The empire of Iran.
The only great state with which the Roman empire bordered was the
empire of Iran,1 based upon that nationality which was best known
in antiquity, as it is in the present day, under the name of the
Persians, consolidated politically by the old Persian royal family of
the Achaemenids and its first great-king Cyrus, united religiously by
the faith of Ahura Mazda and of Mithra. No one of the ancient peoples
of culture solved the problem of national union equally early and with
equal completeness. The Iranian tribes reached on the south as far
as the Indian Ocean, on the north as far as the Caspian Sea; on the
north–east the steppes of inland Asia formed the constant battle-ground
between the settled Persians and the nomadic tribes of Turan. On the
east mighty mountains formed a boundary separating them from the
Indians. In western Asia three great nations early encountered one
another, each pushing forward on its own account: the Hellenes, who
from Europe grasped at the coast of Asia Minor, the Aramaic peoples,
who from Arabia and Syria advanced in a northern and north–eastern
direction and substantially filled the valley of the Euphrates, and
lastly, the races of Iran, not merely inhabiting the country as far
as the Tigris, but even penetrating to Armenia and Cappadocia, while
primitive inhabitants of other types in these far–extending regions
succumbed under these leading powers and disappeared. In the epoch
of the Achaemenids, the culminating point of the glory of Iran, the
Iranian rule went far beyond this wide domain proper to the stock on
all sides, but especially towards the west. Apart from the times, when
Turan gained the upper hand over Iran and the Seljuks and Mongols ruled
over the Persians, foreign rule, strictly so called, has only been
established over the flower of the Iranian stocks twice, by Alexander
the Great and his immediate successors and by the Arabian Abbasids,
and on both occasions only for a comparatively short time; the
eastern regions—in the former case the Parthians, in the latter the
inhabitants of the ancient Bactria—not merely threw off again the yoke
of the foreigner, but dislodged him also from the cognate west.
The rule of the Parthians.When the Romans in the last age of the republic came into immediate
contact with Iran as a consequence of the occupation of Syria, they
found in existence the Persian empire regenerated by the Parthians. We
have formerly had to make mention of this state on several occasions;
this is the place to gather together the little that can be ascertained
regarding the peculiar character of the empire, which so often
exercised a decisive influence on the destinies of the neighbouring
state. Certainly to most questions, which the historical inquirer
has here to put, tradition has no answer. The Occidentals give but
occasional notices, which may in their isolation easily mislead us,
concerning the internal condition of their Parthian neighbours and
foes; and, if the Orientals in general have hardly understood how to
fix and to preserve historical tradition, this holds doubly true of
the period of the Arsacids, seeing that it was by the later Iranians
regarded, together with the preceding foreign rule of the Seleucids, as
an unwarranted usurpation between the periods of the old and the new
Persian rule—the Achaemenids and the Sassanids; this period of five
hundred years is, so to speak, eliminated by way of correction2 from
the history of Iran, and is as if nonexistent.
The Parthians Scythian.The standpoint, thus occupied by the court-historiographers of the
Sassanid dynasty, is more the legitimist–dynastic one of the Persian
nobility than that of Iranian nationality. No doubt the authors of the
first imperial epoch describe the language of the Parthians, whose home
corresponds nearly to the modern Chorasan, as intermediate between
the Median and the Scythian, that is, as an impure Iranian dialect;
accordingly they were regarded as immigrants from the land of the
Scythians, and in this sense their name is interpreted as “fugitive
people,” while the founder of the dynasty, Arsaces, is declared by
some indeed to have been a Bactrian, but by others a Scythian from the
Maeotis. The fact that their princes did not take up their residence
in Seleucia on the Tigris, but pitched their winter quarters in the
immediate neighbourhood at Ctesiphon, is traced to their wish not
to quarter Scythian troops in the rich mercantile city. Much in the
manners and arrangements of the Parthians is alien from Iranian habits,
and reminds us of the customs of nomadic life; they transact business
and eat on horseback, and the free man never goes on foot. It cannot
well be doubted that the Parthians, whose name alone of all the tribes
of this region is not named in the sacred books of the Persians, stand
aloof from Iran proper, in which the Achaemenids and the Magians are at
home. The antagonism of this Iran to the ruling family springing from
an uncivilised and half foreign district, and to its immediate
followers—this antagonism, which the Roman authors not unwillingly
took over from their Persian neighbours—certainly subsisted and
fermented throughout the whole rule of the Arsacids, till it at length
brought about their fall. But the rule of the Arsacids may not on that
account be conceived as a foreign rule. No privileges were conceded
to the Parthian stock and to the Parthian province. It is true that
the Parthian town Hecatompylos is named as residence of the Arsacids;
but they chiefly sojourned in summer at Ecbatana (Hamadan), or else
at Rhagae like the Achaemenids, in winter, as already stated, in the
camp-town of Ctesiphon, or else in Babylon on the extreme western
border of the empire. The hereditary burial-place continued in the
Parthian town Nisaea; but subsequently Arbela in Assyria served for
that purpose more frequently. The poor and remote native province of
the Parthians was in no way suited for the luxurious court-life, and
the important relations to the West, especially of the later Arsacids.
The chief country continued even now to be Media, just as under the
Achaemenids. Although the Arsacids might be of Scythian descent, not so
much depended on what they were as on what they desired to be; and they
regarded and professed themselves throughout as the successors of Cyrus
and of Darius. As the seven Persian family-princes had set aside the
false Achaemenid, and had restored the legitimate rule by the elevation
of Darius, so needs must other seven have overthrown the Macedonian
foreign yoke and placed king Arsaces on the throne. With this patriotic
fiction must further be connected the circumstance that a Bactrian
nativity instead of a Scythian was assigned to the first Arsaces. The
dress and the etiquette at the court of the Arsacids were those of the
Persian court; after king Mithradates I. had extended his rule to the
Indus and Tigris, the dynasty exchanged the simple title of king for
that of king of kings which the Achaemenids had borne, and the pointed
Scythian cap for the high tiara adorned with pearls; on the coins the
king carries the bow like Darius. The aristocracy, too, that came into
the land with the Arsacids and doubtless became in many ways mixed with
the old indigenous one, adopted Persian manners and dress, mostly also
Persian names; of the Parthian army which fought with Crassus it is
said that the soldiers still wore their hair rough after the Scythian
fashion, but the general appeared after the Median manner with the hair
parted in the middle and with painted face.
The regal office.The political organisation, as it was established by the first
Mithradates, was accordingly in substance that of the Achaemenids. The
family of the founder of the dynasty is invested with all the lustre
and with all the consecration of ancestral and divinely-ordained rule;
his name is transferred de jure to each of his successors and divine
honour is assigned to him; his successors are therefore called sons of
God,3 and besides brothers of the sun-god and the moon-goddess, like
the Shah of Persia still at the present day; to shed the blood of a
member of the royal family even by mere accident is a sacrilege—all
of them regulations, which with few abatements recur among the Roman
Caesars, and are perhaps borrowed in part from those of the older
great-monarchy.
Megistanes.Although the royal dignity was thus firmly attached to the family,
there yet subsisted a certain choice as to the king. As the new ruler
had to belong as well to the college of the “kinsmen of the royal
house” as to the council of priests, in order to be able to ascend the
throne, an act must have taken place, whereby, it may be presumed,
these same colleges themselves acknowledged the new ruler.4 By the
“kinsmen” are doubtless to be understood not merely the Arsacids
themselves, but the “seven houses” of the Achaemenid organisation,
princely families, to which according to that arrangement equality
of rank and free access to the great-king belonged, and which must
have had similar privileges under the Arsacids.5 These families
were at the same time holders of hereditary crown offices,6 e.g.
the Surên—the name is like the name Arsaces, a designation at once
of person and of office—the second family after the royal house, as
crown-masters, placed on each occasion the tiara on the head of the
new Arsaces. But as the Arsacids themselves belonged to the Parthian
province, so the Surên were at home in Sacastane (Seistân) and perhaps
Sacae, thus Scythians; the Carên likewise descended from western Media,
while the highest aristocracy under the Achaemenids was purely Persian.
Satraps.The administration lay in the hands of the under-kings or satraps;
according to the Roman geographers of Vespasian’s time the state of the
Parthians consisted of eighteen “kingdoms.” Some of these satrapies
were appanages of a second son of the ruling house; in particular the
two north–western provinces, the Atropatenian Media (Aderbijan) and
Armenia, so far as it was in the power of the Parthians, appear to
have been entrusted for administration to the prince standing next
to the ruler for the time.7 We may add that prominent among the
satraps were the king of the province of Elymais or of Susa, to whom
was conceded a specially powerful and exceptional position, and next
to him the king of Persis, the ancestral land of the Achaemenids.
The form of administration, if not exclusive, yet preponderant and
conditioning the title, was in the Parthian empire—otherwise than in
the case of the Caesars—that of vassal-kingdom, so that the satraps
entered by hereditary right, but were subject to confirmation by the
great-king.8 To all appearance this continued downwards, so that
smaller dynasts and family chiefs stood in the same relation to the
under-kings as the latter occupied to the great-king.9 Thus the
office of great-king among the Parthians was limited to the utmost
in favour of the high aristocracy by the accompanying subdivision of
the hereditary administration of the land. With this it is quite in
keeping, that the mass of the population consisted of persons half or
wholly non-free,10 and emancipation was not allowable. In the army
which fought against Antonius there are said to have been only 400 free
among 50,000. The chief among the vassals of Orodes, who as his general
defeated Crassus, marched to the field with a harem of 200 wives and
a baggage train of 1000 sumpter-camels; he himself furnished to the
army 10,000 horsemen from his clients and slaves. The Parthians never
had a standing army, but at all times the waging of war here was left
to depend on the general levy of the vassal-princes and of the vassals
subordinate to these, as well as of the great mass of the non-free over
whom these bore sway.
The Greek towns of the Parthian empire.Certainly the urban element was not quite wanting in the political
organisation of the Parthian empire. It is true that the larger
townships, which arose out of the distinctive development of the
East, were not urban commonwealths, as indeed even the Parthian royal
residence, Ctesiphon, is named in contrast to the neighbouring Greek
foundation of Seleucia a village; they had no presidents of their
own and no common council, and the administration lay here, as in
the country districts, exclusively with the royal officials. But
a portion—comparatively small, it is true—of the foundations of
the Greek rulers had come under Parthian rule. In the provinces of
Mesopotamia and Babylonia by nationality Aramaean the Greek town-system
had gained a firm footing under Alexander and his successors.
Mesopotamia was covered with Greek commonwealths; and in Babylonia,
the successor of the ancient Babylon, the precursor of Bagdad, and
for a time the residence of the Greek kings of Asia—Seleucia on the
Tigris—had by its favourable commercial position and its manufactures
risen to be the first mercantile city beyond the Roman bounds, with
more, it is alleged, than half a million of inhabitants. Its free
Hellenic organisation, on which beyond doubt its prosperity above all
depended, was not touched even by the Parthian rulers in their own
interest, and the city preserved not merely its town council of 300
elected members, but also the Greek language and Greek habits amidst
the non-Greek East. It is true that the Hellenes in these towns formed
only the dominant element; alongside of them lived numerous Syrians,
and, as a third constituent, there were associated with these the not
much less numerous Jews, so that the population of these Greek towns
of the Parthian empire, just like that of Alexandria, was composed of
three separate nationalities standing side by side. Between these, just
as in Alexandria, conflicts not seldom occurred, as e.g. at the time
of the reign of Gaius under the eyes of the Parthian government the
three nations came to blows, and ultimately the Jews were driven out of
the larger towns.
In so far the Parthian empire was the genuine counterpart to the Roman.
As in the one the Oriental viceroyship is an exceptional occurrence,
so in the other is the Greek city; the general Oriental aristocratic
character of the Parthian government is as little injuriously affected
by the Greek mercantile towns on the west coast as is the civic
organisation of the Roman state by the vassal kingdoms of Cappadocia
and Armenia. While in the state of the Caesars the Romano-Greek urban
commonwealth spreads more and more, and gradually becomes the general
form of administration, the foundation of towns—the true mark of
Helleno-Roman civilisation, which embraces the Greek mercantile cities
and the military colonies of Rome as well as the grand settlements
of Alexander and the Alexandrids—suddenly breaks off with the
emergence of the Parthian government in the East, and even the existing
Greek cities of the Parthian empire wane in the further course of
development. There, as here, the rule more and more prevails over the
exceptions.
Religion.The religion of Iran with its worship—approximating to monotheism—of
the “highest of the gods, who has made heaven and earth and men
and for these everything good,” with its absence of images and its
spirituality, with its stern morality and truthfulness, with its
influence upon practical activity and energetic conduct of life,
laid hold of the minds of its confessors in quite another and deeper
way than the religions of the West ever could; and, while neither
Zeus nor Jupiter maintained their ground in presence of a developed
civilisation, the faith among the Parsees remained ever young till it
succumbed to another gospel—that of the confessors of Mohammed—or
at any rate retreated before it to India. It is not our task to set
forth how the old Mazda-faith, which the Achaemenids professed, and
the origin of which falls in prehistoric time, was related to that
which the sacred books of the Persians having their origin probably
under the later Achaemenids—the Avestâ—announce as the doctrine
of the wise Zarathustra; for the epoch, when the West is placed in
contact with the East, only the later form of religion comes under
consideration. Perhaps the Avestâ took first shape in the east of Iran,
in Bactria, but it spread thence to Media and from there it exercised
its influence on the West. But the national religion and the national
state were bound up with one another in Iran more closely than even
among the Celts. It has already been noticed that the legitimate
kingship in Iran was at the same time a religious institution, that
the supreme ruler of the land was conceived as specially called to the
government by the supreme deity of the land, and even in some measure
divine. On the coins of a national type there appears regularly the
great fire-altar, and hovering over it the winged god Ahura Mazda,
alongside of him in lesser size, and in an attitude of prayer, the
king, and over-against the king the imperial banner. In keeping with
this, the ascendency of the nobility in the Parthian empire goes hand
in hand with the privileged position of the clergy. The priests of
this religion, the Magians, appear already in the documents of the
Achaemenids and in the narratives of Herodotus, and have, probably
with right, always been regarded by the Occidentals as a national
Persian institution. The priesthood was hereditary, and at least in
Media, presumably also in other provinces, the collective body of the
priests was accounted, somewhat like the Levites in the later Israel,
as a separate portion of the people. Even under the rule of the Greeks
the old religion of the state and the national priesthood maintained
their place. When the first Seleucus wished to found the new capital
of his empire, the already mentioned Seleucia, he caused the Magians
to fix day and hour for it, and it was only after those Persians, not
very willingly, had cast the desired horoscope, that the king and his
army, in accordance with their indication, accomplished the solemn
laying of the foundation-stone of the new Greek city. Thus by his side
stood the priests of Ahura Mazda as counsellors, and they, not those
of the Hellenic Olympus, were interrogated in public affairs, so far
as these concerned divine things. As a matter of course this was all
the more the case with the Arsacids. We have already observed that in
the election of king, along with the council of the nobility, that of
the priests took part. King Tiridates of Armenia, of the house of the
Arsacids, came to Rome attended by a train of Magians, and travelled
and took food according to their directions, even in company with
the emperor Nero, who gladly allowed the foreign wise men to preach
their doctrine and to conjure spirits for him. From this certainly
it does not follow that the priestly order as such exercised an
essentially determining influence on the management of the state; but
the Mazda-faith was by no means re-established only by the Sassanids;
on the contrary, amidst all change of dynasties, and amidst all its own
development, the religion of the land of Iran remained in its outline
the same.
