The secret of the difference is this:  the West Asian manvantara, to which the Persians belonged, was more than a thousand years older than the European manvantara, to which the Greeks belonged; so the latter, beside the former, had an air of parvenu. The Greeks dwelt on the Persian’s borders; and fought him when they must; intrigued with or against him when they might; called him barbarian for self-respect’s sake—­and admired and envied him always.  Had he been really a barbarian, in contact with their superior civilization, he would have become degraded by the contact; in such cases it always happens that the inferior sops up the vices only of his betters.  But Alexander found the Persians much the same courtly-mannered, lordly-living, mighty huntsmen they had been when Herodotus described them; and was ambitious that his Europeans should mix with them on equal terms and learn their virtues.

Where and when did this high tradition grow up?  There was not time enough, I think, in that half cycle between the rise of Cyrus and Marathon.  In truth we are to see in these regions vistas of empires receding back into the dimness, difficult to sort out and fix their chronology.  Cyrus overthrew the Assyrian; from whose yoke his people had freed themselves some fifteen years or so before.  The Medes had been rising since the earlier part of that seventh century; sometime then they brought the kindred race of Persians under their sway.  Sometime then, too, I am inclined to think, lived the Teacher Zoroaster:  about whose date there is more confusion than about that of any other World Reformer; authorities differ within a margin of 6000 years.  But Taoism, Confucianism, Jainism, Buddhism, and Pythagoreanism all had their rise about this time; the age of religions began then; it was not a thing of chance, but marked a definite change in the spiritual climate of the world.  The Bundahish, the Parsee account of it, says that he lived 258 years before Alexander; almost all scholars reject the figure—­once more, “it is their nature to.”  But you will note that 258 is about as much as to say 260, which is twice the cycle of thirteen decades; I think the probabilities are strong that the Bundahish is right.  The chief grounds for putting him much earlier are these:  Greek accounts say, six thousand years before the Greek time; and there are known to have been kings in those parts, long before Cyrus, by the name or title of Mazdaka,—­which word is from Mazda, the name of the God-Principle in Zoroastrianism.  The explanation is this:  you shall find it in H.P.  Blavatsky:  there were many Zoroasters; this one we are speaking of was the last (as Gautama was the last of the Buddhas); and of course he invented nothing, taught no new truth; but simply organized as a religion ideas that had before belonged to the Mysteries.  Where then did his predecessors teach?—­Where Zal and Rustem thundered as they might; in the old Iran of