We find much valuable information about it, scattered in the
accounts of historians and travellers, extending over ten centuries,
from Herodotos down to Agathias and Procopius (from B.C. 450 to A.D.
550). The clearest and most faithful account of the Dualist doctrine is
found in the treatise _De Iside et Osiride_, ascribed to Plutarch. But
Zoroastrianism was never more eagerly studied than in the first
centuries of the Christian era, though without anything of the
disinterested and almost scientific curiosity of the earlier times.
Religious and philosophic sects, in search of new dogmas, eagerly
received whatever came to them bearing the name of Zoroaster. As Xanthos
the Lydian, who is said to have lived before Herodotos, had mentioned
Zoroastrianism, there came to light, in those later times, scores of
oracles, styled "Oracula Chaldaica sive Magica," the work of
Neo-Platonists who were but very remote disciples of the Median sage. As
his name had become the very emblem of wisdom, they would cover with it
the latest inventions of their ever-deepening theosophy. Zoroaster and
Plato were treated as if they had been philosophers of the same school,
and Hierocles expounded their doctrines in the same book. Proclus
collected seventy Tetrads of Zoroaster and wrote commentaries on them;
but we need hardly say that Zoroaster commented on by Proclus was
nothing more or less than Proclus commented on by himself.
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