intended to withdraw to Barene, the town which I received as a gift from
Cyrus, and there, in that most lovely mountain valley, to take my rest;
but for your sake and for the king's, I will remain here and continue to
give you instruction in the Persian tongue. Kassandane herself will
initiate you in the customs peculiar to women at the Persian court, and
Oropastes, the high-priest, has been ordered by the king to make you
acquainted with the religion of Iran. He will be your spiritual, and I
your secular guardian."

At these words Nitetis, who had been smiling happily, cast down her eyes
and asked in a low voice: "Am I to become unfaithful to the gods of my
fathers, who have never failed to hear my prayers? Can I, ought I to
forget them?"

"Yes," said Kassandane decidedly, "thou canst, and it is thy bounden
duty, for a wife ought to have no friends but those her husband calls
such. The gods are a man's earliest, mightiest and most faithful friends,
and it therefore becomes thy duty, as a wife, to honor them, and to close
thine heart against strange gods and superstitions, as thou wouldst close
it against strange lovers."

"And," added Croesus, "we will not rob you of your deities; we will only
give them to you under other names. As Truth remains eternally the same,
whether called 'maa', as by the Egyptians, or 'Aletheia' as by the
Greeks, so the essence of the Deity continues unchanged in all places and
times. Listen, my daughter: I myself, while still king of Lydia, often
sacrificed in sincere devotion to the Apollo of the Greeks, without a
fear that in so doing I should offend the Lydian sun-god Sandon; the
Ionians pay their worship to the Asiatic Cybele, and, now that I have
become a Persian, I raise my hands adoringly to Mithras, Ormuzd and the
lovely Anahita. Pythagoras too, whose teaching is not new to you,
worships one god only, whom he calls Apollo; because, like the Greek
sun-god, he is the source of light and of those harmonies which
Pythagoras holds to be higher than all else. And lastly, Xenophanes of
Colophon laughs at the many and divers gods of Homer and sets one single
deity on high--the ceaselessly creative might of nature, whose essence
consists of thought, reason and eternity.

[A celebrated freethinker, who indulged in bold and independent
speculations, and suffered much persecution for his ridicule of the
Homeric deities. He flourished at the time of our history and lived
to a gre