spaces, whilst Mircea, in turn, opposes him with a different time and the same place. The sultan’s ‘flight’ towards his previous victories demonstrates the fickleness to which the poet had drawn attention right from the start of the poem; ‘A sultan of those who rule over some language / Who, with the pastures of his flocks, changes his own homeland’. He will focus on the event at ‘Nicopolis’, the only point he has in common with the ruler before him, but he will explain the victory there through the general destiny of the empire’s ‘expansion’, finding nothing specific in this moment compared to the other, earlier ones. His position is objective par excellence, refusing to stoop to the level of his interlocutor or to yield to the circumstances at hand: this is the ‘advantage’ of the ruler who, knowing the answer in advance, quietly provokes him by calling upon the ‘unseen arbiter’ every time the arrogant man before him ‘carelessly’ breaches the norm.
The third line of the stanza sums up the others: ‘Give us too a sign of Your Majesty’s mercy’. It is absurd to believe that Mircea wishes to prove, through a ‘sign’, Bayezid’s mercy. Firstly, what would this ‘sign’ be? His return? But that is not a mere ‘sign’, but the ultimate outcome. It would then follow that the invocation in the next line – ‘What is written for us too’ – is also directed by the prince towards the sultan, or that he resigns himself to his fate, which is ‘written’ (see the old, tendentious, outdated interpretations of Eminescu’s pessimism). But this “written” fate is not held (possessed) by a person, nor even by a god – but stands above religions! Mercy, then, is a Christian concept with a direct allusion to the ‘Lord’ mentioned above – ‘As for the matter of worship, however, Lord, forgive us’: have mercy in the religious sense; turn your face towards us. The old gentleman (old not because Eminescu did not know his age, as Anghel Demetriescu claims – see the poet’s political articles in which he mentions Mircea’s exact age! – but because he fulfils the role of a priest-king as the head of the community, of the entire nation; the reality of the Romanian Middle Ages is taken into account; the institution of the ‘good and elderly men’ invokes, in this seemingly banal form of address, the divine, and asks for a sign of goodwill in the capacity of a supplicant, as an ambassador of his people who has come to dispute his inheritance. He might have prayed in a hermitage, on a mountain peak or in a church – but he needs this direct, face-to-face confrontation, which necessarily requires an arbiter; he needs to penetrate the heart of evil, to strike at the nerve centre of the invasion so that the proof before the divine might be ‘tangible’, present, so that Bayezid might reveal his anti-religious sentiments (Mircea even goads him into this) and incriminate himself. The Sultan is ‘forced’ to speak, to utter evil so that the appropriate remedy may be found. The ‘sign’ which the prince requests in his favour is, at the same time, for Bayezid a ‘reversed sign’, just as in Egypt: ‘The magus, guardian of vengeance, has read the reversed sign’. By agreeing to the meeting, the sultan makes himself a ‘party’ to the trial; that is to say, he accepts the fortunes of judgement – which, in the classical conception, is never determined by the number and strength of armies, but by the law of the cosmos; Mircea makes up for the difference in military strength with this compensation afforded by his just cause (see the Herald in ‘The Persians’: ‘Queen, it was not in numbers that we were defeated: / A demon has destroyed us. He would not place / A fitting fate upon the scales’ arms’). Similarly, the seven besiegers of Thebes are first defeated through an ad hoc ‘trial’ – and against the last of them, Polynices, who had the goddess of Justice painted on his shield, guiding them towards the conquered city, Eteocles invokes the goddess herself: ‘We shall see whether Dike the virgin, daughter of Zeus, dwells in his deeds and thoughts. But never—neither when he emerged from his mother’s womb, nor when he was a child or had become a young man, nor when Dike dealt him blows to the chin—was she by his side to offer him any counsel – and I believe that even now, as he brings misfortune upon the soil of his homeland, she does not take his side – unless Dike is somehow entirely different from what her name suggests, since she might well side with a man whose mind has gone astray’. The king had serious reasons to invoke the gods to prove his true role; Mircea has the same reasons to invoke his ‘letter’: in the trial currently underway, Bayezid is incriminating himself. Fate is unpredictable, but it obeys the laws of heavenly justice. In similar circumstances, it has always proved to be on the side of those who defend themselves – and so the present ruler asks her to prove the role she once held; he does not unleash an uncontrollable future, nor does he make a ‘bet’ with Baiazid on the outcome of the battle, but, whilst maintaining contact with his protective deity, he reveals his exact situation and asks for the precise ‘sign’ of assistance.
The conclusion of the speech summarises all the elements: ‘If it is one’ (response to the first column: ‘I have come’) – ‘If it is the other’ (response to the second column: ‘Worship me’) – ‘If it is peace’ (conclusion to the first column) – ‘If it is war’ (conclusion to the second column). The ‘one/other’ alternative, echoed in ‘peace/war’, further develops and specifies the precise meaning of the etymological expression ‘concerning the aspect of worship’, ‘Part’ (from ‘to divide’, Latin ‘pers’ – hence ‘Parcele’ – Greek ‘to meron’ = the portion due to each according to destiny, hence ‘Moira’) does not mean ‘whatever’ might happen, just any event amongst many others, but only the ‘one or the other’ alternative. The written word, the invoked destiny, has the ‘good side’, the favourable one, and the ‘bad side’, the adverse one – in the sense in which the ancients regarded the two pans of the scales, or in the sense in which the Latin augurs divided the sky into two parts – ‘left’ (sinistra) and ‘right’ (dextra) – interpreting the augural signs according to where they appeared. It is worth noting that Eminescu also uses the term in its Homeric sense of ‘to meros’: ‘May each have an equal share on the right’ – but also in the established sense of the opposing side: ‘Why should sickness and death be your lot?’. And Mircea’s words, ‘we shall bear them all gladly’, signify—before anything else, an unconditional submission to fate—precisely Eteocles’s reflections on Justice: We submit to it, but that means that Justice has nothing to do with the name it bears, since it proves to be untrue.
- 1
Iornandes, whom G. Călinescu places alongside Herodotus as a source for Eminescu’s portrayal of Tomyris, identifies the Getae with the Goths in his quest to trace the ancient origins of the latter’s existence. Although contested by many historians, Iornandes nevertheless remains an indispensable source for Geto-Dacian antiquity. In the discussions we are familiar with regarding Tomyris in Eminescu’s work, only D. Murărașu (in ‘M. Eminescu: Poems’, ed. Minerva 1972, vol. III, pp. 312–313) makes a clear distinction between the Massagetae and the Getae, and between Herodotus and Iornandes. G. Călinescu even asserts, contrary to Herodotus, that she, Tomyris, queen of the Massagetae, is said to have killed Cyrus’s child – when the facts are entirely different.