ls for
history, indicate thereby the happiness of a nation. We are told that he
had a strong taste for building, and could never see a crumbling edifice
without instantly setting to work to restore it. Ruined towns and
villages, so common throughout the East in all ages, ceased to be seen
in Persia while he filled the throne. An army of masons always followed
him in his frequent journeys throughout his empire, and repaired
dilapidated homesteads and cottages with as much care and diligence as
edifices of a public character. According to some writers he founded
several entirely new towns in Khuzistan or Susiana, while, according to
others, he built the important city of Hormuz, or (as it is sometimes
called) Ram-Aormuz, in the province of Kerman, which is still a
flourishing place. Other authorities ascribe this city, however, to the
first Hormisdas, the son of Sapor I. and grandson of Artaxerxes.
Among the means devised by Hormisdas II. for bettering the condition of
his people the most remarkable was his establishment of a new Court of
Justice. In the East the oppression of the weak by the powerful is
the most inveterate and universal of all evils, and the one that
well-intentioned monarchs have to be most careful in checking and
repressing. Hormisdas, in his anxiety to root out this evil, is said to
have set up a court expressly for the hearing of causes where complaint
was made by the poor of wrongs done to them by the rich. The duty of
the judges was at once to punish the oppressors, and to see that ample
reparation was made to those whom they had wronged. To increase the
authority of the court, and to secure the impartiality of its sentences,
the monarch made a point of often presiding over it himself, of hearing
the causes, and pronouncing the judgments in person. The most powerful
nobles were thus made to feel that, if they offended, they would be
likely to receive adequate punishment; and the weakest and poorest of
the people were encouraged to come forward and make complaint if they
had suffered injury.
Among his other wives, Hormisdas, we are told, married a daughter of
the king of Cabul. It was natural that, after the conquest of Seistan
by Varahran II., about A.D. 280, the Persian monarchs should establish
relations with the chieftains ruling in Afghanistan. That country seems,
from the first to the fourth century of our era, to have been under the
government of princes of Scythian descent and of consider
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