Persia from the Earliest Period to the Arab

HISTORY OF PERSIA. 159
brated founder of the Manichaean heresy, by the zealous
followers of Zoroaster. The religion of which Mani
professed himself the founder, if not the inspired prophet,
appears to have been a mixture of the
Hindu doctrine of metempsychosis, of the principles
of good and evil, and of Christianity. He was fond
of claiming for himself the name of Paraclete, and
of asserting that he was the promised " Comforter."
In the re ;
gn of the second Varahran, the Roman arms
were successful under Carus, who, rejecting the offers
of the Persian ambassadors, crossed with his victorious
forces the whole of Mesopotamia, and (in this su-
perior, alike, to Trajan and Severus) captured both
Seleucia and Ctesiphon ;
nor would he have probably
stayed his hand till all Persia was at his feet, had his
career not been arrested by a thunderstorm, in or
by which he himself lost his life. Gibbon (from
of the visit of
Synesius) gives a picturesque story
Persian ambassadors to the Roman camp, and tells us
how they found the old emperor seated on the grass,
scarcely distinguishable by a richer dress from the
soldiers around him, with his supper before him of
a piece of stale bacon and a few hard peas. Taking
off a cap he wore to cover or conceal his baldness,
the Roman emperor bid them assure their master
that unless he at once acknowledged the superiority
of Rome " he would render Persia as naked of trees
as his own head was destitute of hair V
Somewhat later, in the reign of Narses, a war of
greater and more important dimensions took place,
some details of which must be given, as throwing con-
1 See also Vopiscus, ap. Hist. August. Script.