Page:Next-of-kin Marriages in Old Iran.djvu/50

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IN OLD IRÂN.
35

and her behaviour, in which she assured him there was something great and worthy of a crown. At last she persuaded him to make her his wife, without regarding the laws and opinions of the Greeks: 'God,' said she, 'has made you law to the Persians, and a rule of right and wrong.'"

Now, what do we gather from this passage? Nothing more than that Artaxerxes regarded his passion for his daughter as being in every way hurtful to his reputation, in every way unacceptable to his people or unjustified by law, and, therefore, endeavoured to hide it from his mother as well as the public. Hence we may, likewise, infer that the statements of Herodotus as well as Plutarch harmonize with each other, in showing that the marriage of an absolute monarch with a sister or a daughter was an act in which neither the Persian law nor people was acquiescent. If, according to a few scholars, it was a deed not unauthorized by the Avestâ,—if it was a practice quite familiar to the Persian people of by-gone ages,—what earthly reasons could have persuaded Cambyses, the most

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