_Page 106._ “Their houses levelled with the ground.”—When a city was solemnly destroyed by the Romans,ārNā the plough was drawn along where the walls had stood. Thus Horace (Ode i, 16): “Rage has been the final cause ... that an insolent army has driven the hostile ploughshare over their walls.” Thus also we read in the sacred writings (Micah iii, 12): “Therefore shall Zion for your sake be ploughed as a field;” and likewise of salt being sown on the ground where cities stood (see Judges ix, 45), indicating the last insult of a triumphant enemy. In allusion to the usual practice of absolute Eastern monarchs wreaking their vengeance not only on an offending minister, but also on his wife and family, Sa`dī, in his _Bustān_, b. i, directs a king, in dealing with a criminal, to slay him, if the law pronounce its decree; “but if thou hast those who belong to his family, them forgive, and extend to them thy mercy: the iniquitous man it was who committed the crime;—what was the offence of his helpless wife and children?”
In Cazotte’s rendering of this story, under the corrupted title of Abou Talmant, for a King of Turkistān is substituted a King of Cochin-China. The plot for destroying the prudent minister by means of the prattle of two young slaves in the King’s hearing is considerably amplified: the malicious viziers having taught them to repeat some harem gossip while the King was reposing, but not asleep, which, proving to be true, prepared him to believe the false story of the Queen’s love for Abū Temām. The King’s discovery of his favourite’s innocence is differently related;—instead of his overhearing the two pages quarrel over the division of the money, a day or two after Abū Temām had been put to death, as in the Persian version—the King immediately returns to his private chamber, and seeing the pieces of gold scattered on the floor, sends for the pages, and compels them to tell the truth regarding their possession of so much money. He then causes the _two_ Viziers to be beheaded.
_Page 107._ The King of Persia (_Shāh `Ajam_).—The term _`Ajam_ includes all who cannot speak Arabic, or who do not speak it with elegance. Among the Arabs it applies to all people not of Arab descent, and carries the same idea as Barbarians with the Greeks, Gentiles with the Hebrews. Hence Persia is called `Ajamistān, the land of the stranger, or barbarian. And so two famous Arabian poems are distinguished respectively by the nationalities of their authors: _Lāmiyyatu-’l-`Arab_, by the Arabian brigand-poet Shanfará, and _Lāmiyyātu-’l-`Ajam_, by Et Tugrā`ī, a native of Isfahān: that is, the L-Poem (from its rhyming in _lam_, or L) of the Arab, and the L-Poem of the Foreigner.