Language.The language of the land in the Parthian empire was the native language
of Iran. There is no trace pointing to any foreign language having
ever been in public use under the Arsacids. On the contrary, it is the
Iranian land-dialect of Babylonia and the writing peculiar to this—as
both were developed before, and in, the Arsacid period under the
influence of the language and writing of the Aramaean neighbours—which
are covered by the appellation Pahlavi, i.e. Parthava, and thereby
designated as those of the empire of the Parthians. Even Greek did not
become an official language there. None of the rulers bear even as
a second name a Greek one; and, had the Arsacids made this language
their own, we should not have failed to find Greek inscriptions in
their empire. Certainly their coins show down to the time of Claudius
exclusively,11 and predominantly even later, Greek legends, as they
show also no trace of the religion of the land, and in standard attach
themselves to the local coinage of the Roman east provinces, while
they retain the division of the year as well as the reckoning by years
just as these had been regulated under the Seleucids. But this must
rather be taken as meaning that the great-kings themselves did not
coin at all,12 and these coins, which in fact served essentially for
intercourse with the western neighbours, were struck by the Greek towns
of the empire in the name of the sovereign. The designation of the king
on these coins as “friend of Greeks” (φιλέλλην), which already meets us
early,13 and is constant from the time of Mithradates I., i.e. from
the extension of the state as far as the Tigris, has a meaning only if
it is the Parthian Greek city that is speaking on these coins. It may
be conjectured that a secondary position was conceded in public use to
the Greek language in the Parthian empire alongside of the Persian,
similar to that which it possessed in the Roman state by the side of
Latin. The gradual disappearance of Hellenism under the Parthian rule
may be clearly followed on these urban coins, as well in the emergence
of the native language alongside and instead of the Greek, as in the
debasement of language which becomes more and more prominent.14
Extent of the Parthian empire.As to extent the kingdom of the Arsacids was far inferior, not merely
to the great state of the Achaemenids, but also to that of their
immediate predecessors, the state of the Seleucids. Of its original
territory they possessed only the larger eastern half; after the battle
with the Parthians, in which king Antiochus Sidetes, a contemporary of
the Gracchi, fell, the Syrian kings did not again seriously attempt to
assert their rule beyond the Euphrates; but the country on this side of
the Euphrates remained with the Occidentals.
Arabia.Both coasts of the Persian Gulf, even the Arabian, were in possession
of the Parthians, and the navigation was thus completely in their
power; the rest of the Arabian peninsula did not obey either the
Parthians or the Romans ruling over Egypt.
The region of the Indus.To describe the struggle of the nations for the possession of the Indus
valley, and of the regions bordering on it, to the west and east, so
far as the wholly fragmentary tradition allows of a description at all,
is not the task of our survey; but the main lines of this struggle,
which constantly goes by the side of that waged for the Euphrates
valley, may the less be omitted in this connection, as our tradition
does not allow us to follow out in detail the circumstances of Iran to
the east in their influence on western relations, and it hence appears
necessary at least to realise for ourselves its outlines. Soon after
the death of Alexander the Great, the boundary between Iran and India
was drawn by the agreement of his marshal and coheir Seleucus with
Chandragupta, or in Greek Sandracottos, the founder of the empire of
the Indians. According to this the latter ruled not merely over the
Ganges-valley in all its extent and the whole north-west of India, but
in the region of the Indus, at least over a part of the upland valley
of what is now Cabul, further over Arachosia or Afghanistan, presumably
also over the waste and arid Gedrosia, the modern Beloochistan, as well
as over the delta and mouths of the Indus; the documents hewn in stone,
by which Chandragupta’s grandson, the orthodox Buddha-worshipper Asoka,
inculcated the general moral law on his subjects, have been found, as
in all this widely extended domain, so particularly in the region of
Peshawur.15 The Hindoo Koosh, the Parapanisus of the ancients, and
its continuation to the east and west, thus separated with their mighty
chain—pierced only by few passes—Iran and India. But this agreement
did not long subsist.
Bactro-Indian empire.In the earlier period of the Diadochi the Greek rulers of the kingdom
of Bactra, which took a mighty impulse on its breaking off from the
Seleucid state, crossed the frontier-mountains, brought a considerable
part of the Indus valley into their power, and perhaps established
themselves still farther inland in Hindostan, so that the centre of
gravity of this empire was shifted from western Iran to eastern India,
and Hellenism gave way to an Indian type. The kings of this empire were
called Indian, and bore subsequently non-Greek names; on the coins the
native Indian language and writing appear by the side, and instead, of
the Greek, just as in the Partho-Persian coinage the Pahlavi comes up
alongside of the Greek.
Indo-Scythians.Then one nation more entered into the arena; the Scythians, or, as
they were called in Iran and India, the Sacae, broke off from their
ancestral settlements on the Jaxartes and crossed the mountains
southward. The Bactrian province came at least in great part into their
power, and at some time in the last century of the Roman republic
they must have established themselves in the modern Afghanistan and
Beloochistan. On that account in the early imperial period the coast
on both sides of the mouth of the Indus about Minnagara is called
Scythian, and in the interior the district of the Drangae lying to
the west of Candahar bears subsequently the name “land of the Sacae,”
Sacastane, the modern Seistân. This immigration of the Scythians into
the provinces of the Bactro-Indian empire doubtless restricted and
injured it, somewhat as the Roman empire was affected by the first
migrations of the Germans, but did not destroy it; under Vespasian
there still subsisted a probably independent Bactrian state.16
Partho-Indian empire.Under the Julian and Claudian emperors the Parthians seem to have
been the leading power at the mouth of the Indus. A trustworthy
reporter from the Augustan age specifies that same Sacastane among
the Parthian provinces, and calls the king of the Saco-Scythians an
under-king of the Arsacids; as the last Parthian province towards
the east he designates Arachosia with the capital Alexandropolis,
probably Candahar. Soon afterwards, indeed, in Vespasian’s time,
Parthian princes rule in Minnagara. This, however, was for the empire
on the river Indus more a change of dynasty than an annexation proper
to the state of Ctesiphon. The Parthian prince Gondopharus, whom the
Christian legend connects with St. Thomas, the apostle of the Parthians
and Indians,17 certainly ruled from Minnagara as far up as Peshawur
and Cabul; but these rulers use, like their superiors in the Indian
empire, the Indian language alongside of the Greek, and name themselves
great-kings like those of Ctesiphon; they appear to have been not the
less rivals to the Arsacids, on account of their belonging to the same
princely house.18
Empire of the Sacae on the Indus.This Parthian dynasty was then followed in the Indian empire after a
short interval by what is designated in Indian tradition as that of the
Sacae or that of king Kanerku or Kanishka, which begins with 78 A.D.
and subsisted at least down to the third century.19 They belong to
the Scythians, whose immigration was formerly mentioned, and on their
coins the Scythian language takes the place of the Indian.20 Thus in
the region of the Indus, after the Indians and the Hellenes, Parthians
and Scythians bore sway in the first three centuries of our era. But
even under the foreign dynasties a national Indian type of state was
established and held its ground, and opposed a not less permanent
barrier to the development of the Partho-Persian power in the East than
did the Roman state in the West.
Asiatic Scythians.Towards the north and north-east Iran bordered with Turan. As the
western and southern shores of the Caspian Sea and the upper valleys
of the Oxus and Jaxartes offered an appropriate seat for civilisation,
so the steppe round the Sea of Aral and the extensive plain stretching
behind it belonged by right to the roving peoples. There were among
those nomads probably individual tribes kindred to the Iranians;
but these have no part in the Iranian civilisation, and it is this
element which determines the historical position of Iran, that it forms
the bulwark of the peoples of culture against those hordes, who, as
Scythians, Sacae, Huns, Mongols, Turks, appear to have no other destiny
in the world’s history than that of annihilating culture. Bactria, the
great bulwark of Iran against Turan, sufficed for this defence during a
considerable time under its Greek rulers in the epoch after Alexander;
but we have already mentioned that subsequently, although it did not
perish, it no longer availed to prevent the Scythians from pressing
onward towards the south. With the decay of the Bactrian power the same
task was transferred to the Arsacids. How far they responded to it it
is difficult to say. In the first period of the empire the great-kings
of Ctesiphon seem to have driven back the Scythians or to have brought
them into subjection in the northern provinces as well as to the south
of the Hindoo Koosh; they wrested from them again a portion of the
Bactrian territory. But it is doubtful what limits were here fixed, and
whether they were at all lasting. There is frequent mention of wars
between the Parthians and Scythians. The latter, here in the first
instance dwellers around the Sea of Aral, the forefathers of the modern
Turkomans, are regularly the aggressors, inasmuch as they partly by
crossing over the Caspian Sea invade the valleys of the Cyrus and the
Araxes, partly issuing from their steppes pillage the rich plains of
Hyrcania and the fertile oasis of Margiana (Merv). The border-regions
agreed to buy off the levy of arbitrary contributions by tributes,
which were regularly called up at fixed terms, just as at present the
Bedouins of Syria levy the kubba from the farmers there. The Parthian
government thus, at least in the earlier imperial period, was as little
able as the Turkish government of the present day to secure here to the
peaceful subject the fruits of his toil, and to establish a durable
state of peace on the frontier. Even for the imperial power itself
these border-troubles remained an open sore; often they exercised an
influence on the wars of succession of the Arsacids as well as on their
disputes with Rome.
The Romano-Parthian frontier regions.We have set forth in its due place how the attitude of the Parthians
to the Romans came to be shaped and the boundaries of the two great
powers to be established. While the Armenians had been rivals of
the Parthians, and the kingdom on the Araxes set itself to play the
part of great-king in anterior Asia, the Parthians had in general
maintained friendly relations with the Romans as the foes of their
foes. But, after the overthrow of Mithradates and Tigranes, the
Romans had, particularly through the arrangements made by Pompeius,
taken up a position which was hardly compatible with serious and
lasting peace between the two states. In the south Syria was now under
direct Roman rule, and the Roman legions kept guard on the margin
of the great desert which separates the lands of the coast from the
valley of the Euphrates. In the north Cappadocia and Armenia were
vassal-principalities of Rome. The tribes bordering on Armenia to the
northward, the Colchians, Iberians, Albanians, were thereby necessarily
withdrawn from Parthian influence, and were, at least according to the
Roman way of apprehending the matter, likewise Roman dependencies.
The lesser Media or Atropatene (Aderbijân), adjoining Armenia to the
south-east, and separated from it by the Araxes, had maintained,
despite the Seleucidae, its ancient native dynasty reaching back to
the time of the Achaemenids, and had even asserted its independence;
under the Arsacids the king of this region appears, according to
circumstances, as a vassal of the Parthians or as independent of
these by leaning on the Romans. The determining influence of Rome
consequently reached as far as the Caucasus and the western shore of
the Caspian Sea. This involved an overlapping of the limits indicated
by the national relations. The Hellenic nationality had doubtless so
far gained a footing on the south coast of the Black Sea and in the
interior of Cappadocia and Commagene, that here the Roman ascendency
found in it a base of support; but Armenia, even under the long years
of Roman rule, remained always a non-Greek land, knit to the Parthian
state with indestructible ties, by community of language and of faith,
the numerous intermarriages of people of rank, and similarity of dress
and of armour.21 The Roman levy and the Roman taxation were never
extended to Armenia; at most the land defrayed the raising and the
maintenance of its own troops, and the provisioning of the Roman troops
stationed there. The Armenian merchants formed the channel for the
exchange of goods over the Caucasus with Scythia, over the Caspian Sea
with east Asia and China, down the Tigris with Babylonia and India,
towards the west with Cappadocia; nothing would have been more natural
than to include the politically dependent land in the domain of Roman
tribute and customs; yet this step was never taken.
The incongruity between the national and the political connections of
Armenia forms an essential element in the conflict—prolonged through
the whole imperial period—with its eastern neighbour. It was discerned
doubtless on the Roman side that annexation beyond the Euphrates was an
encroachment on the family-domain of Oriental nationality, and was not
any increase proper of power for Rome. But the ground or, if the phrase
be preferred, the excuse for the continuance of such encroachment lay
in the fact that the subsistence side by side of great states with
equal rights was incompatible with the system of Roman policy, we may
even say with the policy of antiquity in general. The Roman empire knew
as limit, in the strict sense, only the sea or a land-district unarmed.
To the weaker but yet warlike commonwealth of the Parthians the Romans
always grudged a position of power, and took away from it what these
in their turn could not forego; and therefore the relation between
Rome and Iran through the whole imperial period was one of perpetual
feud, interrupted only by armistices, concerning the left bank of the
Euphrates.
The Parthians during the civil wars.In the treaties concluded with the Parthians by Lucullus (iv. 71) iv.
