THE PONTIFF KING AND VARIOUS MONSTERS. 675 
to these bas-relief combats on the walls, and with all the poetical 
enthusiasm of his country, declares them to be representations 
of actual contests between Jemsheed, or Roostam, or Isfundeer, 
and the emissaries of evil, in those hideous forms. Indeed, I 
agree with him in every particular of his explanation, excepting 
the existence of the daemon animals in “ veritable substance,” to 
be seen and slain. The hero of the combats, I suppose to be 
intended for Darius Hystaspes, or his son and successor, Xerxes ; 
but the beasts he encounters, purely allegorical. In consequence 
of the death of Zoroaster, who had been massacred in the great 
sacerdotal city of Balk, by Argasp the Scythian king, Darius 
took on himself the title of Archimagus ; and after avenging the 
murder of his prophet, on the Scythian nation, we are told by 
Porphyry, that the Persian monarch commanded that the name 
of that sacred distinction should be inscribed on his tomb. 
Here, then, we find the pontiff-king. And in the firm grasp 
with which he holds the horn of power on the heads of all the 
animals, while his sword is in their hearts, we may read his 
conquest over the monsters of Sabianism in Scythia, Egypt, 
India, and in Babylonia, which had revolted; and whose gods, 
and whose towers, he and his son reduced to “ a perpetual 
desolation.” Xerxes, who was thus associated with his father’s 
warlike achievements, had more than his own share of fame. 
The Persian poets call him Isfundeer; and regarding him as one 
of their darling heroes, decorate him with all the virtues that he 
— did not possess. But he was a prince of daring enterprise; 
he had carried the arms of Persia to more distant regions than 
any of his predecessors ; and glare being mistaken for glory, the 
writers of the East represent him as a hero sans peur , sans re - 
proche. In the midst of his victories, and the multitude of his 
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