Movses Khorenatsi on the Participation of King Zarmayr in the Trojan War

Your curiosity disturbs us during our work and demands from us two things – conciseness and quickness of narration, which would also need to be clear and elegant like the speeches of Plato, be free from lie and be filled with everything needed to resist lie.

We would also need to tell everything about everyone – starting from the very first human and ending with you – all in one instant. But it is impossible to combine all these.

After all, the Creator of everything that exists, being capable of establishing everything with a mere glance, didn’t do that. He imparted order to the creations, building them all on separate days – on the first day, the second, and so on.

In a similar manner, the teachings of the Spirit dictate us to maintain the same order. In the meantime, we notice that your desires don’t take into account the divine restrictions: you want to know everything in detail and as soon as possible.

We could tell you what you want to know either in great detail, as you wish, or quickly and briefly, which you don’t want. After all, because you have rushed us, we haven’t managed to mark anything about either Alexander of Macedon or the Ilion War in the appropriate place, so we attach it here.

We don’t know whether we seem like skillful or talentless craftsmen when we attach the data – worthy of being narrated by us – in the very end.

If the topics of Homer or the accounts telling about the Ilion War under the Assyrian King Teutamos aren’t worthy of being told, then which ones are?

Our Zarmayr, who served the Assyrians, along with a few of his soldiers and the Ethiopian troops arrived to the rescue of Priam. There, wounded by the Hellenic lionhearts, Zarmayr perished. I’d wish that he had died from the hands of Achilles rather than from any of the other lionhearts.

An excerpt from the book Movses Khorenatsi: History of Armenia – collected at the request of Sahak Bagratuni in Russian