67. and Pompeius (iv. 127) iv. 122. the Euphrates was recognised
as the boundary, and so Mesopotamia was ceded to them. But this did
not prevent the Romans from receiving the rulers of Edessa among their
clients, and from laying claim to a great part of northern Mesopotamia
at least for their indirect rule, apparently by extending the limits
of Armenia towards the south (iv. 146)iv. 140.. On that account,
after some delay, the Parthian government began the war against the
Romans, in the form of declaring it against the Armenians. The answer
to this was the campaign of Crassus, and, after the defeat at Carrhae
(iv. 351 f.)iv. 335 f., the bringing back of Armenia under Parthian
power; we may add, the resumption of their claims on the western half
of the Seleucid state, the carrying out of which, it is true, proved
at that time unsuccessful (iv. 356)iv. 339.. During the whole
twenty years of civil war, in which the Roman republic perished and
ultimately the principate was established, the state of war between
the Romans and Parthians continued, and not seldom the two struggles
became intermixed. Pompeius had, before the decisive battle, attempted
to gain king Orodes as ally; but, when the latter demanded the cession
of Syria, Pompeius could not prevail on himself to deliver up the
province which he had personally made Roman. After the catastrophe he
had nevertheless resolved to do so; but accidents directed his flight
not to Syria, but to Egypt, where he met his end (iv. 446)iv. 424..
The Parthians appeared on the point of once more breaking into Syria;
and the later leaders of the republicans did not disdain the aid of the
public foe. Even in Caesar’s lifetime Caecilius Bassus, when he raised
the banner of revolt in Syria, had at once called in the Parthians.
They had followed this call; Pacorus, the son of Orodes, had defeated
Caesar’s lieutenant and liberated the troops of Bassus besieged by
him in Apamea (709)44 B.C.. For this reason, as well as in order to
take revenge for Carrhae, Caesar had resolved to go in the next spring
personally to Syria and to cross the Euphrates; but his death prevented
the execution of this plan. When Cassius thereupon took arms in Syria,
he entered into relations with the Parthian king; and in the decisive
battle at Philippi (712)42 B.C. Parthian mounted archers joined
in fighting for the freedom of Rome. When the republicans succumbed,
the great-king, in the first instance, maintained a quiet attitude;
and Antonius, while designing probably to execute the plans of the
dictator, had at first enough to do with the settlement of the East.
The collision could not fail to take place; the assailant this time was
the Parthian king.
The Parthians in Syria and Asia Minor.In 713 41 B.C. when Caesar the son fought in Italy with the generals
and the wife of Antonius, and the latter tarried inactive in Egypt
beside queen Cleopatra, Orodes responded to the pressure of a Roman
living with him in exile, Quintus Labienus, and sent the latter, a son
of the dictator’s embittered opponent Titus Labienus, and formerly
an officer in the army of Brutus, as well as (713) 44 B.C. his
son Pacorus with a strong army over the frontier. The governor of
Syria, Decidius Saxa, succumbed to the unexpected attack; the Roman
garrisons, formed in great part of old soldiers of the republican
army, placed themselves under the command of their former officer;
Apamea and Antioch, and generally all the towns of Syria, except
the island-town of Tyre which could not be subdued without a fleet,
submitted; on the flight to Cilicia Saxa, in order not to be taken
prisoner, put himself to death. After the occupation of Syria Pacorus
turned against Palestine, Labienus towards the province of Asia; here
too the cities far and wide submitted or were forcibly vanquished, with
the exception of the Carian Stratonicea. Antonius, whose attention
was claimed by the Italian complications, sent no succour to his
governors, and for almost two years (from the end of 71341 B.C. to
the spring of 71539 B.C.) Syria and a great part of Asia Minor were
commanded by the Parthian generals and by the republican imperator
Labienus—Parthicus, as he called himself with shameless irony, not
the Roman who vanquished the Parthians, but the Roman who with Parthian
aid vanquished his countrymen.
Driven out by Ventidius Bassus.Only after the threatened rupture between the two holders of power
was averted, Antonius sent a new army under the conduct of Publius
Ventidius Bassus, to whom he entrusted the command in the provinces of
Asia and Syria. The able general encountered in Asia Labienus alone
with his Roman troops, and rapidly drove him out of the province. At
the boundary between Asia and Cilicia, in the passes of the Taurus, a
division of Parthians wished to rally their fugitive allies; but they
too were beaten before they could unite with Labienus, and thereupon
the latter was caught on his flight in Cilicia and put to death. With
like good fortune Ventidius gained by fighting the passes of the Amanus
on the border of Cilicia and Syria; here Pharnapates, the best of the
Parthian generals, fell (715)39 B.C.. Thus was Syria delivered from
the enemy. Certainly in the following year Pacorus once more crossed
the Euphrates; but only to meet destruction with the greatest part of
his army in a decisive engagement at Gindarus, north-east of Antioch
(9th June 716)38 B.C.. It was a victory which counterbalanced in
some measure the day of Carrhae, and one of permanent effect; for long
the Parthians did not again show their troops on the Roman bank of the
Euphrates.
Position of Antonius.If it was in the interest of Rome to extend her conquests towards the
East, and to enter on the inheritance of Alexander the Great there in
all its extent, the circumstances were never more favourable for doing
so than in the year 71638 B.C.. The relations of the two rulers to
each other had become re-established seasonably for that purpose, and
even Caesar at that time had probably a sincere wish for an earnest
and successful conduct of the war by his co-ruler and brother-in-law.
The disaster of Gindarus had called forth a severe dynastic crisis
among the Parthians. King Orodes, deeply agitated by the death of
his eldest and ablest son, resigned the government in favour of his
second son Phraates. The latter, in order the better to secure for
himself the throne, exercised a reign of terror, to which his numerous
brothers and his old father himself, as well as a number of the high
nobles of the kingdom, fell victims; others of them left the country
and sought protection with the Romans, among them the powerful and
respected Monaeses. Never had Rome in the East an army of equal numbers
and excellence as at this time: Antonius was able to lead over the
Euphrates no fewer than 16 legions, about 70,000 Roman infantry, about
40,000 auxiliaries, 10,000 Spanish and Gallic, and 6000 Armenian
horsemen; at least half of them were veteran troops brought up from the
West, all ready to follow anywhere their beloved and honoured leader,
the victor of Philippi, and to crown the brilliant victories, which had
been already achieved not by but for him over the Parthians, with still
greater successes under his own leadership.
His aims.In reality Antonius had in view the erection of an Asiatic
great-kingdom after the model of that of Alexander. As Crassus before
his invasion had announced that he would extend the Roman rule as
far as Bactria and India, so Antonius named the first son, whom the
Egyptian queen bore to him, by the name of Alexander. He appears to
have directly intended, on the one hand, to bring—excluding the
completely Hellenised provinces of Bithynia and Asia—the whole
imperial territory in the East, so far as it was not already under
dependent petty princes, into this form; and on the other hand, to
make all the regions of the East once occupied by Occidentals subject
to himself in the form of satrapies. Of eastern Asia Minor the largest
portion and the military primacy were assigned to the most warlike of
the princes there, the Galatian Amyntas (I. 335). Alongside of the
Galatian prince stood the princes of Paphlagonia, the descendants
of Deiotarus, dispossessed from Galatia; Polemon, the new prince in
Pontus, and the husband of Pythodoris the granddaughter of Antonius;
and moreover, as hitherto, the kings of Cappadocia and Commagene.
Antonius united a great part of Cilicia and Syria, as well as of Cyprus
and Cyrene, with the Egyptian state, to which he thus almost restored
its limits as they had been under the Ptolemies; and as he had made
queen Cleopatra, Caesar’s mistress, his own or rather his wife, so her
illegitimate child by Caesar, Caesarion, already earlier recognised as
joint ruler of Egypt,22 obtained the reversion of the old kingdom
of the Ptolemies, and her illegitimate son by Antonius, Ptolemaeus
Philadelphus, obtained that of Syria. To another son, whom she had
borne to Antonius, the already mentioned Alexander, Armenia was for
the present assigned as a payment to account for the rule of the East
conceived as in reserve for him. With this great-kingdom organised
after the Oriental fashion23 he thought to combine the principate
over the West. He himself did not assume the name of king, on the
contrary bore in presence of his countrymen and the soldiers only those
titles which also belonged to Caesar. But on imperial coins with a
Latin legend Cleopatra is called queen of kings, her sons by Antonius
at least kings; the coins show the head of his eldest son along with
that of his father, as if the hereditary character were a matter of
course; the marriage and the succession of the legitimate and the
illegitimate children are treated by him, as was the usage with the
great-kings of the East, or, as he himself said, with the divine
freedom of his ancestor Herakles:24 the said Alexander and his twin
sister were named by him, the former Helios, the latter Selene, after
the model of those same great-kings, and, as once upon a time the
Persian king bestowed on the refugee Themistocles a number of Asiatic
cities, so he bestowed on the Parthian Monaeses, who went over to him,
three cities of Syria. In Alexander too the king of the Macedonians and
the king of kings of the East went in some measure side by side, and
to him too the bridal bed in Susa was the reward for the camp-tent of
Gaugamela; but the Roman copy shows in its exactness a strong element
of caricature.
Preparations for the Parthian war.Whether Antonius apprehended his position in this way, immediately
on his taking up the government in the East, cannot be decided; it
may be conjectured that the creation of a new Oriental great-kingdom
in connection with the Occidental principate ripened in his mind
gradually, and that the idea was only thought out completely, after,
in the year 71737 B.C., on his return from Italy to Asia, he had
once more entered into relations with the last queen of the Lagid
house not to be again broken off. But his temperament was not equal
to such an enterprise. One of those men of military capacity, who
knew how, in presence of the enemy, and especially in a position of
difficulty, to strike prudently and boldly, he lacked the will of the
statesman, the sure grasp and resolute pursuit of a political aim.
Had the dictator Caesar assigned to him the problem of subduing the
East, he would probably have solved it: the marshal was not fitted
to be the ruler. After the expulsion of the Parthians from Syria,
almost two years (summer of 71638 B.C. to summer of 718 36 B.C.
) elapsed without any step being taken towards the object aimed
at. Antonius himself, inferior also in this respect that he grudged
to his generals important successes, had removed the conqueror of
Labienus and of Pacorus, the able Ventidius, immediately after this
last success, and taken the chief command in person in order to pursue
and to miss the pitiful honour of occupying Samosata, the capital
of the small Syrian dependent state, Commagene; annoyed at this, he
left the East, in order to negotiate in Italy with his father-in-law
as to the future arrangements, or to enjoy life with his young
spouse Octavia. His governors in the East were not inactive. Publius
Canidius Crassus advanced from Armenia towards the Caucasus, and
there subdued Pharnabazus king of the Iberians, and Zober king of the
Albanians. Gaius Sossius took in Syria the last town still adhering
to the Parthians, Aradus; he further re-established in Judaea the
rule of Herodes, and caused the pretender to the throne installed
by the Parthians, the Hasmonean Antigonus, to be put to death. The
consequences of the victory on Roman territory were thus duly drawn,
and the recognition of Roman rule was enforced as far as the Caspian
Sea and the Syrian desert. But Antonius had reserved for himself the
beginning of the warfare against the Parthians, and he came not.
Parthian war of Antonius.When at length, in 71836 B.C., he escaped from the arms, not of
Octavia, but of Cleopatra, and set the columns of the army in motion, a
good part of the appropriate season of the year had already elapsed.
Still more surprising than this delay was the direction which Antonius
chose. All aggressive wars of the Romans against the Parthians, earlier
and later, took the route for Ctesiphon, the capital of the kingdom
and at the same time situated on its western frontier, and so the
natural and immediate aim of operations for armies marching downward
on the Euphrates or on the Tigris. Antonius too might, after he had
reached the Tigris through northern Mesopotamia, nearly along the
route which Alexander had traversed, have advanced down the river upon
Ctesiphon and Seleucia. But instead of this he preferred to go in a
northerly direction at first towards Armenia, and from that point,
where he united his whole military resources and reinforced himself
in particular by the Armenian cavalry, to the table-land of Media
Atropatene (Aderbijân). The allied king of Armenia may possibly have
recommended this plan of campaign, seeing that the Armenian rulers at
all times aspired to the possession of this neighbouring land, and
King Artavazdes of Armenia might hope now to subdue the satrap of
Atropatene of the same name, and to add the latter’s territory to his
own. But Antonius himself cannot possibly have been influenced by such
considerations. He may have rather thought that he should be able to
push forward from Atropatene into the heart of the enemy’s country, and
might regard the old Persian court-residences of Ecbatana and Rhagae
as the goal of his march. But, if this was his plan, he acted without
knowledge of the difficult ground, and altogether underrated his
opponents’ power of resistance, besides which the short time available
for operations in this mountainous country and the late beginning of
the campaign weighed heavily in the scale. As a skilled and experienced
officer, such as Antonius was, could hardly deceive himself on such
points, it is probable that special political considerations influenced
the matter. The rule of Phraates was tottering, as we have said;
Monaeses, of whose fidelity Antonius held himself assured, and whom he
hoped perhaps to put into Phraates’s place, had returned in accordance
with the wish of the Parthian king to his native country;25 Antonius
appears to have reckoned on a rising on his part against Phraates,
and in expectation of this civil war to have led his army into the
interior of the Parthian provinces. It would doubtless have been
possible to await the result of this design in the friendly Armenia,
and, if operations thereafter were requisite, to have at least the full
summer-time at his disposal in the following year; but this waiting was
not agreeable to the hasty general. In Atropatene he encountered the
obstinate resistance of the powerful and half independent under-king,
who resolutely sustained a siege in his capital Praaspa or Phraarta
(southward from the lake of Urumia, presumably on the lower course
of the Jaghatu); and not only so, but the hostile attack brought, as
it would seem, to the Parthians internal peace. Phraates led on a
large army to the relief of the assailed city. Antonius had brought
with him a great siege-train, but impatiently hastening forward, he
had left this behind in the custody of two legions under the legate
Oppius Statianus. Thus he on his part made no progress with the siege;
but king Phraates sent his masses of cavalry under that same Monaeses
to the rear of the enemy, against the corps of Statianus laboriously
pursuing its march. The Parthians cut down the covering force,
including the general himself, took the rest prisoners, and destroyed
the whole train of 300 waggons. Thereby the campaign was lost.
