It is instructive to place the masculine ideal of Persia alongside the feminine ideal of Buddhist India and note the different effects of these strongly contrasted standards of goodness upon the races accepting them as the measure and rule of rational conduct and duty. The Buddhist ideal, as we have seen, is made up largely of the gentler, contemplative, passive virtues, the virtues of the recluse and the ascetic. Its issue in character is quietism. In opposition to this, the Zoroastrian ideal inspires sturdy, virile, active virtues, the moral qualities of the reformer, of the toiler and the fighter. The natural effect of the ideal was to confirm in the Persians all the seemingly original strong ethical qualities of the Iranic race. [Sidenote: Persian veneration for the truth] We have seen that one of the chief requirements of the Zoroastrian code was truthfulness; man must be veracious even as Ahura Mazda is veracious. Various testimonies assure us that in respect to this virtue there was in ancient Persia a commendable conformity of practice to theory. The feeling for the beauty and nobility of truthfulness was much more fully developed among the Persians than among any other people of ancient or modern times. They were a truth-revering and a truth-speaking people. Lying was the great crime. To lie, to deceive, was to be a follower of Ahriman, the god of lies and deceit. Hence lying was regarded as a species of treason against Ahura Mazda. “The most disgraceful thing in the world,” affirms Herodotus, in his account of the Persians, “they think, is to tell a lie; the next worse is to owe a debt, because, among other reasons, the debtor is obliged to tell lies.”[327] In his report of the Persian system of education he says, “The boys are taught to ride, to draw the bow, and to speak the truth.”[328] I was not wicked, nor a liar, is the substance and purport of many a record of the ancient kings. Rawlinson adduces this as evidence of their veneration for truthfulness. “The special estimation in which truth was held among the Persians,” he says, “is evidenced in a remarkable manner by the inscriptions of Darius, where _lying_ is taken as the representative of all evil. It is the great calamity of the usurpation of the pseudo-Smerdis, that ‘then the _lie_ became abounding in the land.’ ‘The Evil One (?) invented _lies_ that they should deceive the state.’ Darius is favored by Ormazd, ‘because he was not a heretic, nor a _liar_, nor a tyrant.’ His successors are exhorted not to cherish, but to cast into utter perdition, ‘the man who may be a _liar_, or who may be an evildoer.’ His great fear is lest it may be thought that any part of the record which he has set up has been ‘_falsely_ related,’ and he even abstains from relating certain events of his reign ‘lest to him who may hereafter peruse the tablet, the many deeds that have been done by him may seem to be ‘_falsely_ recorded.’”[329]