Meanwhile he had shown such rare poetic gifts that his fame spread beyond the circle of his clan and in due course of time he was selected as a contestant in those poetic trials that were peculiar to the Arabs in the pre-Islamic days.  So successful was Antar’s effort that he was acknowledged the greatest poet of his time and one of his odes was selected as one of the Mu ’Allakat, the seven suspended poems, while judged by the assemblage of all the Arabs worthy to be written in letters of gold and hung on high in the sacred Kaabah at Mecca, as accepted models of Arabian style.[5]

The death of Antar is enshrouded in obscurity.  Antar perished about the year 615 while fighting against the tribe of the Tai.  According to one authority he had grown old and his youthful activity had forsaken him.  He is said to have fallen from his horse and to have been unable to regain his feet in time.  His death was a signal for peace and the end of the long-drawn hostility.  In spite of the tribe’s desire to avenge its hero and its bard, a compensation of 100 camels was accepted for the murder of one of its scions and the poets celebrated the close of the long struggle.  Another author says the hero, stricken to death by a poison shaft sped by the hand of a treacherous and implacable foe, remounted his horse to insure the safe retreat of his tribe and died leaning on his lance.  His enemies, smitten with terror by the memory of his prowess, dared not advance, till one cunning warrior devised a strategem which startled the horse out of its marble stillness.  The creature gave a bound and Antar’s corpse, left unsupported, fell upon the ground.[6]

His fame as a literary character transcends that of the modern authors of black blood, such as Pushkin in Russia, and the elder Dumas in France.  After his death the fame of Antar’s deeds spread across the Arabian Peninsula and throughout the Mohammedan world.  In time these deeds, like the Homeric legends, were recorded in a literary form and therein is found that Antar, the son of an Abyssinian slave, once a despised camel driver, has become the Achilles of the Arabian Iliad, a work known to this day after being a source of wonder and admiration for hundreds of years to millions of Mohammedans as the “Romance of Antar.”  The book, therefore, ranks among the great national classics like the “Shah-nameh” of Persia, and the “Nibelungen-Lied” of Germany.  Antar was the father of knighthood.  He was the champion of the weak and oppressed, the protector of the women, the impassioned lover-poet, the irresistible and magnanimous knight.  “Antar” in its present form probably preceded the romances of chivalry so common in the twelfth century in Italy and France.[7]

This national classic of the Arabian world is of great length in the original, being often found in thirty or forty manuscript volumes in quarto, in seventy or eighty in octavo.  Portions of it have been translated into English, German and French.  English readers can consult it best in a translation from the Arabic by Terrick Hamilton in four volumes published in London in 1820.  This translation, now rare, covers only a portion of the original; a new translation, suitably abridged, is much needed.  The fact that its hero is of Negro blood may have chilled the ardor of English translators to meet this need.