to laugh, rather than cry, at his birth; that he had been granted his first vision of Ahura Mazda at the age of thirty, as he emerged from a river; that he had finally succumbed, aged seventy-seven, to an assassin’s knife: these few scraps of his biography had been preserved by the devout. But as to when he had lived, and where, wildly divergent opinions were held: some dated Zoroaster to the dawn of time, others only to the reign of King Astyages;55 some held that he had been raised in Bactria, others on the steppes. What everyone agreed, however, was that he had been neither a Mede nor a
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