The case is different with Ormuzd’s enemy Ahriman, who evidently was known by his Persian name to the Roman worshippers of Mithras. In the Vatican can be seen a triangular marble altar dedicated by a _clarissimus_ named Agrestius who was a high-priest of Mithras, to “the god Arimanius[825],” and altars with similar inscriptions have been found at Buda-Pesth[826]. At a Mithraic chapel in York also, there was found a statue, now in the Museum of the Philosophical Society in that city, which bears an inscription to the same god Arimanius[827]. There is therefore fairly clear evidence that the Mithraists recognized Ahriman under his Persian name, and that they sacrificed to him, as Plutarch said the “magi” of his time did to the god whom he calls Hades[828], and this agrees with Herodotus’ statement that the Persians used to do the same to “the god who is said to be beneath the earth[829].” Although this gave occasion to the Christian Fathers to accuse the Mithraists of worshipping the devil, we are not thereby bound to conclude that they looked upon Arimanius as an essentially evil being. It seems more probable that they considered him, as the Greeks did their Hades or Pluto, as a chthonian or subterranean power ruling over a place of darkness and discomfort, where there were punishments indeed, but not as a deity insusceptible of propitiation by sacrifice[830], or compulsion by other means such as magic arts[831]. It has been shown elsewhere that his image in a form which fairly represents his attributes in this capacity appears with some frequency in the Mithraic chapels, where a certain amount of mystery attached to its exhibition[832]. It seems to follow from these considerations that the worshippers of Mithras attributed to their special god no inferiority to Ahriman as M. Cumont’s argument supposes, and that the only power whom they acknowledged as higher than Mithras himself was the Roman equivalent of Ormuzd, the Jupiter Optimus Maximus adored throughout the Roman Empire of their time as the head of the Pantheon[833].