Page:Introduction to the Assyrian church.djvu/188

182 HISTORY OF THE ASSYRIAN CHURCH when Kobad was officially reconverted; for at least one member of the royal house, beside several nobles, remained in the new faith — a fact that makes one suspect that a doctrine that could thus win men against their own obvious interest must have had more to commend it than its adversaries would allow! A little oriental experience gives a great distrust in that account of a man's religion that his enemy gives. The opponent may not be consciously caricaturing, but he invariably represents his own deductions from A.'s principles as A.'s actual tenets.

Mazdakites were numerous enough to be formidable, and when, in 523, Kobad proclaimed his favourite and youngest son Chosroes as heir-apparent, they made a determined attempt to substitute the Mazdakean prince in his room. Kobad and Chosroes together determined to read the rebels a lesson, and a grim and treacherous one it was. The Mazdakite chiefs were invited to a royal banquet, the Shah-in-Shah himself receiving Mazdak alone. The banquet over, the King asked his guest and old teacher to come out into the garden "to see some trees of the King's planting." He came, and was shown them — the feet of his own adherents projecting from the row of pits in which they had been buried alive. He himself was seized, and impaled publicly; and a massacre of 100,000 of his followers put the crown on the horrible work. The party of reform among Zoroastrians, if not destroyed, was driven out of sight.

Another war with Rome began in 528, which was of no great importance, except for the fact that it showed Justinian that he had at last found a general in Belisarius. It brought to the Romans the satisfaction of winning the first victory in the open field that they had won for more than a generation — the battle of Daras. Virtue had