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Ardashir, a Magus, rejuvenates Zoroastrianism. With the fall of the Achaemenian empire were extinguished the last sparks of the fire of racial jealousy between the Medes and Persians. Common hardships and common sorrows had obliterated all traces of bitter feeling for one another. The Seleucid period and the five centuries of Parthian rule, as another great empire in Iran, served all the more to make them now one compact homogeneous people, thinking with one mind, feeling with one heart, and acting with one aim. As already pointed out, the Magi did not receive recognition in the Avesta. It is not so in the Pahlavi period. The Avestan term athravan remains during this era as a class designation alone, but magopat, which later becomes mobad, is used throughout the Pahlavi literature, equally as a class designation for priesthood and as a personal title of a priest to distinguish him from a layman. Significant in this light becomes the fact that although the Persians of old had defeated the Medes and their sacerdotal caste, the Magi, it was now a Magus again that was destined to revive the national glory of Iran, and restore their ancient faith The Kingly Glory of Iran clave to a hero of the house of Sasan in the province of Fars,^[1] who was alike priest and king.^[2] Ardashir was his name, and the Iranian world rang with the praises of this son of Babak, whose fame is writ large in the history of Zoroastrianism.

This founder of the Sasanian dynasty won his spurs in the battle against Ardavan, the last of the Parthian kings, in A.D. 224 People turned their eager eyes to him for the national emancipation from the heavy yoke of the foreigners. His was the task of rebuilding the shattered fragments of the ancient Persian empire upon the ruins of the Parthian empire. When he succeeded in