Sheep, Dogs, Wolves, and Demosthenes: Plutarch in the Buzandaran Patmut'iwnk'

Abstract:This article reveals what may be a direct reference to Plutarch's Life of Demosthenes in the Buzandaran Patmut'iwnk', or the Epic Histories, a fifth-century Armenian history once attributed to P'awstos Buzand. I suggest that, by referencing the city of the Athenians, the author of the Epic Histories purposefully creates an intertext between his text and that of Plutarch. Previous scholarship has argued that not only did the author of the Epic Histories draw almost exclusively from Iranian epic, but also that the author was so thoroughly steeped in Iranian culture that he was in no way conversant with Greek literature. As a result, this article challenges such readings of the text, proposing that the author may have engaged directly with Plutarch's text in Greek. After first examining this reference to Plutarch, I explore possible intermediary texts that could explain the author's mention of the city of Athens, such as progymnasmata and rhetorical handbooks that were extant in Greek and Armenian at the time of the composition of the Epic Histories. Ultimately, I argue that either a direct or indirect reference to Plutarch's Life of Demosthenes must be regarded as "a latent cultural Hellenism," something that Nina Garsoïan has argued does not exist in the text. Although it is impossible to form conclusions about the entirety of the Epic Histories from one piece of evidence, because scholars have argued that there are no examples of Greek influence in the text, one such example invites a reconsideration of the text and its literary environment.