Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 7, 1896.djvu/130

108 education of his son from the first to a trusted counsellor, Zandan, who in the Greek only appears later on as Zardan. It is with him that the king's son converses, when, having got permission to visit the city, he meets with men crippled, sick, and old. In the Greek, again, Barlaam is seventy years old when he meets with Josaphat; and he has been in the wilderness forty-five years, having left the world at the age of twenty-five. In the Georgian, on the other hand, Balavari had retired into the desert at the age of forty-two, and had then practised asceticism there for a period of eighteen years. So it is that when he comes before Iodasaph he is a man of sixty. It is only in the Greek and not in the Georgian that we read how Barlaam first baptised Iodasaph and then gave him the Eucharist. In the Georgian, again, the king Iabenes refuses to bring victims to offer to the idols on a heathen festival; whereas according to the Greek he brings for sacrifice one hundred and twenty oxen as well as other animals. In the Georgian we hear nothing about evil spirits, nor about the magical books of the wizard Theudas. According to the Georgian, the king, before he writes to his son about his desire to be baptised, sends ambassadors, and in the end himself sets off to visit his son. In the Greek, however, we hear nothing of these ambassadors; and Josaphat, instead of baptising his father in his own house, repairs to his father's kingdom in order to do it. Again, between the time of Iodasaph's leaving his kingdom and his meeting with Balavari, two years elapsed. During this period of two years, the Georgian tells us nothing about him; whereas in the Greek we get a very particular description of how the royal hermit in this period visited the cottage of a poor man, and of how he practised during the whole of the time the most rigorous asceticism. In the Greek also we have explained to us the way by which Iodasaph found out the cave of Barlaam and got there.

A very important proof of the close connection which there is between the Georgian and the non-Christian Arabic