Progress of the struggle.The Armenian, despairing of the success of the campaign, collected his
men and went home. Antonius did not immediately abandon the siege,
and even defeated the royal army in the open field, but the alert
horsemen escaped without substantial loss, and it was a victory without
effect. An attempt to obtain from the king at least the restitution
of the old and the newly lost eagles, and thus to conclude peace, if
not with advantage, at least with honour, failed; the Parthian did
not give away his sure success so cheaply. He only assured the envoys
of Antonius that, if the Romans would give up the siege, he would
not molest them on their return home. This neither honourable nor
trustworthy promise of the enemy would hardly have induced Antonius
to break up. It was natural to take up quarters for the winter in the
enemy’s country, seeing that the Parthian troops were not acquainted
with continuous military service, and presumably most of their forces
would have gone home at the commencement of winter. But a strong basis
was lacking, and supplies in the exhausted land were not secured; above
all Antonius himself was not capable of such a tenacious conduct of
the war. Consequently he abandoned the machines, which the besieged
immediately burnt; and entered on the difficult retreat, either too
early or too late. Fifteen days’ march (300 Roman miles) through a
hostile country separated the army from the Araxes, the border river of
Armenia, whither in spite of the ambiguous attitude of the ruler the
retreat could alone be directed. A hostile army of 40,000 horsemen,
in spite of the given promise, accompanied the returning force, and,
with the marching off of the Armenians, the Romans had lost the best
part of their cavalry. Provisions and draught animals were scarce,
and the season of the year far advanced. But in the perilous position
Antonius recovered his energy and his martial skill, and in some
measure also his good fortune in war; he had made his choice, and the
general as well as the troops solved the task in a commendable way.
Had they not had with them a former soldier of Crassus, who, having
become a Parthian, knew most accurately every step of the way, and,
instead of conducting them back through the plain by which they had
come, guided them by mountain paths, which were less exposed to cavalry
attacks—apparently over the mountains about Tabreez—the army would
hardly have reached its goal; and had not Monaeses, paying off in his
way his debt of thanks to Antonius, informed him in right time of the
false assurances and the cunning designs of his countrymen, the Romans
would doubtless have fallen into one of the ambushes which on several
occasions were laid for them.
Difficulties of the retreat.The soldierly nature of Antonius was often brilliantly conspicuous
during these troublesome days, in his dexterous use of any favourable
moment, in his sternness towards the cowardly, in his power over
the minds of the soldiers, in his faithful care for the wounded and
the sick. Yet the rescue was almost a miracle; already had Antonius
instructed a faithful attendant in case of extremity not to let him
fall alive into the hands of the enemy. Amidst constant attacks of
the artful enemy, in weather of wintry cold, without adequate food
and often without water, they reached the protecting frontier in
twenty-seven days, where the enemy desisted from following them. The
loss was enormous; there were reckoned up in those twenty-seven days
eighteen larger engagements, and in a single one of them the Romans
counted 3000 dead and 5000 wounded. It was the very best and bravest
that those constant assaults on the vanguard and on the flanks swept
away. The whole baggage, a third of the camp-followers, a fourth of
the army, 20,000 foot soldiers, and 4000 horsemen had perished in this
Median campaign, in great part not through the sword, but through
famine and disease. Even on the Araxes the sufferings of the unhappy
troops were not yet at an end. Artavazdes received them as a friend,
and had no other choice; it would doubtless have been possible to pass
the winter there. But the impatience of Antonius did not tolerate
this; the march went on, and from the ever increasing inclemency of
the season and the state of health of the soldiers, this last section
of the expedition from the Araxes to Antioch cost, although no enemy
hampered it, other 8000 men. No doubt this campaign was a last flash
of what was brave and capable in the character of Antonius; but it was
politically his overthrow all the more, as at the same time Caesar by
the successful termination of the Sicilian war gained the dominion in
the West and the confidence of Italy for the present and all the future.
Last years of Antonius in the East.The responsibility for the miscarriage, which Antonius in vain
attempted to deny, was thrown by him on the dependent kings of
Cappadocia and Armenia, and on the latter so far with justice, as
his premature marching off from Praaspa had materially increased the
dangers and the losses of the retreat. For the plan of the campaign,
however, it was not he who was responsible, but Antonius;26 and the
failure of the hopes placed on Monaeses, the disaster of Statianus, the
breaking down of the siege of Praaspa, were not brought about by the
Armenian. Antonius did not abandon the subjugation of the East, but set
out next year (719)35 B.C. once more from Egypt. The circumstances
were still even now comparatively favourable. A friendly alliance was
formed with the Median king Artavazdes; he had not merely fallen into
variance with his Parthian suzerain, but was indignant above all at
his Armenian neighbour, and, considering the well-known exasperation
of Antonius against the latter, he might reckon on finding a support
in the enemy of his enemy. Everything depended on the firm accord of
the two possessors of power—the victory-crowned master of the West and
the defeated ruler in the East; and, on the news that Antonius proposed
to continue the war, his legitimate wife, the sister of Caesar,
resorted from Italy to the East to bring up to him new forces, and to
strengthen anew his relations to her and to her brother. If Octavia was
magnanimous enough to offer the hand of reconciliation to her husband
in spite of his relations to the Egyptian queen, Caesar must—as was
further confirmed by the commencement, which just then took place, of
the war on the north-east frontier of Italy—have been still ready at
that time to maintain the subsisting relation.
The brother and sister subordinated their personal interests
magnanimously to those of the commonwealth. But loudly as interest and
honour called for the acceptance of the offered hand, Antonius could
not prevail on himself to break off the relation with the Egyptian
queen; he sent back his wife, and this was at the same time a rupture
with her brother, and, as we may add, an abandonment of the idea of
continuing the war against the Parthians. Now, ere that could be
thought of, the question of mastery between Antonius and Caesar had
to be settled. Antonius accordingly returned at once from Syria to
Egypt, and in the following year undertook nothing further towards the
execution of his plans of Oriental conquest; only he punished those to
whom he assigned the blame of the miscarriage. He caused Ariarathes
the king of Cappadocia to be executed,27 and gave the kingdom to an
illegitimate kinsman of his, Archelaus. The like fate was intended for
the Armenian. If Antonius in 72034 B.C. appeared in Armenia, as
he said, for the continuance of the war, this had simply the object
of getting into his power the person of the king, who had refused
to go to Egypt. This act of revenge was ignobly executed by way of
surprise, and was not less ignobly celebrated by a caricature of the
Capitoline triumph exhibited in Alexandria. At that time the son of
Antonius, destined for lord of the East, as was already stated, was
installed as king of Armenia, and married to the daughter of the new
ally, the king of Media; while the eldest son of the captive king of
Armenia executed some time afterwards by order of queen Cleopatra,
Artaxes, whom the Armenians had proclaimed king instead of his father,
took refuge with the Parthians. Armenia and Media Atropatene were
thus in the power of Antonius or allied with him; the continuance
of the Parthian war was announced doubtless, but remained postponed
till after the overcoming of the western rival. Phraates on his part
advanced against Media, at first without success, as the Roman troops
stationed in Armenia afforded help to the Medians; but when Antonius,
in the course of his armaments against Caesar, recalled his forces
from that quarter, the Parthians gained the upper hand, vanquished the
Medians, and installed in Media, as well as also in Armenia, the king
Artaxes, who, in requital for the execution of his father, caused all
the Romans scattered in the land to be seized and put to death. That
Phraates did not turn to fuller account the great feud between Antonius
and Caesar, while it was in preparation and was being fought out, was
probably due to his being once more hampered by the troubles breaking
out in his own land. These ended in his expulsion, and in his going
to the Scythians of the East. Tiridates was proclaimed as great-king
in his stead. When the decisive naval battle was fought on the coast
of Epirus, and thereupon the overthrow of Antonius was completed in
Egypt, this new great-king sat on his tottering throne in Ctesiphon,
and at the opposite frontier of the empire the hordes of Turan were
making arrangements to reinstate the earlier ruler, in which they soon
afterwards succeeded.
First arrangements of Augustus in the East.The sagacious and clear-seeing man, to whom it fell to liquidate
the undertakings of Antonius and to settle the relations of the two
portions of the empire, needed moderation quite as much as energy.
It would have been the gravest of errors to enter into the ideas of
Antonius as to conquering the East, or even merely making further
conquests there. Augustus perceived this; his military arrangements
show clearly that, while he viewed the possession of the Syrian coast
as well as that of Egypt as an indispensable complement to the empire
of the Mediterranean, he attached no value to inland possessions there.
Armenia, however, had now been for a generation Roman, and could, in
the nature of the circumstances, only be Roman or Parthian; the country
was by its position, in a military point of view, a sally-port for each
of the great powers into the territory of the other. Augustus had no
thought of abandoning Armenia and leaving it to the Parthians; and, as
things stood, he could hardly think of doing so. But, if Armenia was
retained, the matter could not end there; the local relations compelled
the Romans further to bring under their controlling influence the basin
of the river Cyrus, the territories of the Iberians on its upper, and
of the Albanians on its lower course—that is, the inhabitants of the
modern Georgia and Shirvan, skilled in combat on horseback and on
foot—and not to allow the domain of the Parthian power to extend to
the north of the Araxes beyond Atropatene. The expedition of Pompeius
had already shown that the settlement in Armenia necessarily led
the Romans on the one hand as far as the Caucasus, on the other as
far as the western shore of the Caspian Sea. The initial steps were
everywhere taken. The legates of Antonius had fought with the Iberians
and Albanians; Polemon, confirmed in his position by Augustus, ruled
not merely over the coast from Pharnacea to Trapezus, but also over the
territory of the Colchians at the mouth of the Phasis. To this general
state of matters fell to be added the special circumstances of the
moment, which most urgently suggested to the new monarch of Rome not
merely to show his sword in presence of the Orientals, but also to draw
it. That king Artaxes, like Mithradates formerly, had given orders to
put to death all the Romans within his bounds, could not be allowed to
remain unrequited. The exiled king of Media also had now sought help
from Augustus, as he would otherwise have sought it from Antonius. Not
merely did the civil war and the conflict of pretenders in the Parthian
empire facilitate the attack, but the expelled ruler Tiridates likewise
sought protection with Augustus, and declared himself ready as a Roman
vassal to accept his kingdom in fief from the latter. The restitution
of the Romans who had fallen into the power of the Parthians at the
defeats of Crassus and of the Antonians, and of the lost eagles, might
not in themselves seem to the ruler worth the waging of war; the
restorer of the Roman state could not allow this question of military
and political honour to drop.
Policy open to him.The Roman statesman had to reckon with these facts; considering the
position, which Antonius took in the East, the policy of action was
imperative generally, and doubly so from the preceding miscarriages.
Beyond doubt it was desirable soon to undertake the organisation of
matters in Rome, but for the undisputed monarch there subsisted no
stringent compulsion to do this at once. He found himself after the
decisive blows of Actium and Alexandria on the spot and at the head of
a strong and victorious army; what had to be done some day was best
done at once. A ruler of the stamp of Caesar would hardly have returned
to Rome without having restored the protectorate in Armenia, having
obtained recognition for the Roman supremacy as far as the Caucasus
and the Caspian Sea, and having settled accounts with the Parthians.
A ruler of caution and energy would have now at once organised the
defence of the frontier in the East, as the circumstances required;
it was from the outset clear that the four Syrian legions, together
about 40,000 men, were not sufficient to guard the interests of Rome
simultaneously on the Euphrates, on the Araxes, and on the Cyrus, and
that the militia of the dependent kingdoms only concealed, and did not
cover, the want of imperial troops. Armenia by political and national
sympathy held more to the Parthians than to the Romans; the kings of
Commagene, Cappadocia, Galatia, Pontus, were inclined doubtless on the
other hand more to the Roman side, but they were untrustworthy and
weak. Even a policy keeping within bounds needed for its foundation an
energetic stroke of the sword, and for its maintenance the near arm of
a superior Roman military power.
Inadequate measures.Augustus neither struck nor protected; certainly not because he
deceived himself as to the state of the case, but because it was his
nature to execute tardily and feebly what he perceived to be necessary,
and to let considerations of internal policy exercise a more than due
influence on the relations abroad. The inadequacy of the protection of
the frontier by the client states of Asia Minor he well perceived; and
in connection therewith, already in the year 72925 B.C., after
the death of king Amyntas who ruled all the interior of Asia Minor,
he gave to him no successor, but placed the land under an imperial
legate. Presumably the neighbouring more important client-states,
and particularly Cappadocia, were intended to be in like manner
converted after the decease of the holders for the time into imperial
governorships. This was a step in advance, in so far as thereby the
militia of these countries was incorporated with the imperial army and
placed under Roman officers; these troops could not exercise a serious
pressure on the insecure border-lands or even on the neighbouring
great-state, although they now counted among those of the empire. But
all these considerations were outweighed by regard to the reduction
of the numbers of the standing army and of the expenditure for the
military system to the lowest possible measure.
Equally insufficient, in presence of the relations of the moment, were
the measures adopted by Augustus on his return home from Alexandria.
He gave to the dispossessed king of the Medes the rule of the Lesser
Armenia, and to the Parthian pretender Tiridates an asylum in Syria,
in order through the former to keep in check the king Artaxes who
persevered in open hostility against Rome, by the latter to press upon
king Phraates. The negotiations instituted with the latter regarding
the restitution of the Parthian trophies of victory were prolonged
without result, although Phraates in the year 73123 B.C. had
promised their return in order to obtain the release of a son who had
accidentally fallen into the power of the Romans.
Augustus in Syria.It was only when Augustus went in person to Syria in the year 734 20 B.C.
