THE ORIGINS OF MITHRAISM
and enduring guaranty of sights.
.
their
13
legitimate
..
This reverence for Persian customs, inher ited from legendary ancestors, this idea that piety is the bulwark of the throne and the sole condition of success, is explicitly affirmed in the pompous inscription* engraved on the colossal tomb that Antiochus I., Epiphanes, of Commagene (69-34 B.C.), erected on a spur of the mountain-range vTaurus, commanding a distant view of the vailey~of the Euphrates But, being a descendant by his mother of the Seleucidse of Syria, and sup posedly by his father of Darius, son of Hystaspes, the king of Commagene merged
(Figure
the
i).
memories
of
his
double
and
origin,
blended together the gods and the rites of the Persians and the Greeks, just as in his own dynasty the name of Antiochus alternated with that of Mithridates. Similarly in the neighboring countries, the Iranian princes and priests gradually suc cumbed to the growing power of the Grecian civilization. Under the Achaemenides, all the different nations lying between the Pontus Euxinus and Mount Taurus were suffered by the tolerance of the central authority to prac customs, and languages. the caused by the confusion in But_ great
tise their local cults,
collapse of the Persian empire, *Michel, Recueil inscr. gr. Vol. II., p. 89, No. i.
t
No.
735.
all political
Compare
and
T. et
M.,
I