the questions and answers alternated. Elsewhere Zarathushtra does frame
questions that receive answers from on high (29. 2–8), and he claims to tell
forth things that Mazda ̄ has told him (45. 3, 5). In the Edda we find several
examples of question and answer stanzas in symmetrical alternation, and here
too the questions are prefaced by a repeated formula:
Segðu mér þat, Alvíss: o ̨ ll of ro ̨cfira
voromc, dvergr, at vitir.
Tell me this, Alvíss: about all beings’ destinies
I fancy, dwarf, you know. (Alvíssmál 9, 11, etc.).
Segðu mér þat, Fio ̨ lsviþr, es ec þic fregna mon
oc ec vilia vita.
Tell me this, Fio ̨ lsviþr, that I shall ask you,
and I should like to know. (Fio ̨lsvinnsmál 7, 9, etc.)
þegiattu, vo ̨ lva, þic vil ec fregna ––
unz alkunna vil ec enn vita.
Be not silent, seeress, I want to ask you ––
till I have full knowledge I want to know more. (Baldrs draumar 8, 10, 12)The structure of the first and third of these, with a parenthetic supplement
filling out the couplet, has been compared with Zarathushtra’s ‘this I ask thee,
tell me straight, Lord’.^64
A recurrent type of question concerns superlatives: what is the best thing,
what is the greatest so-and-so? The Avestan hymn to Vərəθraγna begins with
the tale that Zarathushtra asked Ahura Mazda ̄ ‘Who is the best-armed of the
holy Yazatas?’ The god answered, ‘The Ahura-created Vərəθraγna, O Spitama
Zarathushtra’, and this exchange is repeated as a refrain (Yt. 14. 1, 6, 8, etc.).
Similar questionings appear in the Vide ̄vda ̄t. In the third chapter Zarathush-
tra asks ‘what place on earth is the most agreeable?’ And then ‘what place is
the next most agreeable?’ and so on to the fifth most agreeable; then ‘what
place is the most diagreeable?’, and so forth. At the end of the Homeric
catalogue of the Achaean ships the poet asks the Muse ‘who was the best of
them, of the men and the horses?’ And the answers follow: ‘the best horses
were... And of the men the best was.. .’ (Il. 2. 761–8). Among the so-called
Akousmata which embodied the oral teaching of the Pythagoreans one cat-
egory consisted in questions of the ‘what is the most’ type, with the answers:
‘What is the most righteous act? –– Sacrifice.’ ‘What is the cleverest thing? ––
Number; and secondly whoever gave things their names.’^65
(^64) Cf. Schmitt (1967), 36 f., 276 f.
(^65) Iambl. Vit. Pyth. 82, with further instances. Cf. Ohlert (1912), 107–16.
- Cosmos and Canon 361