Page:History of Zoroastrianism.djvu/344

Rh says that he represented Zaruan as the author of Hormisdas and Satan. The fiction that magic originated with Zoroaster persists and is repeated from the classical and patristic works by very late writers. In the Faust-legend, Zoroaster figures as the prince of magicians whose book Faust studies so diligently that he is called a second Zoroastris. This book passes into the hands of Faust's pupil Wagner, who also studies it with as much diligence as his master did.

The date and place of Zaratusht. The Avestan works, we have seen, are silent over the question of the period when Zarathushtra flourished. Of the two main sources of information on this problem, namely the classical and the traditional, the latter is based on a few passages occurring in Bundahishn, Arda Viraf, and Zatsparam. The barest information we gather from these solitary passages is that Zaratusht opened his prophetic ministry in the thirtieth year of the fabulous reign of one hundred and twenty years of King Vishtaspa. The religion remained in undisturbed condition for three hundred years and in the three hundredth year of its foundation, Alexander invaded Persia. The Arabic and Persian writers reproduce this statement in their works. The repetition of this legend by a host of the later writers seems to have given it a semblance of historic data. Tradition which is oblivious of the existence of the most renowned Persian kings Cyrus and Darius and Xerxes, which confounds the later Achaemenian kings with the Kianian, which complacently accords a reign of one hundred and twenty years to Vishtaspa, which disposes of the rule of four hundred years of the Parthians in forty pages, which does not provide us with fifty pages of materials on the religious and social life of Zoroastrians during the five hundred years that intervened between Alexander and Ardashir, the founder of the Sasanian dynasty—this is not a safe guide to follow. Both the classical date 6000 and the traditional date 600  are not acceptable; one for its extravagance, the other for its unreliability. The date, as also the place of the birth and death of Zoroaster, will, probably, never be established with any certainty, for no data