Page:Next-of-kin Marriages in Old Iran.djvu/46

fought the lion, and conquered him. The thing greatly pleased Cambyses, but his sister, who was șitting by, shed tears. When Cambyses saw this he asked her why she wept: whereon she told him that seeing the young dog come to his brother's aid made her think of Smerdis (her brother), whom there was none to help. For this speech, the Greeks say, Cambyses put her to death."

But from these statements of the historian of Halicarnassus, is it not plain enough that the marriage of Cambyses with his sister—if we may rely upon the Greek evidence alone—was nothing more than the individual act of one of the wickedest tyrants that ever reigned in Persia, and that it was owing to the cruel and ferocious character of their ruler that this most irreligious marriage from the stand-point of the Magi was acquiesced in by the priests as well as the people? And is this action of a vicious and wicked king sufficient to justify us in affixing the stigma of such a custom to the whole Irânian nation, or in tracing it to their religious writings? Further, it should