The unanimous opinion of the East has always placed the romance of ‘Antar’ at the summit of such literature.  As one of their authors well says:—­“‘The Thousand and One Nights’ is for the amusement of women and children; ‘Antar’ is a book for men.  From it they learn lessons of eloquence, of magnanimity, of generosity, and of statecraft.”  Even the prophet Muhammad, well-known foe to poetry and to poets, instructed his disciples to relate to their children the traditions concerning Antar, “for these will steel their hearts harder than stone.”

The book belongs among the great national classics, like the ‘Shah-nameh’ and the ‘Nibelungen-Lied.’  It has a direct relation to Western culture and opinion also.  Antar was the father of knighthood.  He was the preux-chevalier, the champion of the weak and oppressed, the protector of women, the impassioned lover-poet, the irresistible and magnanimous knight.  European chivalry in a marked degree is the child of the chivalry of his time, which traveled along the shores of the Mediterranean Sea and passed with the Moors into Spain (710).  Another current flowed from Arabia to meet and to modify the Greeks of Constantinople and the early Crusaders; and still another passed from Persia into Palestine and Europe.  These fertilized Provencal poetry, the French romance, the early Italian epic.  The ‘Shah-nameh’ of Firdausi, that model of a heroic poem, was written early in the eleventh century.  ‘Antar’ in its present form probably preceded the romances of chivalry so common in the twelfth century in Italy and France.

Antarah ben Shedad el Absi (Antar the Lion, the Son of Shedad of the tribe of Abs), the historic Antar, was born about the middle of the sixth century of our era, and died about the year 615, forty-five years after the birth of the prophet Muhammad, and seven years before the Hijra—­the Flight to Medina—­with which the Muhammadan era begins.  His father was a noble Absian knight.  The romance makes him the son of an Abyssinian slave, who is finally discovered to be a powerful princess.  His skin was black.  He was despised by his father and family and set to tend their camels.  His extraordinary strength and valor and his remarkable poetic faculty soon made him a marked man, in a community in which personal valor failed of its full value if it were not celebrated in brilliant verse.  His love for the beautiful Ibla (Ablah in the usual modern form), the daughter of his uncle, was proved in hundreds of encounters and battles; by many adventurous excursions in search of fame and booty; by thousands of verses in her honor.

The historic Antar is the author of one of the seven “suspended poems.”  The common explanation of this term is that these seven poems were judged, by the assemblage of all the Arabs, worthy to be written in golden letters (whence their name of the ’golden odes’), and to be hung on high in the sacred Kaabah at Mecca.  Whether this be true, is not certain.  They are at any rate accepted models of Arabic style.  Antar was one of the seven greatest poets of his poetic race.  These “suspended poems” can now be studied in the original and in translation, by the help of a little book published in London in 1894, ‘The Seven Poems,’ by Captain F.E.  Johnson, R.A.