حبیب السیر 17.5

17.5

When Firdusi came out of the bath, and they brought those dirhams before him, he was exceedingly vexed at the circumstance, and gave 20,000 dirhams to the bath-keeper, 20,000 to a sherbet-seller who had brought some beverage for him, and the remaining 20,000 dirhams he gave to the person who brought the money. Having composed about forty verses, as a satire upon the Sultan, he introduced them into the beginning or conclusion of the Shah-nama, and fled to Tus. One day, some little time after this circumstance, Ahmad bin Hasan Maimandi was out hunting with the Sultan, and having come close to him, he repeated several verses out of the Shah-nama, which were exceedingly applauded by the Sultan, who asked whose poetry it was. He answered that the verses were the produce of the genius of Firdusi. The Sultan repented of his neglect of that incomparable poet, and ordered them to take 60,000 dinars with rich robes of honour to Tus, and to ask Firdusi's pardon. In the Bahdristan it is written that when those presents came in at one gate of Tus, the coffin of Firdusi was carried out at the other. An only daughter was his heiress, to whom the emissaries of the Sultan offered those honourable presents; but she, from the pride inherent in her disposition, refused them and said, "I have enough wealth to last me to the end of my days; I have no need of this money." The agents of the Sultan built a caravanserai in the neighbourhood of Tus with that money.