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THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY.
(JULY, 1902.
more likely, in either case he depicts the circumstances as they obtained at the time of Artaxerxes I. about the middle of the fifth century B. C. Had he got to make use of older Greek sources, his portrayal would refer to a somewhat preceding age. But we have no sufficient grounds for this conjecture.
This much is confirinod : what he records is produced neither by himself nor by his authority from the sacred literature of Persin. It is the result of personal or second-hand observation and oral communication, - not the official doctrine of priestly schools, but the every day practice, which, as a matter of course, is to some extent divergent from the prescriptions and ideals of the theologians. This before all must be borne in mind in estimating the worth of his portrayal, which must not be branded as falsehood, when it seems to contradict the latter, but which at the same time does not argue a different time and a different sphere for the origin of the Apesta. The coincidences between the Avesta and Herodotus are too many for us to doubt that he actually has in mind the Zarathushtrian religion. But he is not uniformly accurate. What he asserts about the Persian names: shows that here be misses the meaning of his authority, and when he holds Mithrat for a female divinity, whom the Persians had assimilated from the Arabs, it is manifest that he has misunderstood him. Such discrepancies, however, are easily emended, and no reasons are forthcoming why we should refuse to credit his accounts. On the contrary, they supply a valuable means of inquiry into the tenets of the Zarathushtrian religion, as already accepted in general under the Achæmenides.
It is much to be deplored that the works of Theopompos have perished beyond recall. In the eighth book of his Philippina this contemporary of Philippus and Alexander handles the Magian teachings. In connection with the tradition of the Parsis that Alexander had the holy writings of Zarathushtrianism translated into Greek, which is not certainly to be literally understood, it would be of immense consequence to know what Theopompos had read or heard of the precepts contained in them. Plutarch was cognisant of his work and consulted it. He cites him where he recounts the successive world epochs, which the Persians admitted, and with reference to the conflict between Aromazdes and Areimanios and the annihilation of the latter. Probably he is beholdeu to the same authority for his careful account of Zarath ushtrian theology which he presents in the same work,
It must be, then, that he derived his information from Hermippos, a contemporary of Ptolemaios Euergetes (247-22 B. C.), of whom Pliny A88Qres us that be had studied the precepts of the Persians from their own books, and had published a detailed account of the two million verses which they contained. Hermippos' work, too, is hopelessly lost, to the incalculable detriment of the history of Mazdayasnian religion. Not so much because we would have learnt what is conspicuously absent in the 'archaic and the recent autochthonous sourees, but because from it we should have derived what was already in vogue among the.Zarathushtrians, and because it would have shed considerable light on the question of the date of the Avesta.
On this account it is that the reports of Diogenes Laertius? (who also cites Theopompos) that Eudoxos, the contemporary of Plato, and Aristotle knew the doctrine of the conflict of ZeusOromazdes and Hades-Areimanios, is of the greatest moment despite its brevity.
Chap. 189.
Chap. 181. • De Iride et Osirido, c. 46-47. The explanation he gives with regard to the four ont of the six Ameshaupenda is tolerably correct; but he has not quite understood Haurvatat and Ameretat. His account of the 24 of the gode of Oromaxdes' creation hiding themselves in an egg, which is broken by w many counter-orentions of Areimanion, had so far found no corroboration in any old Zarathushtrian text. For a notion in the later writinga harmonising with this idea, so Windischmann: Zoroastrische Studien, p. 284.
• Historia Naturali. XXX. 1. To Windischmann the two million seems an exaggeration, and, instead of wicies contum milia rorum, he would read vícies dena milia vernum. He indicates that the 200,000 line tolerably correspond to what is related of the bulk of the Avoata during the times of the Bassanides. I, too, would not bewer for the accuracy of the two million. But the Bassanian Zend Avesta was held to be morely remnant of the richer literature which existed at the time of Alexander,
* Prooemium, 6 and 9.
