The Zend-Avesta, Part 1: The Vendidad (Sacred Books of the East, Vol. 4)

Inquiries into the religion of ancient Persia began long ago; the Greeks, as the old foes of Persia, were the first to study it. Aristotle¹, Hermippus², and many others³ wrote of it in books of which, unfortunately, nothing remains but a few fragments or their titles. We find much valuable information scattered throughout the accounts of historians and travelers, extending over ten centuries, from Herodotus down to Agathias and Procopius. It was never more eagerly studied than in the first centuries of the Christian era, but that study no longer had the disinterested, scientific character of earlier times. Religious and philosophic sects, in search of new dogmas, eagerly received anything bearing the name of Zoroaster. As Xanthus the Lydian, who is said to have lived before Herodotus, had mentioned Zoroastrian Logia (oracles)⁴, there came to light in later times scores of oracles styled Logia tou Zoroastrou—or 'Chaldean or Magical Oracles'—the work of Neo-Platonists who were but very remote disciples of the Median sage. As his name had become the emblem of wisdom, they would attribute their own latest theosophical inventions to him. Zoroaster and Plato were treated as if they had been philosophers of the same school, and Hierocles expounded their doctrines in the same book. Proclus collected seventy 'Tetrads' of Zoroaster and wrote commentaries on them¹; but it need hardly be said that Zoroaster commented on by Proclus was nothing more or less than Proclus commented on by Proclus. Prodicus the Gnostic possessed secret books of Zoroaster²; and, upon the whole, it may be said that in the first centuries of Christianity, the religion of Persia was more studied and less understood than it had ever been before. The real object aimed at in studying the old religion was to form a new one.

¹ Diogenes Laertius, Prooemium 8.
² Pliny, Hist. Nat. XXX, 1, 2.
³ Dinon, Theopompus, Hermodorus, Heraclides Cumanus.
⁴ See Nicolaus Damascenus, Didot, Fragm. Hist. III, 409.