he 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