“Yes, he learnt Greek and Lydian together as a little child, and speaks them both equally well.  He can speak Persian too, perfectly; and what is more, he knows and practises all the Persian virtues.”

“Which are the highest virtues then according to you Persians?”

“Truth is the first of all; courage the second, and the third is obedience; these three, joined with veneration for the gods, have made us Persians great.”

“But I thought you worshipped no gods?”

“Foolish child! who could live without a god, without a higher ruler?  True, they do not dwell in houses and pictures like the gods of the Egyptians, for the whole creation is their dwelling.  The Divinity, who must be in every place, and must see and hear everything, cannot be confined within walls.”

“Where do you pray then and offer sacrifice, if you have no temples?”

“On the grandest of all altars, nature herself; our favorite altar is the summit of a mountain.  There we are nearest to our own god, Mithras, the mighty sun, and to Auramazda, the pure creative light; for there the light lingers latest and returns earliest.”

[From Herodotus (I. 131 and 132.), and from many other sources, we see clearly that at the time of the Achaemenidae the Persians had neither temples nor images of their gods.  Auramazda and Angramainjus, the principles of good and evil, were invisible existences filling all creation with their countless train of good and evil spirits.  Eternity created fire and water.  From these Ormusd (Auramazda), the good spirit, took his origin.  He was brilliant as the light, pure and good.  After having, in the course of 12000 years, created heaven, paradise and the stars, he became aware of the existence of an evil spirit, Ahriman (Angramainjus), black, unclean, malicious and emitting an evil odor.  Ormusd determined on his destruction, and a fierce strife began, in which Ormusd was the victor, and the evil spirit lay 3000 years unconscious from the effects of terror.  During this interval Ormusd created the sky, the waters, the earth, all useful plants, trees and herbs, the ox and the first pair of human beings in one year.  Ahriman, after this, broke loose, and was overcome but not slain.  As, after death, the four elements of which all things are composed, Earth, Air, Fire and Water, become reunited with their primitive elements; and as, at the resurrection-day, everything that has been severed combines once more, and nothing returns into oblivion, all is reunited to its primitive elements, Ahriman could only have been slain if his impurity could have been transmuted into purity, his darkness into light.  And so evil continued to exist, and to produce impurity and evil wherever and whenever the good spirit created the pure and good.  This strife must continue until the last day; but then Ahriman, too, will become pure and holy; the Diws or Daewa (evil spirits) will have absorbed his evil, and themselves have ceased to