yet he holds the incestuous marriage of Cambyses with his sister to have been contrary to existing Persian laws.  At the still worst forms of incest of which the Magi and those under their influence are accused, Herodotus does not even glance.  No doubt, if Xanthus Lydus really made the statement which Clemens of Alexandria assigns to him, it is an important piece of evidence, though scarcely sufficient to prove the Magi guilty.  Xanthus was a man of little judgment, apt to relate extravagant tales; and, as a Lydian, he may have been disinclined to cast an aspersion on the religion of his country’s oppressors.  The passage in question, however, probably did not come from Xanthus Lydus, but from a much later writer who assumed his name, as has been well shown by a living critic.  The true original author of the accusation against the Magi and their co-religionists seems to have been Ctesias, whose authority is far too weak to establish a charge intrinsically so improbable.  Its only historical foundation seems to have been the fact that incestuous marriages were occasionally contracted by the Persian kings; not, however, in consequence of any law, or religious usage, but because in the plenitude of their power they could set all law at defiance, and trample upon the most sacred principles of morality and religion.

A minor charge preferred against the Magian morality by Xanthus, or rather by the pseudo-Xanthus, has possibly a more solid foundation.  “The Magi,” this writer said, “hold their wives in common:  at least they often marry the wives of others with the free consent of their husbands.”  This is really to say that among the Magians divorce was over-facile; that wives were often put away, merely with a view to their forming a fresh marriage, by husbands who understood and approved of the transaction.  Judging by the existing practice of the Persians, we must admit that such laxity is in accordance with Iranic notions on the subject of marriage—­notions far less strict than those which have commonly prevailed among civilized nations.  There is, however, no other evidence, besides this, that divorce was very common where the Magian system prevailed; and the mere assertion of the writer who personated Xanthus Lydus will scarcely justify us in affixing even this stigma on the religion.

Upon the whole, Magism, though less elevated and less pure than the old Zoroastrian creed, must be pronounced to have possessed a certain loftiness and picturesqueness which suited it to become the religion of a great and splendid monarchy.  The mysterious fire-altars on the mountain-tops, with their prestige of a remote antiquity—­the ever-burning flame believed to have been kindled from on high—­the worship in the open air under the blue canopy of heaven—­the long troops of Magians in their white robes, with their strange caps, and their mystic wands—­the frequent prayers—­the abundant sacrifices—­the long incantations—­the supposed prophetic