A time of prosperity now ensued.  Perozes ruled with moderation and justice.  He dismissed his Ephthalite allies with presents that amply contented them, and lived for five years in great peace and honor.  But in the seventh year, from the death of his father, the prosperity of Persia was suddenly and grievously interrupted by a terrible drought, a calamity whereto Asia has in all ages been subject, and which often produces the most frightful consequences.  The crops fail; the earth becomes parched and burnt up; smiling districts are change into wildernesses; fountains and brooks cease to flow; then the wells have no water; finally even the great rivers are reduced to threads, and contain only the scantiest supply of the life-giving fluid in their channels.  Famine under these circumstances of necessity sets in; the poor die by hundreds; even the rich have a difficulty in sustaining life by means of food imported from a distance.  We are told that the drought in the reign of Perozes was such that at last there was not a drop of water either in the Tigris or the Oxus; all the sources and fountains, all the streams and brooks failed; vegetation altogether ceased; the beasts of the field and the fowls of the air perished; nowhere through the whole empire was a bird to be seen; the wild animals, even the reptiles, disappeared altogether.  The dreadful calamity lasted for seven years, and under ordinary circumstances the bulk of the population would have been swept off; but such were the “wisdom and the beneficence of the Persian monarch,” that during the entire duration of the scourge not a single person, or, according to another account, but one person, perished of hunger.  Perozes began by issuing general orders that the rich should come to the relief of their poorer brethren; he required the governors of towns, and the head-men of villages, to see that food was supplied to those in need, and threatened that for each poor man in a town or village who died of want he would put a rich man to death.  At the end of two years, finding that the drought continued, he declined to take any revenue from his subjects, remitting taxes of all kinds, whether they were money imposts or contributions in kind.  In the fourth year, not content with these measures, he went further:  opened the treasury doors and made distributions of money from his own stores to those in need.  At the same time he imported corn from Greece, from India, from the valley of the Oxus, and from Abyssinia, obtaining by these means such ample supplies that he was able to furnish an adequate sustenance to all his subjects.  The result was that not only did the famine cause no mortality among the poorer classes, but no one was even driven to quit the country in order to escape the pressure of the calamity.