Rome, the Greek World, and the East, Vol. 3 - The Greek World, the Jews, and the East

Looking East from the Classical World 

Classical sources provide by far the earliest representations of Zoroaster as an
Iranian sage located in the remote past, whose teachings expressed a dualis-
tic view of the world. The most informative of these texts is a passage from
Plutarch’s essayOn Isis and Osiris, a work written in the early second cen-
tury..:

The great majority and the wisest of men hold this opinion: they be-

lieve that there are two gods, rivals as it were, the one the Artificer of

good and the other of evil. There are also those who call the better one

a god and the other a daemon, as, for example, Zoroaster the sage, who,

they record, lived five thousand years before the time of the Trojan

War. He called the one Oromazes and the other Areimanius; and he

further declared that among all things perceptible to the senses Oro-

mazes may best be compared to light, and Areimanius, conversely, to

darkness and ignorance, and midway between the two is Mithras; for

this reason the Persian give to Mithras the name of ‘‘Mediator.’’^51

The conclusion is obvious. No problem arises from Plutarch’s reference to
the major Iranian deity, Ahura Mazda, for the great inscription of Darius I,
from the late sixth century.., written in old Persian, proclaims the king
as his worshipper. Neither in this long inscription, however, nor anywhere
else in the scanty Iranian evidence from before the early medieval period, is
there any allusion to an ancient teacher named Zoroaster.
The reader might reasonably object that the manuscripts of Plutarch’s
works, too, are medieval. So they are. The fundamental difference, however,
is that the texts of classical authors such as Plutarch, while mainly derived
from medieval manuscripts, can be tied into a dense interlocking network
of ancient papyrus texts and of ancient documents, both papyri and inscrip-
tions, some naming Plutarch himself, as well as many other persons who
appear in hisLivesandMoral Essays. In this case, therefore, we can work back
from the medieval copy to a known ancient context. With theAvesta, we can-
not. A series of classical writers ascribe to a very ancient Persian sage named
‘‘Zoroaster’’ a dualistic view of the world. We cannot prove them wrong, but
it would be counter to all methodological principles to treat such representa-

mages hellénisésI–II (). See now A. De Jong,Traditions of the Magi: Zoroastrianism in Greek
and Latin Literature(). Note also P. Kingsley, ‘‘The Greek Origin of the Sixth-Century
Dating of Zoroaster,’’Bull. Sch. Or. and Afr. Stud.  (): , vigorously criticising the
Greek tradition—but only (it seems) in favour of a second-millennium date for the ‘‘real’’
Zoroaster.
. Plutarch,MoraliaD–D (trans. Loeb text, vol. V, –).