epeated by writer after writer as a certain fact, and became finally a
stock topic with the early Christian apologists. Whether it had any real
foundation in fact is very uncertain. Herodotus, who collects with so
much pains the strange and unusual customs of the various nations whom
he visits, is evidently quite ignorant of any such monstrous practice.
He regards the Magian religion as established in Persia, yet he holds
the incestuous marriage of Cambyses with his sister to have been
contrary to existing Persian laws. At the still worst forms of incest
of which the Magi and those under their influence are accused, Herodotus
does not even glance. No doubt, if Xanthus Lydus really made the
statement which Clemens of Alexandria assigns to him, it is an important
piece of evidence, though scarcely sufficient to prove the Magi guilty.
Xanthus was a man of little judgment, apt to relate extravagant tales;
and, as a Lydian, he may have been disinclined to cast an aspersion
on the religion of his country's oppressors. The passage in question,
however, probably did not come from Xanthus Lydus, but from a much later
writer who assumed his name, as has been well shown by a living critic.
The true original author of the accusation against the Magi and their
co-religionists seems to have been Ctesias, whose authority is far
too weak to establish a charge intrinsically so improbable. Its only
historical foundation seems to have been the fact that incestuous
marriages were occasionally contracted by the Persian kings; not,
however, in consequence of any law, or religious usage, but because in
the plenitude of their power they could set all law at defiance, and
trample upon the most sacred principles of morality and religion.

A minor charge preferred against the Magian morality by Xanthus, or
rather by the pseudo-Xanthus, has possibly a more solid foundation.
"The Magi," this writer said, "hold their wives in common: at least
they often marry the wives of others with the free consent of their
husbands." This is really to say that among the Magians divorce was
over-facile; that wives were often put away, merely with a view to their
forming a fresh marriage, by husbands who understood and approved of the
transaction. Judging by the existing practice of the Persians, we must
admit that such laxity is in accordance with Iranic notions on the
subject of marriage--notions far less strict than those which have
commonly prevailed among civil