For thirteen years Gregory languished in this noisome dungeon, forgotten by the world but saved from death by the ministrations of a widow who resided in the castle. The hatred or fear of the Christians, so early manifest in the new reign, was emphasised by Tiridates in a pompous edict, which admonished his subjects to beware of the resentment of the gods--of Aramazd, who gave fertility; of Anahid, the goddess defender; of Vahagn, the courageous god. The king had been a witness--so it proceeded--during his sojourn in the Empire, of the great solicitude of the Cæsars for the cult of the national divinities, to the prosperity and glory of their people. Following the example of his august instructors, he bade his subjects, nobles and peasants, to lay hands on any offender against the gods. They should bind him, hand and foot, and bring him to the gate of the palace. His lands and possessions would be bestowed upon the denouncer. The religious policy of a Decius and a Valerian was at least extended by Tiridates to the holier sphere of legitimate homicide. At the head of the Roman cavalry he rode down the Persian cohorts, and among his levies were reckoned a contingent of Huns. Of lofty stature and broad shoulders, his appearance was the signal of victory; and it became a proverb that Tiridates would destroy the dams in his impatience, and in his courage arrest the rivers in their course towards the sea. At the point where the historian I have been following was perhaps about to change his theme, and to present the opposite picture of a king and people overtaken by calamities which could only be attributed to the wrath of heaven, the priestly compiler of the Agathangelus treatise has gone to work with his scissors, and has substituted for the more straightforward account of the authority he was using one of those prolix and portentous legends, familiar to the student of hagiographical literature, which were at once the outcome of the diseased fancy of the cloister and the food with which it was sustained. The tale of the advent of the Roman virgins, of the assault upon the modesty of the fairest among them, of their martyrdom and of the transformation of the royal violator into a wild boar, wallowing in mud and eating grass, bears the imprint at every phase of a monkish invention, which was probably stolen in its essential features from the literature of Greek monasteries and adapted to the local conditions at Vagharshapat. [207] But carelessness or want of skill on the part of the compiler has happily preserved for us a fragment of the original story, from which we learn that the Armenians were afflicted by an extraordinary outbreak of diverse diseases: leprosy, palsy, dropsy, madness. [208] We are given to infer that the king himself was visited by some grave malady, and that he was cured in a miraculous manner upon the appearance and at the hands of Gregory, who had long been numbered among the dead. [209] We are told how, from