The Persian monarch allowed the Armenians no time to recover from the blow which he had treacherously dealt them.  His armies at once entered their territory and carried everything before them.  Chosroes seems to have had no son of sufficient age to succeed him, and the defence of the country fell upon the satraps, or governors of the several provinces.  These chiefs implored the aid of the Roman emperor, and received a contingent; but neither were their own exertions nor was the valor of their allies of any avail.  Artaxerxes easily defeated the confederate army, and forced the satraps to take refuge in Roman territory.  Armenia submitted to his arms, and became an integral portion of his empire.  It probably did not greatly trouble him that Artavasdes, one of the satraps, succeeded in carrying off one of the sons of Chosroes, a boy named Tiridates, whom he conveyed to Rome, and placed under the protection of the reigning emperor.

Such were the chief military successes of Artaxerxes.  The greatest of our historians, Gibbon, ventures indeed to assign to him, in addition, “some easy victories over the wild Scythians and the effeminate Indians.”  But there is no good authority for this statement; and on the whole it is unlikely that he came into contact with either nation.  His coins are not found in Afghanistan; and it may be doubted whether he ever made any eastern expedition.  His reign was not long; and it was sufficiently occupied by the Roman and Armenian wars, and by the greatest of all his works, the reformation of religion.

The religious aspect of the insurrection which transferred the headship of Western Asia from the Parthians to the Persians, from Artabanus to Artaxerxes, has been already noticed; but we have now to trace, so far as we can, the steps by which the religious revolution was accomplished, and the faith of Zoroaster, or what was believed to be such, established as the religion of the State throughout the new empire.  Artaxerxes, himself (if we may believe Agathias) a Magus, was resolved from the first that, if his efforts to shake off the Parthian yoke succeeded, he would use his best endeavors to overthrow the Parthian idolatry and install in its stead the ancestral religion of the Persians.  This religion consisted of a combination of Dualism with a qualified creature-worship, and a special reverence for the elements, earth, air, water, and fire.  Zoroastrianism, in the earliest form which is historically known to us, postulated two independent and contending principles—­a principle of good, Ahura-Mazda, and a principle of evil, Angro-Mainyus.  These beings, who were coeternal and coequal, were engaged in a perpetual struggle for supremacy; and the world was the battle-field wherein the strife was carried on.  Each had called into existence numerous inferior beings, through whose agency they waged their interminable conflict.  Ahura-Mazda (Oromazdos, Ormazd) had created thousands of angelic beings to perform his