, and showed himself in earnest, that the Orientals submitted. In
Armenia, where a powerful party had risen against king Artaxes, the
insurgents threw themselves into the arms of the Romans and sought
imperial investiture for Artaxes’s younger brother Tigranes, brought up
at the imperial court and living in Rome. When the emperor’s stepson
Tiberius Claudius Nero, then a youth of twenty-two years, advanced
with a military force into Armenia, king Artaxes was put to death
by his own relatives, and Tigranes received the imperial tiara from
the hand of the emperor’s representative, as fifty years earlier his
grandfather of the same name had received it from Pompeius (iv. 127).
Atropatene was again separated from Armenia and passed under the sway
of a ruler likewise brought up in Rome, Ariobarzanes, son of the
already-mentioned Artavazdes; yet the latter appears to have obtained
the land not as a Roman but as a Parthian dependency. Concerning the
organisation of matters in the principalities on the Caucasus we
learn nothing; but as they are subsequently reckoned among the Roman
client-states, probably at that time the Roman influence prevailed here
also. Even king Phraates, now put to the choice of redeeming his word
or fighting, resolved with a heavy heart on the surrender—keenly as it
did violence to the national feelings of his people—of the few Roman
prisoners of war still living and the standards won.
Mission of Gaius Caesar to the East.Boundless joy saluted this bloodless victory achieved by this prince
of peace. After it there subsisted for a considerable time a friendly
relation with the king of the Parthians, as indeed the immediate
interests of the two great states came little into contact. In Armenia,
on the other hand, the Roman vassal-rule, which rested only on its own
basis, had a difficulty in confronting the national opposition. After
the early death of king Tigranes his children, or the leaders of the
state governing under their name, joined this opposition. Against them
another ruler Artavazdes was set up by the friends of the Romans; but
he was unable to prevail against the stronger opposing party. These
Armenian troubles disturbed also the relation to the Parthians; it was
natural that the Armenians antagonistic to Rome should seek to lean on
these, and the Arsacids could not forget that Armenia had been formerly
a Parthian appanage for the second son. Bloodless victories are often
feeble and dangerous. Matters went so far that the Roman government, in
the year 7486 B.C., commissioned the same Tiberius, who, fourteen
years before had installed Tigranes as vassal-king of Armenia, to
enter it once more with a military force and to regulate the state
of matters in case of need by arms. But the quarrels in the imperial
family, which had interrupted the subjugation of the Germans (I. 35),
interfered also here and had the same bad effect. Tiberius declined
his stepfather’s commission, and in the absence of a suitable princely
general the Roman government for some years looked on, inactive for
good or evil, at the doings of the anti-Roman party in Armenia under
Parthian protection. At length, in the year 7531 B.C., not merely
was the same commission given to the elder adopted son of the emperor,
Gaius Caesar, at the age of twenty, but the subjugation of Armenia
was to be, as the father hoped, the beginning of greater things; the
Oriental campaign of the crown-prince of twenty was, we might almost
say, to continue the expedition of Alexander. Literati commissioned
by the emperor or in close relations to the court, the geographer
Isidorus, himself at home at the mouth of the Euphrates, and king
Juba of Mauretania, the representative of Greek learning among the
princely personages of the Augustan circle, dedicated—the former his
information personally acquired in the East, the latter his literary
collections on Arabia—to the young prince, who appeared to burn with
the desire of achieving the conquest of that land—over which Alexander
had met his death—as a brilliant compensation for a miscarriage of the
Augustan government which a considerable time ago had there occurred.
In the first instance for Armenia this mission was just as successful
as that of Tiberius. The Roman crown-prince and the Parthian great-king
Phraataces met personally on an island of the Euphrates; the Parthians
once more gave up Armenia, the imminent danger of a Parthian war was
averted, and the understanding, which had been disturbed, was at least
outwardly re-established. Gaius appointed Ariobarzanes, a prince of the
Median princely house, as king over the Armenians, and the suzerainty
of Rome was once more confirmed. The Armenians, however, opposed to
Rome did not submit without resistance; matters came not merely to
the marching in of the legions, but even to fighting. Before the walls
of the Armenian stronghold Artageira the young crown-prince received
from a Parthian officer through treachery the wound (2 A.D.) of which
he died after months of sickness. The intermixture of imperial and
dynastic policy punished itself anew. The death of a young man changed
the course of great policy; the Arabian expedition so confidently
announced to the public fell into abeyance, after its success could no
longer smooth the way of the emperor’s son to the succession. Further
undertakings on the Euphrates were no longer thought of; the immediate
object—the occupation of Armenia and the re-establishment of the
relations with the Parthians—was attained, however sad the shadows
that fell on this success through the death of the crown-prince.
Mission of Germanicus to the East.The success had no more endurance than that of the more brilliant
expedition of 73420 B.C.. The rulers of Armenia installed by
Rome were soon hard pressed by those of the counter-party with the
secret or open participation of the Parthians, and supplanted. When
the Parthian prince Vonones, reared in Rome, was called to the vacant
Parthian throne, the Romans hoped to find in him a support; but on
that very account he had soon to vacate it, and in his stead came king
Artabanus of Media, an energetic man, sprung on the mother’s side from
the Arsacids, but belonging to the Scythian people of the Daci, and
brought up in native habits (about 10 A.D.). Vonones was then received
by the Armenians as ruler, and thereby these were kept under Roman
influence. But the less could Artabanus tolerate his dispossessed rival
as a neighbour prince; the Roman government must, in order to sustain
a man in every respect unfitted for his position, have applied armed
force against the Parthians as against his own subjects. Tiberius, who
meanwhile had come to reign, did not order an immediate invasion, and
for the moment the anti-Roman party in Armenia was victorious; but it
was not his intention to abandon the important border-land. On the
contrary, the annexation, probably long resolved on, of the kingdom of
Cappadocia was carried out in the year 17; the old Archelaus, who had
occupied the throne there from the year 71836 B.C., was summoned to
Rome and was there informed that he had ceased to reign. Likewise the
petty, but on account of the fords of the Euphrates important, kingdom
of Commagene came at that time under immediate imperial administration.
Thereby the direct frontier of the empire was pushed forward as far as
the middle Euphrates. At the same time the crown-prince Germanicus,
who had just commanded with great distinction on the Rhine, went
with extended full powers to the East, in order to organise the new
province of Cappadocia and to restore the sunken repute of the imperial
authority.
And its results.This mission also attained its end soon and easily. Germanicus,
although not supported by the governor of Syria, Gnaeus Piso, with
such a force of troops as he was entitled to ask and had asked, went
nevertheless to Armenia, and by the mere weight of his person and
of his position brought back the land to allegiance. He allowed the
incapable Vonones to fall, and, in accordance with the wishes of the
chief men favourable to Rome, appointed as ruler of the Armenians a
son of that Polemon whom Antonius had made king in Pontus, Zeno, or,
as he was called as king of Armenia, Artaxias; the latter was, on the
one hand, connected with the imperial house through his mother queen
Pythodoris, a granddaughter of the triumvir Antonius, on the other
hand, reared after the manner of the country, a vigorous huntsman and
a brave carouser at the festal board. The great-king Artabanus also
met the Roman prince in a friendly way, and asked only for the removal
of his predecessor Vonones from Syria, in order to check the intrigues
concocted between him and the discontented Parthians. As Germanicus
responded to this request and sent the inconvenient refugee to Cilicia,
where he soon afterwards perished in an attempt to escape, the best
relations were established between the two great states. Artabanus
wished even to meet personally with Germanicus at the Euphrates, as
Phraataces and Gaius had done; but this Germanicus declined, doubtless
with reference to the easily excited suspicion of Tiberius. In truth
the same shadow of gloom fell on this Oriental expedition as on the
last preceding one; from this too the crown-prince of the Roman empire
came not home alive.
Artabanus and Tiberius.
For a time the arrangements made did their work. So long as Tiberius
bore sway with a firm hand, and so long as king Artaxias of Armenia
lived, tranquillity continued in the East; but in the last years of
the old emperor, when he from his solitary island allowed things to
take their course and shrank back from all interference, and especially
after the death of Artaxias (about 34), the old game once more began.
King Artabanus, exalted by his long and prosperous government and
by many successes achieved against the border peoples of Iran, and
convinced that the old emperor would have no inclination to begin a
heavy war in the East, induced the Armenians to proclaim his own eldest
son, Arsaces, as ruler; that is, to exchange the Roman suzerainty for
the Parthian. Indeed he seemed directly to aim at war with Rome; he
demanded the estate left by his predecessor and rival Vonones, who
had died in Cilicia, from the Roman government, and his letters to
it as undisguisedly expressed the view that the East belonged to the
Orientals, as they called by the right name the abominations at the
imperial court, of which people in Rome ventured only to whisper in
their most intimate circles. He is said even to have made an attempt
to possess himself of Cappadocia. But he had miscalculated on the
old lion. Tiberius was even at Capreae formidable not merely to his
courtiers, and was not the man to let himself, and in himself Rome,
be mocked with impunity. He sent Mission of Vitellius.Lucius Vitellius, the father of the
subsequent emperor, a resolute officer and skilful diplomatist, to
the East with plenary power similar to that which Gaius Caesar and
Germanicus had formerly had, and with the commission in case of need
to lead the Syrian legions over the Euphrates. At the same time
he applied the often tried means for giving trouble to the rulers
of the East by insurrections and pretenders in their own land. To
the Parthian prince, whom the Armenian nationalists had proclaimed
as ruler, he opposed a prince of the royal house of the Iberians,
Mithradates, brother of the Armenian king Pharasmanes, and directed
the latter, as well as the prince of the Albanians, to support the
Roman pretender to Armenia with military force. Large bands of the
Transcaucasian Sarmatae, warlike and easy of access to every wooer,
were hired with Roman money for the inroads into Armenia. The Roman
pretender succeeded in poisoning his rival through bribed courtiers,
and in possessing himself of the country and of the capital Artaxata.
Artabanus sent in place of the murdered prince another son Orodes to
Armenia, and attempted also on his part to procure Transcaucasian
auxiliaries; but only few made good their way to Armenia, and the
bands of Parthian horsemen were not a match for the good infantry
of the Caucasian peoples and the dreaded Sarmatian mounted archers.
Orodes was vanquished in a hard pitched battle, and himself severely
wounded in single combat with his rival. Then Artabanus in person
set out for Armenia. But now Vitellius also put in motion the Syrian
legions, in order to cross the Euphrates and to invade Mesopotamia,
and this brought the long fermenting insurrection in the Parthian
kingdom to an outbreak. The energetic and, with successes, more and
more rude demeanour of the Scythian ruler, had offended many persons
and interests, and had especially estranged from him the Mesopotamian
Greeks and the powerful urban community of Seleucia, from which he had
taken away its municipal constitution, democratic after a Greek type.
Roman gold fostered the movement which was in preparation. Discontented
nobles had already put themselves in communication with the Roman
government, and besought from it a genuine Arsacid. Tiberius had sent
the only surviving son of Phraates, of the same name with his father,
and—after the old man, accustomed to Roman habits, had succumbed
to his exertions while still in Syria—in his stead a grandson of
Phraates, likewise living in Rome, by name Tiridates. The Parthian
prince Sinnaces, the leader of these plots, now renounced allegiance
to the Scythian and set up the banner of the Arsacids. Vitellius with
his legions crossed the Euphrates, and in his train the new great-king
by grace of Rome. The Parthian governor of Mesopotamia, Ornospades,
who had once as an exile shared under Tiberius in the Pannonian wars,
placed himself and his troops at once at the disposal of the new
ruler; Abdagaeses, the father of Sinnaces, delivered over the imperial
treasure; very speedily Artabanus found himself abandoned by the whole
country, and compelled to take flight to his Scythian home, where he
wandered about in the forests without settled abode, and kept himself
alive with his bow, while the tiara was solemnly placed on the head
of Tiridates in Ctesiphon by the princes who were, according to the
Parthian constitution, called to crown the ruler.
Tiridates superseded.But the rule of the new great-king sent by the national foe did
not last long. The government, conducted less by himself, young,
inexperienced, and incapable, than by those who had made him king, and
chiefly by Abdagaeses, soon provoked opposition. Some of the chief
satraps had remained absent even from the coronation festival, and
again brought forth the dispossessed ruler from his banishment; with
their assistance and the forces supplied by his Scythian countrymen
Artabanus returned, and already in the following year (36) the whole
kingdom, with the exception of Seleucia, was again in his power.
Tiridates was a fugitive, and was compelled to demand from his Roman
protectors the shelter which could not be refused to him. Vitellius
once more led the legions to the Euphrates; but, as the great-king
appeared in person and declared himself ready for all that was asked,
provided that the Roman government would stand aloof from Tiridates,
peace was soon concluded. Artabanus not merely recognised Mithradates
as king of Armenia, but presented also to the effigy of the Roman
emperor the homage which was wont to be required of vassals, and
furnished his son Darius as a hostage to the Romans. Thereupon the old
emperor died; but he had lived long enough to see this victory, as
bloodless as complete, of his policy over the revolt of the East.
The East under Gaius.What the sagacity of the old man had attained was undone at once by the
indiscretion of his successor. Apart from the fact that he cancelled
judicious arrangements of Tiberius, re-establishing, e.g. the annexed
kingdom of Commagene, his foolish envy grudged the dead emperor the
success which he had gained; he summoned the able governor of Syria
as well as the new king of Armenia to Rome to answer for themselves,
deposed the latter, and, after keeping him for a time a prisoner, sent
him into exile. As a matter of course the Parthian government took
action for itself, and once more seized possession of Armenia which
was without a master.28 Claudius, on coming to reign in the year
41, had to begin afresh the work that had been done. He dealt with
it after the example of Tiberius. Mithradates, recalled from exile,
was reinstated, and directed with the help of his brother to possess
himself of Armenia. The fraternal war then waged among the three sons
of king Artabanus III. in the Parthian kingdom smoothed the way for
the Romans. After the murder of the eldest son, Gotarzes and Vardanes
contended over the throne for years; Seleucia, which had already
renounced allegiance to the father, defied him and subsequently his
sons throughout seven years; the peoples of Turan also interfered, as
they always did, in this quarrel of princes of Iran. Mithradates was
able, with the help of the troops of his brother and of the garrisons
of the neighbouring Roman provinces, to overpower the Parthian
partisans in Armenia and to make himself again master there;29 the
land obtained a Roman garrison. After Vardanes had come to terms with
his brother and had at length reoccupied Seleucia, he seemed as though
he would march into Armenia; but the threatening attitude of the Roman
legate of Syria withheld him, and very soon the brother broke the
agreement and the civil war began afresh. Not even the assassination of
the brave and, in combat with the peoples of Turan, victorious Vardanes
put an end to it; the opposition party now turned to Rome and besought
from the government there the son of Vonones, the prince Meherdates
then living in Rome, who thereupon was placed by the emperor Claudius
before the assembled senate at the disposal of his countrymen and sent
away to Syria with the exhortation to administer his new kingdom well
and justly, and to remain mindful of the friendly protectorate of
Rome (49). He did not reach the position in which these exhortations
might be applied. The Roman legions, which escorted him as far as the
Euphrates, there delivered him over to those who had called him—the
head of the powerful princely family of the Carên and the kings Abgarus
of Edessa and Izates of Adiabene. The inexperienced and unwarlike youth
was as little equal to the task as all the other Parthian rulers set up
by the Romans; a number of his most noted adherents left him so soon as
they learned to know him, and went to Gotarzes; in the decisive battle
the fall of the brave Carên turned the scale. Meherdates was taken
prisoner and not even executed, but only, after the Oriental fashion,
rendered incapable of government by mutilation of the ears.
