Mithra's name is the word for contract, and the Mihr Yasht, the tenth hymn of the Avesta, is largely about what happens to people who break one. He is described as destroying the house, village, district and country of the contract-breaker; his thousand ears and ten thousand eyes make evasion impossible. The passage that repays attention specifies that a contract made with a follower of the lie is as binding as one made with a follower of the truth — the obligation attaches to the agreement itself and not to the worthiness of the counterparty, which forecloses the standard route by which religious communities excuse themselves from promises to outsiders. Persian sources and Greek observers alike make truth-telling the defining Persian virtue; Herodotus reports that Persian boys were taught to ride, to shoot straight and to speak the truth, and that the worst disgrace was to lie, with owing a debt reckoned second because a debtor is driven to lying.