ed the king to withhold payment until the work was
done.

At the end of thirty-three years, when the poem was completed, the
grand vizier, after counting its sixty-thousand couplets, concluded
not to pay for it in gold, and sent instead sixty thousand small
pieces of silver. On receiving so inadequate a reward, Firdusi became
so angry that, after distributing the money among the bearers and
writing an insulting poem to the king, he fled first to Mazinderan and
then to Bagdad, where he lingered until shortly before his death, when
he returned to Tous. Tradition claims that the Shah; hearing he had
come home,--and having meantime discovered the trickery of his
minister,--immediately sent Firdusi sixty thousand pieces of gold, but
that the money arrived only as his corpse was being lowered into the
tomb! As the poet's daughter indignantly refused to accept this tardy
atonement, another relative took the money and built the dike which
Firdusi had longed to see.

We know that Persian monarchs made sundry attempts to collect the
annals of their country, but these collections were scattered at the
time of the Arabian conquest, so that only a few documents were
brought back to Persia later on. Although the poem of Firdusi claims
to be a complete history of Persia, it contains so many marvels that,
were it not for its wonderful diction, it would not have survived,
although he declares he has written,

"What no tide
Shall ever wash away, what men
Unborn shall read o'er ocean wide."[38]

The poem opens with the description of a ruler so prosperous that the
Spirit of Evil sent a mighty devil (deev) to conquer him. Thanks to
the effort of this demon, the king's son was slain, and, as the
monarch died of grief, it was his grandson who succeeded him. During a
forty-centuries reign this king gave fire to his people, taught them
irrigation and agriculture, and bestowed names on all the beasts.

His son and successor taught mortals how to spin and weave, and the
demons, in hopes of destroying him, imparted to him the arts of
reading and writing. Next came the famous Persian hero Jemshid, who is
said to have reigned seven hundred years, and to have divided the
Persian nation into four classes,--priests, warriors, artisans, and
husbandmen. During his reign, which is the Age of Gold of Persia, the
world was divided into separate parts, and the city of Persepolis
founded, where two columns of the ruined royal palace still bear t