Armenia occupied by the Parthians.Notwithstanding this defeat of Roman policy in the Parthian kingdom,
Armenia remained with the Romans, so long as the weak Gotarzes ruled
over the Parthians. But so soon as a more vigorous hand grasped the
reins of sovereignty, and the internal conflicts ceased, the struggle
for that land was resumed. King Vologasus, who after the death of
Gotarzes and the short reign of Vonones II. succeeded this his father
in the year 51,30 ascended the throne, exceptionally, in full
agreement with his two brothers Pacorus and Tiridates. He was an
able and prudent ruler—we find him even as a founder of towns, and
exerting himself with success to divert the trade of Palmyra towards
his new town Vologasias on the lower Euphrates—averse to quick and
extreme resolutions, and endeavouring, if possible, to keep peace with
his powerful neighbour. But the recovery of Armenia was the leading
political idea of the dynasty, and he too was ready to make use of any
opportunity for realising it.
Rhadamistus.This opportunity seemed now to present itself. The Armenian court had
become the scene of one of the most revolting family tragedies which
history records. The old king of the Iberians, Pharasmanes, undertook
to eject his brother Mithradates, the king of Armenia, from the throne
and to put his own son Rhadamistus in his place. Under the pretext of
a quarrel with his father Rhadamistus appeared at the court of his
uncle and father-in-law, and entered into negotiations with Armenians
of repute in that sense. After he had secured a body of adherents,
Pharasmanes, in the year 52, under frivolous pretexts involved his
brother in war, and brought the country into his own or rather his
son’s power. Mithradates placed himself under the protection of the
Roman garrison of the fortress of Gorneae.31 Rhadamistus did not
venture to attack this; but the commandant, Caelius Pollio, was well
known as worthless and venal. The centurion holding command under him
resorted to Pharasmanes to induce him to recall his troops, which the
latter promised, but did not keep his word. During the absence of the
second in command Pollio compelled the king—who doubtless guessed what
was before him—by the threat of leaving him in the lurch, to deliver
himself into the hands of Rhadamistus. By the latter he was put to
death, and with him his wife, the sister of Rhadamistus, and their
children, because they broke out in cries of lamentation at the sight
of the dead bodies of their parents. In this way Rhadamistus attained
to sovereignty over Armenia. The Roman government ought neither to have
looked on at such horrors, of which its officers shared the guilt, nor
to have tolerated that one of its vassals should make war on another.
Nevertheless the governor of Cappadocia, Julius Paelignus, acknowledged
the new king of Armenia. Even in the council of the governor of Syria,
Ummidius Quadratus, the opinion preponderated that it might be a matter
of indifference to the Romans whether the uncle or the nephew ruled
Armenia; the legate, sent to Armenia with a legion, received only
instructions to maintain the status quo till further orders. Then the
Parthian king, on the assumption that the Roman government would not
be zealous to take part for king Rhadamistus, deemed the moment a fit
one for resuming his old claims upon Armenia. He invested his brother
Tiridates with Armenia, and the Parthian troops marching in possessed
themselves, almost without striking a blow, of the two capitals,
Tigranocerta and Artaxata, and of the whole land. When Rhadamistus made
an attempt to retain the price of his deeds of blood, the Armenians
themselves drove him out of the land. The Roman garrison appears to
have left Armenia after the giving over of Gorneae; the governor
recalled the legion put upon the march from Syria, in order not to fall
into conflict with the Parthians.
Corbulo sent to Cappadocia.When this news came to Rome (at the end of 54) the emperor Claudius had
just died, and the ministers Burrus and Seneca practically governed for
his young successor, seventeen years old. The procedure of Vologasus
could only be answered by a declaration of war. In fact the Roman
government sent to Cappadocia, which otherwise was a governorship
of the second rank and was not furnished with legions, by way of
exception the consular legate Gnaeus Domitius Corbulo. He had come
rapidly into prominence as brother-in-law of the emperor Gaius, had
then under Claudius been legate of lower Germany in the year 47 (I.
125), and was thenceforth regarded as one of the able commanders, not
at that time numerous, who energetically maintained the stringency of
discipline—in person a Herculean figure, equal to any fatigue, and of
unshrinking courage in presence not of the enemy merely but also of
his own soldiers. It appeared to be a sign of things becoming better
that the government of Nero gave to him the first important command
which it had to fill. The incapable Syrian legate of Syria, Quadratus,
was not recalled, but was directed to put two of his four legions at
the disposal of the governor of the neighbouring province. All the
legions were brought up to the Euphrates, and orders were given for
the immediate throwing of bridges over the stream. The two regions
bordering immediately on Armenia to the westward, Lesser Armenia and
Sophene, were assigned to two trustworthy Syrian princes, Aristobulus,
of a lateral branch of the Herodian house, and Sohaemus, of the ruling
family of Hemesa, and both were placed under Corbulo’s command.
Agrippa, the king of the remnant of the Jewish state still left at that
time, and Antiochus, king of Commagene, likewise received orders to
march.
Character of his troops.At first, however, no fighting took place. The reason lay partly in
the state of the Syrian legions; it was a bad testimonial of poverty
for the previous administration, that Corbulo was compelled to describe
the troops assigned to him as quite unserviceable. The legions levied
and doing garrison duty in the Greek provinces had always been inferior
to the Occidentals; now the enervating power of the East with the long
state of peace and the laxity of discipline completely demoralised
them. The soldiers abode more in the towns than in the camps; not
a few of them were unaccustomed to carry arms, and knew nothing of
pitching camps and of service on the watch; the regiments were far from
having their full complement and contained numerous old and useless
men; Corbulo had, in the first instance, to dismiss a great number of
soldiers, and to levy and train recruits in still larger numbers. The
exchange of the comfortable winter quarters on the Orontes for those
in the rugged mountains of Armenia, and the sudden introduction of
inexorably stern discipline in the camp, brought about various ailments
and occasioned numerous desertions. In spite of all this the general
found himself, when matters became serious, compelled to ask that one
of the better legions of the West might be sent to him. Under these
circumstances he was in no haste to bring his soldiers to face the
enemy; nevertheless it was political considerations that preponderantly
influenced him in this course.
The aims of the war.If it had been the design of the Roman government to drive out the
Parthian ruler at once from Armenia, and to put in his place not
indeed Rhadamistus, with whose blood-guiltiness the Romans had no
occasion to stain themselves, but some other prince of their choice,
the military resources of Corbulo would probably have at once sufficed,
since king Vologasus, once more recalled by internal troubles, had led
away his troops from Armenia. But this was not embraced in the plan
of the Romans; they wished, on the contrary, rather to acquiesce in
the government of Tiridates there, and only to induce and, in case of
need, compel him to an acknowledgment of the Roman supremacy; only
for this object were the legions, in case of extremity, to march. This
in reality came very near to the cession of Armenia to the Parthians.
What told in favour of this course, and what prevented it, has formerly
been set forth (p. 34 f.). If Armenia were now arranged as a Parthian
appanage for a second son, the recognition of the Roman suzerainty was
little more than a formality, strictly taken, nothing but a screen
for military and political honour. Thus the government of the earlier
period of Nero, which, as is well known, was equalled by few in insight
and energy, intended to get rid of Armenia in a decorous way; and that
need not surprise us. In fact they were in this case pouring water into
a sieve. The possession of Armenia had doubtless been asserted and
brought to recognition within the land itself, as among the Parthians,
through Tiberius in the year 20 B.C., then by Gaius in the year 2, by
Germanicus in the year 18, and by Vitellius in the year 36. But it was
just these extraordinary expeditions regularly repeated and regularly
crowned with success, and yet never attaining to permanent effect,
that justified the Parthians, when in the negotiations with Nero
they maintained that the Roman suzerainty over Armenia was an empty
name—that the land was, and could be, none other than Parthian. For
the vindication of the Roman supreme authority there was always needed,
if not the waging of war, at least the threat of it; and the constant
irritation thereby produced made a lasting state of peace between the
two neighbouring great powers impossible. The Romans had, if they were
to act consistently, only the choice between either bringing Armenia
and the left bank of the Euphrates in general effectively under their
power by setting aside the mere mediate government, or leaving the
matter to the Parthians, so far as was compatible with the supreme
principle of the Roman government to acknowledge no frontier-power
with equal rights. Augustus and the rulers after him had so far
decidedly declined the former alternative, and they ought therefore
to have taken the second course. But this too they had at least
attempted to decline, and had wished to exclude the Parthian royal
house from the rule over Armenia, without being able to do so. This the
leading statesmen of the earlier Neronian period must have regarded
as an error, since they left Armenia to the Arsacids, and restricted
themselves to the smallest conceivable measure of rights thereto. When
the dangers and the disadvantages, which the retention of this region
only externally attached to the empire brought to the state, were
weighed against those which the Parthian rule over Armenia involved
for the Romans, the decision might, especially in view of the small
offensive power of the Parthian kingdom, well be found in the latter
sense. But under all the circumstances this policy was consistent, and
sought to attain in a clearer and more rational way the aim pursued by
Augustus.
Negotiations with Vologasus.From this standpoint we understand why Corbulo and Quadratus, instead
of crossing the Euphrates, entered into negotiations with Vologasus;
and not less why the latter, informed doubtless of the real designs of
the Romans, agreed to submit to the Romans in a similar way with his
predecessor, and to deliver to them as a pledge of peace a number of
hostages closely connected with the royal house. The return tacitly
agreed on for this was that the rule of Tiridates over Armenia should
be tolerated, and that a Roman pretender should not be set up. So
some years passed in a de facto state of peace. But when Vologasus
and Tiridates did not agree to apply to the Roman government for the
investing of the latter with Armenia,32 Corbulo took the offensive
against Tiridates in the year 58. The very policy of withdrawal and
concession, if it was not to appear to friend and foe as weakness,
needed a foil, and so either a formal and solemn recognition of the
Roman supremacy or, better still, a victory won by arms.
Corbulo in Armenia.In the summer of the year 58 Corbulo led an army, tolerably fit
for fighting, of at least 30,000 men, over the Euphrates. The
reorganisation and the hardening of the troops were completed by
the campaign itself, and the first winter-quarters were taken up on
Armenian soil. In the spring of 5933 he began the advance in the
direction of Artaxata. At the same time Armenia was invaded from
the north by the Iberians, whose king Pharasmanes, to cover his own
crimes, had caused his son Rhadamistus to be executed, and now further
endeavoured by good services to make his guilt be forgotten; and not
less by their neighbours to the north-west, the brave Moschi, and on
the south by Antiochus, king of Commagene. King Vologasus was detained
by the revolt of the Hyrcanians on the opposite side of the kingdom,
and could or would not interfere directly in the struggle. Tiridates
offered a courageous resistance, but he could do nothing against the
crushing superiority of force. In vain he sought to throw himself on
the lines of communication of the Romans, who obtained their necessary
supplies by way of the Black Sea and the port of Trapezus. The
strongholds of Armenia fell under the attacks of the Roman assailants,
and the garrisons were cut down to the last man. Defeated in a pitched
battle under the walls of Artaxata, Tiridates gave up the unequal
struggle, and went to the Parthians. Artaxata surrendered, and here,
in the heart of Armenia, the Roman army passed the winter. In the
spring of 60 Corbulo broke up from thence, after having burnt down
the town, and marched right across the country to its second capital
Tigranocerta, above Nisibis, in the basin of the Tigris. The terrors
of the destruction of Artaxata preceded him; serious resistance was
nowhere offered; even Tigranocerta voluntarily opened its gates to the
victor, who here in a well-calculated way allowed mercy to prevail.
Tiridates still made an attempt to return and to resume the struggle,
but was repulsed without special exertion. At the close of the summer
of 60 all Armenia was subdued, and stood at the disposal of the Roman
government.
Tigranes, king of Armenia.It is intelligible that people in Rome now put Tiridates out of
account. The prince Tigranes, a great-grandson on the father’s side
of Herod the Great, on the mother’s of king Archelaus of Cappadocia,
related also to the old Marenian royal house on the female side, and
a nephew of one of the ephemeral rulers of Armenia in the last years
of Augustus, brought up in Rome, and entirely a tool of the Roman
government, was now (60) invested by Nero with the kingdom of Armenia,
and at the emperor’s command installed by Corbulo in its rule. In
the country there was left a Roman garrison, 1000 legionaries, and
from 3000 to 4000 cavalry and infantry of auxiliaries. A portion of
the border land was separated from Armenia and distributed among the
neighbouring kings, Polemon of Pontus and Trapezus, Aristobulus of
Lesser Armenia, Pharasmanes of Iberia and Antiochus of Commagene. On
the other hand the new master of Armenia advanced, of course with
consent of the Romans, into the adjacent Parthian province of Adiabene,
defeated Monobazus the governor there, and appeared desirous of
wresting this region also from the Parthian state.
