Page:Next-of-kin Marriages in Old Iran.djvu/115

writers hardly profess to do more than retail their stories out of a stock gathered with industry no doubt, but entirely without the control of the critical spirit which in modern times we have learned to consider so indispensable. Ctesias, who must have known a great deal about Persia and its people, from original observation, has told so many undoubted falsehoods that his evidence is unworthy of credit on any contested point. The first sources of European information on the subject before us are thus remarkably unsatisfactory, yet it is to be feared that it is with impressions derived from these sources that the Western scholars have approached the Parsee literature. So influenced they may very naturally have construed the mysterious and rare phrases supposed to involve a sanction of incestuous unions, in a frame of mind which had led to illusions such as the Dastur has insisted on and striven to dispel.

One would gather from the narrative in Herodotus that the marriage of Cambyses was of a kind to startle and shock the sensibilities of his people—else why recount it? That would indicate very probably the survival in the popular legends, drawn from a pre-historic time, of some ancient tale of wrong which the popular fancy was pleased to annex to a king who had played so great a part and had so terrible a history as Cambyses. In