Renouncing wine and women, he fought the tribe of Asad until he had exacted revenge in blood, and spent the remainder of his life trying to regain his father's kingdom.
Like many figures of early Arabia, which at that time lacked a formal writing system and relied on the oral transmission of stories, the details of the life of Imru' al-Qais are hard to determine with any certainty.
Even so, historians have been able to compare the various stories written down by later biographers with clues from Imru' al-Qais' poems and information about major historical events in the Sasanian and Byzantine Empires to reconstruct a probable account of the life and ancestry of this most famous of the Jahili poets.
This caused Kavadh to make al-Harith king of the Hirah, a region in the south of modern-day Iraq, and expel his previous Arab vassal al-Mundhir.
One story says that, concerned with his son's lack of responsibility, Hujr tried putting Imru' al-Qais in charge of the family's camel herds, an experiment which ended in disaster.
[6] Another story says that Hujr finally disowned his son after Imru' al-Qais publicly courted his cousin 'Unayzah, and after failing to win her hand in marriage, managed to enjoy her affections in secret, which caused a considerable scandal in the family.
[citation needed] Imru' al-Qais' adventures with women also formed an important part of his early life, consisting according to some records of dozens of marriages, divorces and affairs, all ending badly for one reason or another.
Imru' al-Qais' lovers feature large in his poetry, as he praises their graces, lambastes their cruelty, and laments their absence and the longing in his heart.
Ibn al-Kalbi holds that Imru' al-Qais was still in exile at the time of his father's death, and that the news reached him while he was in the midst of a party with his friends.
The Ghassanid prince Al-Harith ibn Jabalah, Justinian's north Arabian vassal, sponsored Imru' al-Qais in his appeal, and most accounts indicate that he won some promise of support from the Byzantine emperor, and perhaps even a contingent of troops.
Some reports indicate that Justinian pressed the Negus of Axum to support Imru' al-Qais' bid, but that he refused due to the ongoing feud between the Axumite Empire and the tribe of Kinda.
The evidence that Shaykho cites to support his claim consists mostly of a handful of references to Christian practices and symbols in Imru' al-Qais' poems, as well as a few instances of the Arabic word for (the one) God (Allah).
Other historians have said that references to Christianity can be explained by the presence of monasteries and missionaries along the northern frontier of the Arabian Peninsula, and the fact that many Arabs would have been impressed by these scenes without necessarily converting themselves.
It can be explained by the fact that Arabs have been close to Jewish tribes since ancient times, too (Gindibu helped the Kingdom of Judah during the Battle of Qarqar) because of their ethnic similarity and geographic proximity.
Makki reports that some historians have suggested Imru' al-Qais could have been influenced by the purported Mazdakism of his grandfather, but also states that, in his opinion, there is little direct evidence to support this.
[11] To this day Imru' al-Qays remains the best-known of the pre-Islamic poets and has been a source of literary and national inspiration for Arabic intellectuals all the way into the 21st century.