[Footnote 1138:  Le Coq in J.R.A.S. 1911, p. 277.]

[Footnote 1139:  Catechetic Lectures, VI. 20 ff.  The whole polemic is curious and worth reading.]

[Footnote 1140:  Alberuni, Chronology of ancient nations, trans.  Sachau, p. 190.]

[Footnote 1141:  The account in Philostratus (books II. and III.) reads like a romance and hardly proves that Apollonius went to India, but still there is no reason why he should not have done so.]

[Footnote 1142:  He wrote, however, against certain Gnostics.]

[Footnote 1143:  Similarly Sallustius (c. 360 A.D.), whose object was to revive Hellenism, includes metempsychosis in his creed and thinks it can be proved.  See translation in Murray, Four Stages of Greek Religion, p. 213.]

CHAPTER LVII

PERSIAN INFLUENCE IN INDIA

Our geographical and political phraseology about India and Persia obscures the fact that in many periods the frontier between the two countries was uncertain or not drawn as now.  North-western India and eastern Persia must not be regarded as water-tight or even merely leaky compartments.  Even now there are more Zoroastrians in India than in Persia and the Persian sect of Shiite Mohammedans is powerful and conspicuous there.  In former times it is probable that there was often not more difference between Indian and Iranian religion than between different Indian sects.

Yet the religious temperaments of India and Iran are not the same.  Zoroastrianism has little sympathy for pantheism or asceticism:  it does not teach metempsychosis or the sinfulness of taking life.  Images are not used in worship,[1144] God and his angels being thought of as pure and shining spirits.  The foundation of the system is an uncompromising dualism of good and evil, purity and impurity, light and darkness.  Good and evil are different in origin and duality will be abolished only by the ultimate and complete victory of the good.  In the next world the distinction between heaven and hell is equally sharp but hell is not eternal.[1145]

The pantheon and even the ritual of the early Iranians resembled those of the Veda and we can only suppose that the two peoples once lived and worshipped together.  Subsequently came the reform of Zoroaster which substituted theism and dualism for this nature worship.  For about two centuries, from 530 B.C. onwards, Gandhara and other parts of north-western India were a Persian province.  Between the time of Zoroaster (whatever that may be) and this period we cannot say what were the relations of Indian and Iranian religions, but after the seventh century they must have flourished in the same region.  Aristobulus,[1146] speaking of Taxila in the time of Alexander the Great, describes a marriage market and how the dead were devoured by vultures.  These are Babylonian and Persian customs, and doubtless were accompanied by many others less striking to a foreign tourist.  Some hold that the Zoroastrian scriptures allude to disputes with Buddhists.[1147]