ence in which the magi were held : " Then the king, Nebuchadnezzar, fell upon his face and worshipped Dan- iel, and commanded that they should offer an oblation and sweet odors imto him" (verse 46 ; see also verse 48). From the 4yth verse it would seem not unlikely that the administration of justice in the last resort belonged to this priesth" order, as we know it did to the hierarchy of northern and more modern courts. (See Munter,.4n- iiq. Abhandlung.Y).l4A:; Bleek,in Schleiermacher's Theol. Zeitschr. iii, 277 ; Hengstenberg's Daniel, p. 341.)
The name of the magi does not meet us in the Bibli- cal account of the ]\Iedo-Persian kings. If, however, we identify the Artaxerxes who stopped the building of the Temple (Ezra iv, 17-22) with the pseudo-Smerdis of Herodotus [see Artaxerxes] and the Gomates of the Behistun inscription, we maj' see here also another point of contact. (Compare Sir Henry Rawlinson's translation of the Behistim inscription : '• The rites wliich Gomates the magian had introduced I prohibited. I restored to the state the chants, and the worship, and to those fam- ilies which Gomates the magian had deprived of them" \Journ. of Asiatic Soc. vol. x, and Blakesley's Herodotus, Excurs. on iii, 74]). The magian attempt to reassert Median supremacy, and with it probably a corrupted Chaldaized form of Blagianism, in place of the purer faith in Ormuzd of which Cyrus had been the propa- gator, would naturally be accompanied by antagonism to the people whom the Persians had protected and sup- ported. The immediate renewal of the suspended work on the triumph of Darius (Ezra iv, 24 ; v, 1, 2 ; vi, 7, 8) falls in, it need hardly be added, with this hypothesis. The story of the actual massacre of the magi throughout the dominions of Darius, and of the commemorative magophonia (Herod, iii, 79), with whatever exaggera- tions it may be mixed up, indicates in like manner the triumph of the Zoroastrian system. If we accept the traditional date of Zoroaster as a contemporary of Dari- us, we may see in the changes which he effected a re- vival of the older system. It is, at any rate, striking that the word magi does not appear in the Zend-Avesta, the priests being there described as atharva (guardians of the fire), and that there are multiplied prohibitions in it of all forms of the magic which, in the West, and possibly in the East also, took its name from them, and with which, it would appear, they had already become tainted. All such arts, auguries, necromancy, and the like, are looked on as evil, and emanating from Ahriman, and are pursued by the hero-king Feridoun with the most persistent hostility (Du Perron, Zend-A vesta, vol. i, part ii, p. 269, 424),
The name, however, kept its ground, and with it prob- ably the order to Avhich it was attached. Under Xerx- es the magi occupy a position which indicates that they had recovered from their temporary depression. They are consulted by him as soothsayers (Herod, vii, 19), and are as infiuential as they had been m the court of Astyages. They prescribe the strange and terrible sacrifices at the Strj'mon and the Nine Ways (Herod, vii, 114). They were said to have urged the destruc- tion of the temples of Greece (Cicero, De Legg. ii, 10). Traces of their influence may perhaps be seen in the re- gard paid by ^Jlardonius to the oracles of the Greek god that offered the nearest analogue to their own Mithras (Herod, viii, 134), and in the like reverence which had previously been shown by the Median Datis towards the island of Delos (Herod, vi, 97). They come before the Greeks as the representatives of the religion of the Persians. No sacrifices may be offered unless one of their order is present chanting the (prescribed prayers, as in the ritual of the Zend-Avesta (Herod, i, 132). No (great change is traceable in their position during the decline of the Persian monarchy. The positi<jn of Ju- daea as a Persian province must have kc]5t up some measure of contact between the two religi(nis systems. The histories of Esther and Nehemiah point to the in- fluence which might be exercised by members of the subject-race. It might well be that the religious miuds
MAGI
636
MAGI
of the two nations would learn to respect each other, and that some measure uf the prophetic liopcs of Israel might mingle with the helief of the magi. As an order they perpetuated themselves under the Parthian kings. The name rose to fresh honor under the Sassanidas. The classification which was ascribed to Zoroaster was rec- ognised as the basis of a hierarchical system, after other and lower elements had mingled with the earlier dual- ism, and might be traced even in the rehgion and wor- ship of the Parsees.