Mithras was the sun and he was also the God of the
Persians; and according to Ovid's account horses were offered in sacrifice
to him,

_Placat equo Persis radiis Hyperiona cinctum,_
_Ne detur celeri victima tarda Deo._

But Mr. Hyde believes that they only made use of the sun and fire in their
worship as symbols of the Divinity. It may be necessary to distinguish, as
elsewhere, between the Wise and the Multitude. There are in the splendid
ruins of Persepolis or of Tschelminaar (which means forty columns)
sculptured representations of their ceremonies. An ambassador of Holland
had had them sketched at very great cost by a painter, who had devoted a
considerable time to the task: but by some chance or other these sketches
fell into the hands of a well-known traveller, M. Chardin, according to
what he tells us himself. It would be a pity if they were lost. These ruins
are one of the most ancient and most beautiful monuments of the earth; and
in this respect I wonder at such lack of curiosity in a century so curious
as ours.

[210]
138. The ancient Greeks and the modern Orientals agree in saying that
Zoroaster called the good God Oromazes, or rather Oromasdes, and the evil
God Arimanius. When I pondered on the fact that great princes of Upper Asia
had the name of Hormisdas and that Irminius or Herminius was the name of a
god or ancient hero of the Scythian Celts, that is, of the Germani, it
occurred to me that this Arimanius or Irminius might have been a great
conqueror of very ancient time coming from the west, just as Genghis Khan
and Tamburlaine were later, coming from the east. Arimanius would therefore
have come from the north-west, that is, from Germania and Sarmatia, through
the territory of the Alani and Massagetae, to raid the dominions of one
Ormisdas, a great king in Upper Asia, just as other Scythians did in the
days of Cyaxares, King of the Medes, according to the account given by
Herodotus. The monarch governing civilized peoples, and working to defend
them against the barbarians, would have gone down to posterity, amongst the
same peoples, as the good god; but the chief of these devastators will have
become the symbol of the evil principle: that is altogether reasonable. It
appears from this same mythology that these two princes contended for long,
but that neither of them was victorious. Thus they both held their own,
just as the two