Imperial power depends on poets to prettify atrocities into memorable praise
Evidence
In the remnants of the Persian imperial imagination, however, we have a medieval text, Chahar Maqaleh-ye Aruzi, in which a chapter is devoted to poets and their necessity to the smooth operation of a kingdom—or an empire. They sing the praises of the emperor in beautiful and memorable words, which are memorized by the courtiers and through them handed along to the rest of the world. It is not so much that people are ignorant of the emperor’s atrocities as that they have fallen prey to the beauty of the poet’s lies. — Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks, 330
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to the role of the poet as propagandist in earlier imperial literature (e.g. Virgil’s Aeneid serving Augustus), and to modern PR-statecraft critiques.
- SHARE: A medieval Persian text explicitly arguing court poets are necessary to empire’s smooth operation — worth sending to anyone studying propaganda or court culture.