married her, making my own house her bridal gift.

Jaʿfar said, “Up—let us go.”

I called for the porters to move the gold, but Jaʿfar swore, “By Allah, not a single dirham of it shall go with us.” Then he said to her former master, “Spend it on the two of you.”⦗1⦘

It was said that Jaʿfar kept in his treasuries dinars, each one weighing a full hundred mithqāls, and that, as he travelled, he would hurl these specially minted coins onto the rooftops of the people.

A yellow coin struck in the royal mint—
Jaʿfar’s face shines upon its surface;
It outweighs a hundred by one—
whenever it reaches a man in hardship, he is enriched.⦗2⦘

Others claimed the verse was by Abū al-ʿAtāhiyah, and that the dinar bore Jaʿfar’s likeness.

The author of al-Aghānī relates: ʿAbd Allāh ibn al-Rabīʿ told us; Aḥmad ibn Ismāʿīl narrated to me; from Muḥammad ibn Jaʿfar, who said: I witnessed my father speaking with my grandfather when I was still a boy. He said: “The Commander of the Faithful took me by the hand, passed through several chambers until we reached a room, opened it, entered, closed it behind us, then sat by another door and tapped on it. I heard the sound of a lute, and a woman sang with exquisite skill—I swear by Allah I was captivated. She sang a second time, and we both danced; then we left. He said to me, ‘Do you know who that was?’ I replied, ‘No.’ He said, ‘ʿUlayyah, my sister. By Allah, if you breathe a word of this, I will kill you.’ My grandfather retorted, ‘You have already breathed it—and, by Allah, he will kill you.’”⦗3⦘

It is also reported that a woman of the Kilāb tribe declaimed to Jaʿfar:

“I passed by al-ʿAqīq and its folk,
complaining that the spring rain had scarcely visited them.”