Such is the account which is given by the Oriental authors of the terrible famine which they ascribe to the early part of the reign of Perozes.  It is difficult, however, to suppose that the matter has not been very much exaggerated, since we find that, as early as A.D. 464-5, when the famine should have been at its height, Perozes had entered upon a great war and was hotly engaged in it, his ambassadors at the same time being sent to the Greek court, not to ask supplies of food, but to request a subsidy on account of his military operations.  The enemy which had provoked his hostility was the powerful nation of the Ephthalites, by whose aid he had so recently obtained the Persian crown.  According to a contemporary Greek authority, more worthy of trust than most writers of his age and nation, the origin of the war was a refusal on the part of the Ephthalites to make certain customary payments which the Persians viewed in the light of a tribute.  Perozes determined to enforce his just rights, and marched his troops against the defaulters with this object.  But in his first operations he was unsuccessful, and after a time he thought it best to conclude the war, and content himself with taking a secret revenge upon his enemy, by means of an occult insult.  He proposed to Khush-newaz to conclude a treaty of peace, and to strengthen the compact by adding to it a matrimonial alliance.  Khush-newaz should take to wife one of his daughters, and thus unite the interests of the two reigning families.  The proposal was accepted by the Ephthalite monarch; and he readily espoused the young lady who was sent to his court apparelled as became a daughter of Persia.  In a little time, however, he found that he had been tricked:  Perozes had not sent him his daughter, but one of his female slaves; and the royal race of the Ephthalite kings had been disgraced by a matrimonial union with a person of servile condition.  Khush-newaz was justly indignant; but dissembled his feelings, and resolved to repay guile with guile.  He wrote to Perozes that it was his intention to make war upon a neighboring tribe, and that he wanted officers of experience to conduct the military operations.  The Persian monarch, suspecting nothing, complied with the request, and sent three hundred of his chief officers to Khush-newaz, who immediately seized them, put some to death, and, mutilating the remainder, commanded them to return to their sovereign, and inform him that the king of the Ephthalites now felt that he had sufficiently avenged the trick of which he had been the victim.  On receiving this message Perozes renewed the war, advanced towards the Ephthalite country, and fixed his head-quarters in Hyrcania, at the city of Gurgan, He was accompanied by a Greek of the name of Eusebius, an ambassador from the Emperor Zeno, who took back to Constantinople the following account of the campaign.