What the Greeks narrate respecting the celebration of the birthday among the Persians, the distinction of the satraps whose provinces were best cultivated and populated, and the rewards given to those who had most children, agrees entirely with the delight in life which runs through the Avesta, and the exhortations to increase life everywhere present in that book. The Avesta always speaks of one wife only. The polygamy noticed by the Greeks was limited to the rich (the number of wives among the Persians, says Ammian, was regulated by property[388]); in consequence of the religious feeling just noticed, it prevailed, no doubt, far more extensively among the Arians of Iran than among the Indians. Yet the harems of the Indian princes were large. However numerous the harems of the Achæmenids, only one wife was the lawful wife; and she alone, as in India, bore the name of queen: only her sons could be considered heirs to the throne. The other wives greeted the queen on their knees: the queen must belong to the race of the Achæmenids, or at any rate to one of the six tribal princes.[389] The same was the case among the rest of the Persians who had several wives; one only was the house-wife. The Avesta told us above that the wife must be watched. According to Plutarch the Persians were more strict in this matter than the rest of the barbarians; they kept not only the wife but the concubines shut up, and they left the houses in covered cars only.[390] Manu's law also requires that women should be watched (IV. 263). The power of the father, and the respectful attitude of the children to the mother, correspond to the principles of family life which we have seen beyond the Indus. Yet, so far as we can see, marriage was not in Iran so close and firmly established a relation as among the Arians of India, where the wife belonged absolutely to the man, and surrendered herself in complete devotion to him; nor did the relation of children to parents in Iran experience that excellent and happy development which on the whole attended it in India, and of which we can still perceive the results. If Western writers maintain that it was the custom among the Persians to take the nearest relations in marriage, so that even the brother married the sister (of which Herodotus gives an example in Cambyses) and the son the mother after the father's death (the latter is said to have prevailed especially among the Magi)[391]--the Avesta, as we have seen, declared marriages between near relations to be good, and the history of the Achæmenids mentions marriage with sisters more than once. The more extreme assertions, especially in regard to the Magi, are to be regarded as exaggerations of the Greeks, and owed their origin to their astonishment at a custom which was more than revolting. On the relation of the sexes both before and after marriage, and other matters connected with procreation, the Vendidad supplies a number of minute regulations.[392]