This paper investigates the complex world of kingship in the early Persian romance Vis and Ramin (w. ca. 1054). The royal figure of the story, King Mobad, appears on the surface to represent a travesty of sovereignty in all its manifest forms: an old man surrounded by younger rivals, cuckolded by his younger brother, rendered impotent by a nurse’s spell, humiliated in battle by his own vassals. Critics of the poem have thus tended to write him off as an uninteresting caricature, a tasteless portrait of bad kingship; but some have suggested that there are dimensions to this figure worth considering. Molé claims that he is a vehicle of satire, mocking the Seljuk sultan Toghril Bey; Meisami asserts that he is part of a didactic allegory, an exemplar of rulers ruled by their own concupiscence. These readings offer a useful corrective to the prior disregard of his character, yet they do not dislodge the general assumption that Mobad is, in the end, a failure—impotent in every sense of the word. But if we look closely at his story, it becomes difficult to determine exactly where his failure lies. It seems omnipresent and nowhere at the same time: every juncture presents no viable alternatives for the king, yet his every move contributes to a seemingly inevitable slide into disaster. This suggests a systemic problem at work, a structure in which the only way a king could avoid Mobad’s fate is to renounce the praxis of kingship itself, thus fulfilling the very failure he set out to avoid. Through this paradox, I explore how Vis and Ramin probes the unstable ideology of kingship as an embodied concatenation of power, masculine desire, and symbolic authority, first by discussing how the many “garden” scenes in the poem appropriate Sasanid iconography and the topography of the panegyric qasidas by the Ghaznavid poets ‘Onsori and Farrokhi to overturn the hierarchy they envision; then by comparing Mobad’s relation to violence against that of Toghril Bey in the poem’s paratext; and finally by reflecting on the act of embodiment as the root source of kingship’s failure to realize its own claims. The paper concludes that Vis and Ramin, in a way similar to the Shahnama, does not stop at holding up a “mirror” by which kings may learn right or wrong behavior; it rather critiques the institution itself, showing how the practice of kingship assures its self-destruction.