That was all; no more physical recriminations took place, nobody was raped or killed. We would not have known about the affair if this Hammam, Jicthin's brother, had not been a famous poet better known as al-Farazdaq, one of the great poets of the Umayyad period, and if he had not been involved in a protracted poetic battle, a 'flyting' or scolding match exchanging verbal abuse, with another giant of Arabic literary history, the poet Jarir b. c Atiyya. Jarir, universally lauded as a poet excelling in delicate love lyrics, heard about the matter and exploited it repeatedly in many of his lampooning poems, called naqirit;l,,2 grossly blowing up the incident by graphically depicting a gang rape in obscene detail, while accusing the victim's brother of being scandalously remiss in rescuing her.