If we now look at the religious literature of the time when the worship of Mithras was coming into favour, we find a pretty general consensus of opinion that the chthonian or infernal god represented in the earlier Persian religion by this Ahriman, was a power who might be the rival of, but was not necessarily the mortal enemy of Zeus. Whether Neander be right or not in asserting that the prevailing tendency of the age was towards Dualism[902], it is certain that most civilized nations had then come to the conclusion that on this earth the bad is always mixed up with the good. Plutarch puts this clearly enough when he says that nature here below comes not from one, but from two opposed principles and contending powers, and this opinion, he tells us, is a most ancient one which has come down from expounders of myths (θεολόγοι) and legislators to poets and philosophers, and is expressed “not in words and phrases, but in mysteries and sacrifices, and has been found in many places among both Barbarians and Greeks[903].” The same idea of antagonistic powers is, of course, put in a much stronger form in the reformed Persian religion, where the incursion of Ahriman into the kingdom of Ormuzd brings upon the earth all evil in the shape of winter, prolonged drought, storms, disease, and beasts and plants hurtful to man[904]. But this does not seem to have been the view of Ahriman’s functions taken by the older Magism, whence the worship of Mithras was probably derived[905]. In Mithraism, it is not Ahriman, as in the _Bundahish_, but Mithras, the vicegerent of Ormuzd, who slays the mystic Bull, and by so doing he brings good and not evil to the earth. Nowhere do we find in the Mithraic sculptures any allusion to Ahriman as a god of evil pure and simple, or as one who is for ever opposed to the heavenly powers. We do, indeed, find in several Mithraea representations of a Titanomachia where the Titans, represented as men with serpent legs, are depicted as fleeing before a god like the Greek Zeus who strikes them with his thunderbolts[906]. But this is not more necessarily suggestive of two irreconcilable principles than the Greek story of the Titans, those sons of Earth who were persuaded by their mother to make war upon their father Uranos, who put their brother Kronos upon his throne, and who were in their turn hurled from heaven by Kronos’ son Zeus. Even if we do not accept the later myth which reconciles Zeus to his adversaries[907], the story does not go further than to say that the Titans attempted to gain heaven and were thrust back to their own proper dwelling-place, the earth.