righteous and the wicked, but only the wicked will be hurt and neither will be destroyed. During the eschatological inferno, the "followers of truth" will separate themselves from the wicked and ascend a mountain. The evil king who dominates the world will be angered on hearing this, and he will resolve to encircle the mountain with his army. The righteous implore to "Jupiter", who sends them a saviour, who will descend from heaven accompanied by angels and before him a flaming sword. Hystaspes "prophesies" that the wicked king (i.e. the Roman emperor) will survive the destruction of his armies, but will lose power. It was "presumably" the prophecy of the destruction of a victorious power (i.e. the Roman empire) that caused the work to be proscribed by Rome; according to Justin Martyr (Apologia, I. 44. 12), reading the work was punishable by death. Unlike the works attributed to the other two les Mages hellénisés, the Oracles of Hystaspes was apparently based on the genuine Zoroastrian myths, and "the argument for ultimate magian composition is a strong one. [...] As prophecies they have a political context, a function, and a focus which radically distinguish them from the philosophical and encyclopedic wisdom of the other pseudepigrapha. " Although "[p]rophecies of woes and iniquities in the last age are alien to orthodox Zoroastrianism", there was probably a growth of Zoroastrian literature in the late fourth-early third centuries denouncing the evils of the Hellenistic age, and offering hope of the coming kingdom of Ahura Mazda. The Greco-Roman obsession with Zoroaster as the "inventor" of astrology also influenced the image of Hystaspes. So for example in Lydus' On the months (de Mensibus II. 4), which credits "the Chaldeans in the circle of Zoroaster and Hystaspes and the Egyptians" for the creation of the seven-day week after the number of planets. The sixth century Agathias was more ambivalent, observing that it wasn't clear to him whether the name of Zoroaster's patron referred to the father of Darius or to another Hystaspes (ii. 24). As with the medieval Zoroastrian chronology that identifies Vishtaspa with "Ardashir" (see above), Ammianus' identification was once considered to substantiate the "traditional date" of Zoroaster. Notes References Sources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Kayanians Shahnameh characters History of Zoroastrianism