Page:History of Art in Persia.djvu/29

 14 History of Art in Antiquity. to clear die fallow soil and bring to its furrows the rill that will cause the seed to swell and shoot up. In this way he serves and co>operates with the deity. " He who guides the plough does a pious deed/' is one of the precepts of this religion. Hence it will be easily understood that their application should have led to the cultivation of every available plot of land all over Iran, and created a healthy, sturdy, and honest peasant class, out of which were recruited the armies of the Medic and Persian sovereigns, with which they so speedily conquered the whole of Anterior Asia. Such ethics as these, enjoining at one and the same tiine the practice of husbandry, respect for truth, and purity of life, were common to all the fractions of the Aryan family. The virtues of the ancient Persians, the companions of Cyrus and Darius, the first brought to the notice of Greek historians, were extolled by them as against the Persians of later days, corrupted by the self- indulgence consequent on boundless power, and the deteriorating effect of long and continuous contact with enslaved populations.* Make allowance as you will for rhetorical exaggeration and love of antithesis, it is none the less true that when the lonians found themselves for the first time in presence of the Persians, they felt themselves dwarfed by the moral -superiority of the latter. A more difficult question is to know to what extent the dualistic conception, such as it had grown and as we find it in Media, spread in Southern Iran. The bas-reliefs and inscriptions of Persia tell us that AhurA-Mazda was also the great god of the Persians, but they do not mention Angr6-MainyCls. This, how- ever, is no proof that he had no place in popular belief. On the other hand, we can easily grasp that a religion originally so simple should have rapidly changed when the Persians were brought in daily touch with the peoples of Mesopotamia and Asia Minor. Ahurd-Mazda, though supreme, was not the only god ; other deities helped him to do battle against the principle of darkness, but the action of any one of these 7iumi, through the combination of various circumstances, could at a given moment raise him to con- siderable importance.^ By means of this open door also alien deities crept in and obtained a corner in the Iranic pantheon. In with great effect the marked contrast between the two classes of Persians, ancient and modem. than Darius. Digitized by Google
 * Xenophon, in the opening pages of the Cyropctdia (viii. 8), has brought out
 * '* Ahuri-Matda and the other gods " is a fonnola often aeen in iucriptions later