176 PLUTARCH— CLEOPATRA— OPPIAN—ATHEN^US 



With this very hberal payment by piece or verse-work 

 may be contrasted the treatment meted out to the great 

 Persian poet Firdausi by the Emperor Mahmud. 



The most romantic of the versions of the story makes the 

 latter promise a miskal (or something less than I oz.) for every 

 couplet of the former's epic, Shah Nameh. On the poem's 

 arrival at Court, joy reigned till discovery that it contained 

 some 60,000 couplets. 



Aghast at the amount, Mahmud or liis Chancellor of Ex- 

 chequer took advantage of some ambiguity in the terms and, 

 despite the protests of Firdausi that the largesse was promised 

 in gold, made payment in silver. It chanced that the treasure 

 arrived while the author was in the public baths at Tus ; furious 

 at the fraud, he gave 20,000 to the bathkeeper, 20,000 to the 

 refreshment seller, and 20,000 to the camel driver who had 

 brought the bags of bullion. 



Many years after, the Emperor, either repenting him of 

 his broken word or moved by reports of the great poverty in 

 which the poet had long lived, dispatched the sum in gold, 

 or, as some say, indigo. Alas ! as the convoy entered Tus 

 by the Rudbar gate, by that of the Razan was Firdausi being 

 borne to his grave, 1 



At the death of Oppian in his thirtieth year, the citizens 

 of his native place in Cilicia erected a statue to his memory. 

 It bore the most laudatory of inscriptions, of which the last 

 two lines have been Englished —" x\H " [i.e. preceding poets) 



" All the inspired him their chief allowed 

 And all to him their humbler laurels bowed," 



was not paid on all the verses of the Halieutica, but only on those in whicli 

 Oppian records the prowess and sport of the Emperor in " The Virginia Water " 

 of the Caesars — where we learn from Eutropius (VII. 14) that Nero fished with 

 golden nets drawn by purple ropes. If so the total would be a mere fraction 

 of either the 3506 guineas or of the 16,000 guineas. Great doubt exists as 

 to whether or not there were two poets named Oppian ; and if there were, 

 to which does the anonymous Greek Life of Oppian refer, and which of the 

 two was the author of Ixeiitica, for possibly it was to the author of this poem 

 that the Imperial payment of gold was made. See W. H. Drummond's paper 

 in Royal Irish Academy, 1818. Also A. Ausfeld, De Oppiano et scriptis sub 

 eius nomine traditis, Gotha, 1876. 



^ Cf. Prof. E. Browne, Literary History of Persia, vol. II., pp. 128-138, and 

 Sir Gore Ouseley's Biographies of Persian Poets, for the various Firdausi 

 versions. 



