The steps which he took to effect his purpose seem to have been the following.  He put down idolatry by a general destruction of the images, which he overthrew and broke to pieces.  He raised the Magian hierarchy to a position of honor and dignity such as they had scarcely enjoyed even under the later Achaemenian princes, securing them in a condition of pecuniary independence by assignments of lands, and also by allowing their title to claim from the faithful the tithe of all their possessions.  He caused the sacred fire to be rekindled on the altars where it was extinguished, and assigned to certain bodies of priests the charge of maintaining the fire in each locality.  He then proceeded to collect the supposed precepts of Zoroaster into a volume, in order to establish a standard of orthodoxy whereto he might require all to conform.  He found the Zoroastrians themselves divided into a number of sects.  Among these he established uniformity by means of a “general council,” which was attended by Magi from all parts of the empire, and which settled what was to be regarded as the true Zoroastrian faith.  According to the Oriental writers, this was effected in the following way:  Forty thousand, or, according to others, eighty thousand Magi having assembled, they were successively reduced by their own act to four thousand, to four hundred, to forty, and finally to seven, the most highly respected for their piety and learning.  Of these seven there was one, a young but holy priest, whom the universal consent of his brethren recognized as pre-eminent.  His name was Arda-Viraf.  “Having passed through the strictest ablutions, and drunk a powerful opiate, he was covered with a white linen and laid to sleep.  Watched by seven of the nobles, including the king, he slept for seven days and nights; and, on his reawaking, the whole nation listened with believing wonder to his exposition of the faith of Ormazd, which was carefully written down by an attendant scribe for the benefit of posterity.”

The result, however brought about, which must always remain doubtful, was the authoritative issue of a volume which the learned of Europe have now possessed for some quarter of a century, and which has recently been made accessible to the general reader by the labors of Spiegel.  This work, the Zendavesta, while it may contain fragments of a very ancient literature, took its present shape in the time of Artaxerxes, and was probably then first collected from the mouths of the Zoroastrian priests and published by Arda-Viraf.  Certain additions may since have been made to it; but we are assured that “their number is small,” and that we “have no reason to doubt” that the text of the Avesta, in the days of Arda-Viraf, was on the whole exactly the same as at present.  The religious system of the new Persian monarchy is thus completely known to us, and will be described minutely in a later chapter.  At present we have to consider, not what the exact tenets of the Zoroastrians were, but only the mode in which Artaxerxes imposed them upon his subjects.