176 PLUTARCH—CLEOPATRA—OPPIAN—ATHENEUS 
With this very liberal 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 } 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 his 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.! 
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 —‘ All”’ (¢.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 which 
Oppian records the prowess and sport of the Emperor in ‘‘ The Virginia Water ”’ 
of the Czsars—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 I*eutica, 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. 
1 Cf. Prof. E. Browne, Literary History of Persia, vol. I1., pp. 128-138, and 
Sir Gore Ouseley’s Biographies of Persian Poets, for the various Firdausi 
versions. 