Negotiations with the Parthians.This turn of affairs compelled the Parthian government to emerge from
its passiveness; the question now concerned no longer the recovery of
Armenia, but the integrity of the Parthian empire. The long-threatened
collision between the two great states seemed inevitable. Vologasus in
an assembly of the grandees of the empire confirmed Tiridates afresh
as king of Armenia, and sent with him the general Monaeses against
the Roman usurper of the land, who was besieged by the Parthians
in Tigranocerta, which the Roman troops kept in their possession.
Vologasus in person collected the Parthian main force in Mesopotamia,
and threatened (at the beginning of 61) Syria. Corbulo, who, after
Quadratus’s death, held the command for a time in Cappadocia as in
Syria, but had besought from the government the nomination of another
governor for Cappadocia and Armenia, sent provisionally two legions
to Armenia to lend help to Tigranes, while he in person moved to the
Euphrates in order to receive the Parthian king. Again, however, they
came not to blows, but to an agreement. Vologasus, well knowing how
dangerous was the game which he was beginning, declared himself now
ready to enter into the terms vainly offered by the Romans before the
outbreak of the Armenian war, and to allow the investiture of his
brother by the Roman emperor. Corbulo entered into the proposal. He let
Tigranes drop, withdrew the Roman troops from Armenia, and acquiesced
in Tiridates establishing himself there, while the Parthian auxiliary
troops likewise withdrew; on the other hand, Vologasus sent an embassy
to the Roman government, and declared the readiness of his brother to
take the land in fee from Rome.
The Parthian war under Nero.These measures of Corbulo were of a hazardous kind,34 and led to a
bad complication. The Roman general may possibly have been, still more
thoroughly than the statesmen in Rome, impressed by the uselessness
of retaining Armenia; but, after the Roman government had installed
Tigranes as king of Armenia, he could not of his own accord fall back
upon the conditions earlier laid down, least of all abandon his own
acquisitions and withdraw the Roman troops from Armenia. He was the
less entitled to do so, as he administered Cappadocia and Armenia
merely ad interim, and had himself declared to the government that
he was not in a position to exercise the command at once there and in
Syria; whereupon the consular Lucius Caesennius Paetus was nominated
as governor of Cappadocia and was already on the way thither. The
suspicion can hardly be avoided that Corbulo grudged the latter the
honour of the final subjugation of Armenia, and wished before his
arrival to establish a definitive solution by the actual conclusion of
peace with the Parthians. The Roman government accordingly declined
the proposals of Vologasus and insisted on the retention of Armenia,
which, as the new governor who arrived in Cappadocia in the course of
the summer of 61 declared, was even to be taken under direct Roman
administration. Whether the Roman government had really resolved to go
so far cannot be ascertained; but this was at all events implied in
the consistent following out of their policy. The installing of a king
dependent on Rome was only a prolongation of the previous untenable
state of things; whoever did not wish the cession of Armenia to the
Parthians had to contemplate the conversion of the kingdom into a Roman
province. The war therefore took its course; and on that account one of
the Moesian legions was sent to the Cappadocian army.
Measures of Paetus.When Paetus arrived, the two legions assigned to him by Corbulo were
encamped on this side of the Euphrates in Cappadocia; Armenia was
evacuated, and had to be reconquered. Paetus set at once to work,
crossed the Euphrates at Melitene (Malatia), advanced into Armenia,
and reduced the nearest strongholds on the border. The advanced season
of the year, however, compelled him soon to suspend operations and
to abandon for this year the intended reoccupation of Tigranocerta;
nevertheless, in order to resume his march at once next spring, he,
after Corbulo’s example, took up his winter-quarters in the enemy’s
country at Rhandeia, on a tributary of the Euphrates, the Arsanias,
not far from the modern Charput, while the baggage and the women
and children had quarters not far from it in the strong fortress of
Arsamosata. But he had underrated the difficulty of the undertaking.
One, and that the best of his legions, the Moesian, was still on
the march, and spent the winter on this side of the Euphrates in
the territory of Pontus; the two others were not those whom Corbulo
had taught to fight and conquer, but the former Syrian legions of
Quadratus, not having their full complement, and hardly capable of
use without thorough reorganisation. He had withal to confront not,
like Corbulo, the Armenians alone, but the main body of the Parthians;
Vologasus had, when the war became in earnest, led the flower of his
troops from Mesopotamia to Armenia, and judiciously availed himself
of the strategical advantage that he commanded the inner and shorter
lines. Corbulo might, especially as he had bridged over the Euphrates
and constructed têtes de pont on the other bank, have at least
hampered, or at any rate requited this marching off by a seasonable
incursion into Mesopotamia; but he did not stir from his positions and
he left it to Paetus to defend himself, as best he could, against the
whole force of his foes. The latter was neither himself military nor
ready to accept and follow military advice, not even a man of resolute
character; arrogant and boastful in onset, despairing and pusillanimous
in presence of misfortune.
Capitulation of Rhandeia.Thus there came what could not but come. In the spring of 62 it was
not Paetus who assumed the aggressive, but Vologasus; the advanced
troops who were to bar the way of the Parthians were crushed by the
superior force; the attack was soon converted into a siege of the Roman
positions pitched far apart in the winter camp and the fortress. The
legions could neither advance nor retreat; the soldiers deserted in
masses; the only hope rested on Corbulo’s legions lying inactive far
off in northern Syria, beyond doubt at Zeugma. Both generals shared
in the blame of the disaster: Corbulo on account of the lateness of
his starting to render help,35 although, when he did recognise
the whole extent of the danger, he hastened his march as much as
possible; Paetus, because he could not take the bold resolution to
perish rather than to surrender, and thereby lost the chance of rescue
that was near—in three days longer the 5000 men whom Corbulo was
leading up would have brought the longed-for help. The conditions
of the capitulation were free retreat for the Romans and evacuation
of Armenia, with the delivering up of all fortresses occupied by
them, and of all the stores that were in their hands, of which the
Parthians were urgently in need. On the other hand Vologasus declared
himself ready, in spite of this military success, to ask Armenia as a
Roman fief for his brother from the imperial government, and on that
account to send envoys to Nero.36 The moderation of the victor may
have rested on the fact that he had better information of Corbulo’s
approach than the enclosed army; but more probably the sagacious man
was not concerned to renew the disaster of Crassus and bring Roman
eagles again to Ctesiphon. The defeat of a Roman army—he knew—was not
the overpowering of Rome; and the real concession, which was involved
in the recognition of Tiridates, was not too dearly purchased by the
compliance as to form.
Conclusion of peace.
The Roman government once more declined the offer of the Parthian king
and ordered the continuance of the war. It could not well do otherwise;
if the recognition of Tiridates was hazardous before the recommencement
of war, and hardly capable of being accepted after the Parthian
declaration of war, it now, as a consequence of the capitulation
of Rhandeia, appeared directly as its ratification. From Rome the
resumption of the struggle against the Parthians was energetically
promoted. Paetus was recalled; Corbulo, in whom public opinion, aroused
by the disgraceful capitulation, saw only the conqueror of Armenia,
and whom even those who knew exactly and judged sharply the state
of the matter could not avoid characterising as the ablest general
and one uniquely fitted for this war, took up again the governorship
of Cappadocia, and at the same time the command over all the troops
available for this campaign, who were further reinforced by a seventh
legion brought up from Pannonia; accordingly all the governors and
princes of the East were directed to comply in military matters with
his orders, so that his official authority was nearly equivalent to
that which had been assigned to the crown-princes Gaius and Germanicus
for their missions to the East. If these measures were intended to
bring about a serious reparation of the honour of the Roman arms they
missed their aim. How Corbulo looked at the state of affairs, is
shown by the very agreement which he made with the Parthian king not
long after the disaster of Rhandeia; the latter withdrew the Parthian
garrisons from Armenia, the Romans evacuated the fortresses constructed
on Mesopotamian territory for the protection of the bridges. For
the Roman offensive the Parthian garrisons in Armenia were just as
indifferent as the bridges of the Euphrates were important; whereas,
if Tiridates was to be recognised as a Roman vassal-king in Armenia,
the latter certainly were superfluous and Parthian garrisons in
Armenia impossible. In the next spring (63) Corbulo certainly entered
upon the offensive enjoined upon him, and led the four best of his
legions at Melitene over the Euphrates against the Partho-Armenian
main force stationed in the region of Arsamosata. But not much came
of the fighting; only some castles of Armenian nobles opposed to
Rome were destroyed. On the other hand, this encounter led also to
agreement. Corbulo took up the Parthian proposals formerly rejected
by his government, and that, as the further course of things showed,
in the sense that Armenia became once for all a Parthian appanage for
the second son, and the Roman government, at least according to the
spirit of the agreement, consented to bestow this crown in future only
on an Arsacid. It was only added that Tiridates should oblige himself
to take from his head the royal diadem publicly before the eyes of the
two armies in Rhandeia, just where the capitulation had been concluded,
and to deposit it before the effigy of the emperor, promising not to
put it on again until he should have received it from his hand, and
that in Rome itself. This was done (63). By this humiliation there
was no change in the fact that the Roman general, instead of waging
the war intrusted to him, concluded peace on the terms rejected by
his government.37 But the statesmen who formerly took the lead had
meanwhile died or retired, the personal government of the emperor
was installed in their stead, and the solemn act in Rhandeia and the
spectacle in prospect of the investiture of the Parthian prince with
the crown of Armenia in the capital of the empire failed not to produce
their effect on the public, and above all on the emperor in person.
The peace was ratified and fulfilled.Tiridates in Rome. In the year 66 the Parthian
prince appeared according to promise in Rome, escorted by 3000 Parthian
horsemen, bringing as hostages the children of his three brothers as
well as those of Monobazus of Adiabene. Falling on his knees he saluted
his liege lord seated on the imperial throne in the market-place of the
capital, and here the latter in presence of all the people bound the
royal chaplet round his brow.
The East under the Flavians.The conduct on both sides, cautious, and we might almost say
peaceful, of the last nominally ten years’ war, and its corresponding
conclusion by the actual transfer of Armenia to the Parthians, while
the susceptibilities of the mightier western empire were spared, bore
good fruit. Armenia, under the national dynasty recognised by the
Romans, was more dependent on them than formerly under the rulers
forced upon the country. A Roman garrison was left at least in the
district of Sophene, which most closely bordered on the Euphrates.38
For the re-establishment of Artaxata the permission of the emperor was
sought and granted, and the building was helped on by the emperor Nero
with money and workmen. Between the two mighty states separated from
each other by the Euphrates at no time has an equally good relation
subsisted as after the conclusion of the treaty of Rhandeia in the last
years of Nero and onward under the three rulers of the Flavian house.
Other circumstances contributed to this. The masses of Transcaucasian
peoples, perhaps allured by their participation in the last wars,
during which they had found their way to Armenia as mercenaries, partly
of the Iberians, partly of the Parthians, began then to threaten
especially the western Parthian provinces, but at the same time the
eastern provinces of the Roman empire. Probably in order to check them,
immediately after the Armenian war in the year 63, the annexation was
ordained of the so-called kingdom of Pontus, i.e. the south-east
corner of the coast of the Black Sea, with the town of Trapezus and the
region of the Phasis. The great Oriental expedition, which this emperor
was just on the point of beginning when the catastrophe overtook him
(68), and for which he already had put the flower of the troops of the
West on the march, partly to Egypt, partly along the Danube, was meant
no doubt to push forward the imperial frontier in other directions;39
but its proper aim was the passes of the Caucasus above Tiflis,
and the Scythian tribes settled on the northern slope, in the first
instance the Alani.40 These were just assailing Armenia on the one
side and Media on the other. So little was that expedition of Nero
directed against the Parthians that it might rather be conceived of as
undertaken to help them; overagainst the wild hordes of the north a
common defensive action was at any rate indicated for the two civilised
states of the West and East. Vologasus indeed declined with equal
friendliness the amicable summons of his Roman colleague to visit him,
just as his brother had done, at Rome, since he had no liking on his
part to appear in the Roman forum as a vassal of the Roman ruler; but
he declared himself ready to present himself before the emperor when
he should arrive in the East, and the Orientals doubtless, though not
the Romans, sincerely mourned for Nero. King Vologasus addressed to the
senate officially an entreaty to hold Nero’s memory in honour, and,
when a pseudo-Nero subsequently emerged, he met with sympathy above all
in the Parthian state.
Arrangements of Vespasian.Nevertheless the Parthian was not so much concerned about the
friendship of Nero as about that of the Roman state. Not merely
did he refrain from any encroachment during the crises of the
four-emperor-year,41 but correctly estimating the probable result of
the pending decisive struggle, he offered to Vespasian, when still in
Alexandria, 40,000 mounted archers for the conflict with Vitellius,
which, of course, was gratefully declined. But above all he submitted
without more ado to the arrangements which the new government made
for the protection of the east frontier. Vespasian had himself as
governor of Judaea become acquainted with the inadequacy of the
military resources statedly employed there; and, when he exchanged
this governorship for the imperial power, not only was Commagene again
converted, after the precedent of Tiberius, from a kingdom into a
province, but the number of the standing legions in Roman Asia was
raised from four to seven, to which number they had been temporarily
brought up for the Parthian and again for the Jewish war. While,
further, there had been hitherto in Asia only a single larger military
command, that of the governor of Syria, three such posts of high
command were now instituted there. Syria, to which Commagene was added,
retained as hitherto four legions; the two provinces hitherto occupied
only by troops of the second order, Palestine and Cappadocia, were
furnished, the first with one, the second with two legions.42 Armenia
remained a Roman dependent principality in possession of the Arsacids,
but under Vespasian a Roman garrison was stationed beyond the Armenian
frontier in the Iberian fortress Harmozika near Tiflis,43 and
accordingly at this time Armenia also must have been militarily in the
Roman power. All these measures, however little they contained even a
threat of war, were pointed against the eastern neighbour. Nevertheless
Vologasus was after the fall of Jerusalem the first to offer to
the Roman crown-prince his congratulations on the strengthening of
the Roman rule in Syria, and he accepted without remonstrance the
encampment of the legions in Commagene, Cappadocia, and Lesser Armenia.
