Page:Next-of-kin Marriages in Old Iran.djvu/59

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NEXT-OF-KIN MARRIAGES.

it for the moral restraints of his purer faith. Be this as it may, Kôbâd's apostacy was followed by a civil commotion, which ended in the deposition of the king and his imprisonment in the "Castle of Oblivion." Now does not this successful popular resistance to royal incest and adultery prove that the minds of the Irânians were averse to any violation of the moral law as to the relation between the sexes? There is one important point to be observed in the accounts of Agathias bearing on the doctrines which the Mazdakian heretics professed, viz., his assertion that consanguineous marriages were enormities recently introduced in Irân. If we accept this remark of a contemporary writer, does it not give a death-blow to all preceding authorities? Mr. Adam justly remarks (p. 716):—"But if 'those enormities were recent,' this contradicts all the preceding more ancient authorities, which affirm their earlier prevalence from Ctesias downwards."

Now, discarding all the fanciful hypotheses in-

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