Nay, he even once more incited Vespasian to that Transcaucasian
expedition, and besought the sending of a Roman army against the Alani
under the leadership of one of the imperial princes; although Vespasian
did not enter into this far-seeing plan, that Roman force can hardly
have been sent into the region of Tiflis for any other object than for
closing the pass of the Caucasus, and in so far it represented there
also the interests of the Parthians. In spite of the strengthening of
the military position of Rome on the Euphrates, or even perhaps in
consequence of it—for to instil respect into a neighbour is a means
of preserving the peace—the state of peace remained essentially
undisturbed during the whole rule of the Flavians. If—as cannot be
surprising, especially when we consider the constant change of the
Parthian dynasts—collisions now and then occurred, and war-clouds
even made their appearance, they disappeared again as quickly.44 The
emergence of a pseudo-Nero in the last years of Vespasian—he it was
who gave the impulse to the Revelation of John—might almost have led
to such a collision. The pretender, in reality a certain Terentius
Maximus from Asia Minor, but strikingly resembling the poet-emperor
in face, voice, and address, found not merely a conflux of adherents
in the Roman region of the Euphrates, but also support among the
Parthians. Among these at that time, as so often, several rulers seem
to have been in conflict with each other, and one of them, Artabanus,
because the emperor Titus declared against him, seems to have adopted
the cause of the Roman pretender. This, however, had no consequences;
on the contrary, soon afterwards the Parthian government delivered up
the pretender to the emperor Domitian.45 The commercial intercourse,
advantageous for both parties between Syria and the lower Euphrates,
where just then king Vologasus called into existence the new emporium
Vologasias or Vologasocerta, not far from Ctesiphon, must have
contributed its part towards promoting the state of peace.
The Parthian war of Trajan.Things came to a conflict under Trajan. In the earlier years of his
government he had made no essential change in eastern affairs, apart
from the conversion of the two client-states hitherto subsisting
on the border of the Syrian desert—the Nabataean of Petra and the
Jewish of Caesarea Paneas—into administrative districts directly
Roman (A.D. 106). The relations with the ruler of the Parthian kingdom
at that time, king Pacorus, were not the most friendly,46 but it
was only under his brother and successor Chosroes that a rupture
took place, and that again concerning Armenia. The Parthians were to
blame for it. When Trajan bestowed the vacated throne of the Armenian
king on Axidares the son of Pacorus, he kept within the limits of
his right; but king Chosroes described this personage as incapable
of governing, and arbitrarily installed in his stead another son of
Pacorus, Parthomasiris, as king.47 The answer to this was the Roman
declaration of war. Trajan left the capital towards the end of the year
114,48 to put himself at the head of the Roman troops of the East,
which were certainly once more found in the deepest degeneracy, but
were reorganised in all haste by the emperor, and reinforced besides by
better legions brought up from Pannonia.49
Envoys of the Parthian king met him at Athens; but they had nothing
to offer except the information that Parthomasiris was ready to accept
Armenia as a Roman fief, and were dismissed. The war began. In the
first conflicts on the Euphrates the Romans fared worst;50 but when
the old emperor, ready to fight and accustomed to victory, placed
himself at the head of the troops in the spring of 115, the Orientals
submitted to him almost without resistance. Moreover, among the
Parthians civil war once more prevailed, and a pretender, Manisarus,
had appeared against Chosroes. From Antioch the emperor marched to
the Euphrates and farther northward as far as the most northerly
legion-camp Satala in Lesser Armenia, whence he advanced into Armenia
and took the direction of Artaxata. On the way Parthomasiris appeared
in Elegeia and took the diadem from his head, in the hope of procuring
investiture through this humiliation, as Tiridates had once done.
But Trajan was resolved to make this vassal-state a province, and to
shift the eastern frontier of the empire generally. This he declared
to the Parthian prince before the assembled army, and directed him
with his suite to quit at once the camp and the kingdom; thereupon
a tumult took place, in which the pretender lost his life. Armenia
yielded to its fate, and became a Roman governorship. The princes also
of the Caucasian tribes, the Albani, the Iberi, farther on toward the
Black Sea the Apsilae, the Colchi, the Heniochi, the Lazi, and various
others, even those of the trans-Caucasian Sarmatae, were confirmed in
the relation of vassalage, or now subjected to it. Trajan thereupon
advanced into the territory of the Parthians and occupied Mesopotamia.
Here, too, all submitted without a blow; Batnae, Nisibis, Singara came
into the power of the Romans; in Edessa the emperor received not merely
the subjection of Abgarus, the ruler of the land, but also that of the
other dynasts, and, like Armenia, Mesopotamia became a Roman province.
Trajan took up once more his winter quarters in Antioch, where a
violent earthquake demanded more victims than the campaign of the
summer. In the next spring (116) Trajan, the “victor of the Parthians,”
as the senate now saluted him, advanced from Nisibis over the Tigris,
and occupied, not without encountering resistance at the crossing and
subsequently, the district of Adiabene; this became the third new Roman
province, named Assyria. The march went onward down the Tigris to
Babylonia; Seleucia and Ctesiphon fell into the hands of the Romans,
and with them the golden throne of the king and his daughter; Trajan
reached even the Persian satrapy of Mesene, and the great mercantile
town at the mouth of the Tigris, Charax Spasinu. This region also seems
to have been incorporated with the empire in such a way that the new
province Mesopotamia embraced the whole region enclosed by the two
rivers.
Revolt of Seleucia, and its siege.Full of longing, Trajan is said now to have wished for himself the
youth of Alexander, in order to carry from the margin of the Persian
Sea his arms into the Indian land of marvels. But he soon learned that
he needed them for nearer opponents. The great Parthian empire had
hitherto scarcely confronted in earnest his attack, and ofttimes sued
in vain for peace. But now on the way back at Babylon news reached the
emperor of the revolt of Babylonia and Mesopotamia; while he tarried at
the mouth of the Tigris the whole population of these new provinces
had risen against him;51 the citizens of Seleucia on the Tigris, of
Nisibis, indeed of Edessa itself, put the Roman garrisons to death
or chased them away and closed their gates. The emperor saw himself
compelled to divide his troops, and to send separate corps against the
different seats of the insurrection; one of these legions under Maximus
was, with its general, surrounded and cut to pieces in Mesopotamia. Yet
the emperor mastered the insurgents, particularly through his general
Lusius Quietus, already experienced in the Dacian war, a native sheikh
of the Moors. Seleucia and Edessa were besieged and burnt down. Trajan
went so far as to declare Parthia a Roman vassal-state, and invested
with it at Ctesiphon a partisan of Rome, the Parthian Parthamaspates,
although the Roman soldiers had not set foot on more than the western
border of the great-kingdom.
Death of Trajan.Then he began his return to Syria by the route along which he had
come, detained on the way by a vain attack on the Arabs in Hatra,
the residence of the king of the brave tribes of the Mesopotamian
desert, whose mighty works of fortification and magnificent buildings
are still at the present day imposing in their ruins. He intended
to continue the war next year, and so to make the subjection of the
Parthians a reality. But the combat in the desert of Hatra, in which
the sixty-year-old emperor had bravely fought with the Arab horsemen,
was to be his last. He sickened and died on the journey home (8th Aug.
117), without being able to complete his victory and to hold the
celebration of it in Rome; it was in keeping with his spirit that even
after death the honour of a triumph was accorded to him, and hence he
is the only one of the deified Roman emperors who even as god still
bears the title of victory.
Trajan’s Oriental policy.Trajan had not sought war with the Parthians, but it had been forced
upon him; not he, but Chosroes had broken the agreement as to Armenia,
which during the last forty years had been the basis of the state of
peace in the region of the Euphrates. If it is intelligible that the
Parthians did not acquiesce in it, since the continuing suzerainty of
the Romans over Armenia carried in itself the stimulus to revolt, we
must on the other hand acknowledge that in the way hitherto followed
further steps could not be taken than were taken by Corbulo; the
unconditional renunciation of Armenia, and—which was the necessary
consequence of it—the recognition of the Parthian state on a footing
of full equality, lay indeed beyond the horizon of Roman policy as
much as the abolition of slavery and similar ideas that could not be
thought of at that time. But if permanent peace could not be attained
by this alternative, there was left in the great dilemma of Roman
Oriental policy only the other course—the extension of direct Roman
rule to the left bank of the Euphrates. Therefore Armenia now became
a Roman province, and no less Mesopotamia. This was only in keeping
with the nature of the case. The conversion of Armenia from a Roman
vassal-state with a Roman garrison into a Roman governorship made not
much change externally; the Parthians could only be effectively ejected
from Armenia when they lost possession of the neighbouring region; and
above all, the Roman rule as well as the Roman provincial constitution
found a far more favourable soil in the half-Greek Mesopotamia than in
the thoroughly Oriental Armenia. Other considerations fell to be added.
The Roman customs-frontier in Syria was badly constituted, and to get
the international traffic from the great commercial marts of Syria
towards the Euphrates and the Tigris entirely into its power was an
essential gain to the Roman state, as indeed Trajan immediately set to
work to institute the new customs-dues at the Euphrates and Tigris.52
Even in a military point of view the boundary of the Tigris was easier
of defence than the previous frontier-line which ran along the Syrian
desert and thence along the Euphrates. The conversion of the region
of Adiabene beyond the Tigris into a Roman province, whereby Armenia
became an inland one, and the transformation of the Parthian empire
itself into a Roman vassal-state were corollaries of the same idea.
It is not meant to be denied that in a policy of conquest consistency
is a dangerous praise, and that Trajan after his fashion yielded in
these enterprises more than was reasonable to the effort after external
success, and went beyond the rational goal;53 but wrong is done
to him when his demeanour in the East is referred to blind lust of
conquest. He did what Caesar would have done had he lived. His policy
is but the other side of that of Nero’s statesmen, and the two are
as opposite, as they are equally consistent and equally warranted.
Posterity has justified more the policy of conquest than that of
concession.
Reaction under Hadrian and Pius.For the moment no doubt it was otherwise. The Oriental conquests of
Trajan lit up the gloomy evening of the Roman empire like flashes of
lightning in the darkness of the night; but, like these, they brought
no new morning. His successor found himself compelled to choose between
completing the unfinished work of subduing the Parthians or allowing
it to drop. The extension of the frontier could not be carried out at
all without a considerable increase of the army and of the budget; and
the shifting of the centre of gravity to the East, thereby rendered
inevitable, was a dubious strengthening of the empire. Hadrian and
Pius therefore returned entirely into the paths of the earlier
imperial period. Hadrian allowed the Roman vassal-king of Parthia,
Parthamaspates, to drop, and portioned him off in another way. He
evacuated Assyria and Mesopotamia, and voluntarily gave back these
provinces to their earlier ruler. He sent to him as well his captive
daughter; the permanent token of the victory won, the golden throne
of Ctesiphon, even the pacific Pius refused to deliver up again to
the Parthians. Hadrian as well as Pius earnestly endeavoured to live
in peace and friendship with their neighbour, and at no time do the
commercial relations between the Roman entrepôts on the Syrian east
frontier and the mercantile towns on the Euphrates seem to have been
more lively than at this epoch.
Armenia a vassal-state.Armenia ceased likewise to be a Roman province, and returned to its
former position as a Roman vassal-state and a Parthian appanage of the
second son.54 The princes of the Albani, and the Iberians on the
Caucasus, and the numerous small dynasts in the south-eastern corner of
the Black Sea likewise remained dependent.55 Roman garrisons were
stationed not merely on the coast in Apsarus56 and on the Phasis,
but, as can be shown, under Commodus in Armenia itself, not far from
Artaxata; in a military point of view all these states belonged to the
district of the commandant of Cappadocia.57 This supremacy, however,
very indefinite in its nature, seems to have been dealt with generally,
and in particular by Hadrian,58 in such a way that it appeared more
as a right of protection than as subjection proper, and at least the
more powerful of these princes did, and left undone, in the main what
pleased them. The common interest—which we have formerly brought
out—in warding off the wild trans-Caucasian tribes became still more
definitely prominent in this epoch, and evidently served as a bond in
particular between Romans and Parthians. Towards the end of the reign
of Hadrian the Alani, in agreement apparently with the king of Iberia,
at that time Pharasmanes II., on whom it primarily devolved to bar
the pass of the Caucasus against them, invaded the southern regions,
and pillaged not only the territory of the Albanians and Armenians,
but also the Parthian province of Media and the Roman province of
Cappadocia, though matters did not come to a waging of war in common,
but the gold of the ruler then reigning in Parthia, Vologasus III., and
the mobilising of the Cappadocian army on the part of the Romans,59
induced the barbarians to return, yet their interests coincided, and
the complaint which the Parthians lodged in Rome as to Pharasmanes of
Iberia, shows the concert of the two great powers.60
Parthian war under Marcus and Verus.The disturbances of the status quo came again from the Parthian side.
The suzerainty of the Romans over Armenia played a part in history
similar to that of the German empire over Italy; unsubstantial as it
was, it was yet constantly felt as an encroachment, and carried within
it the danger of war. Already under Hadrian the conflict was imminent;
the emperor succeeded in keeping the peace by a personal interview
with the Parthian prince. Under Pius the Parthian invasion of Armenia
seemed once more impending; his earnest dissuasive was in the first
instance successful. But even this most pacific of all emperors, who
had it more at heart to save the life of a burgess than to kill a
thousand foes, was obliged in the last period of his reign to prepare
himself for the attack and to reinforce the armies of the East. Hardly
had he closed his eyes (161), when the long-threatening thunder-cloud
discharged itself. By command of Vologasus IV. the Persian general
Chosroes61 advanced into Armenia, and placed the Arsacid prince
Pacorus on the throne. The governor of Cappadocia Severianus did what
was his duty, and led on his part the Roman troops over the Euphrates.
At Elegeia, just where a generation before the king Parthomasiris,
likewise placed by the Parthians on the Armenian throne, had humbled
himself in vain before Trajan, the armies encountered each other; the
Roman was not merely beaten but annihilated in a three days’ conflict;
the unfortunate general put himself to death, as Varus had formerly
done. The victorious Orientals were not content with the occupation
of Armenia, but crossed the Euphrates and invaded Syria; the army
stationed there was also defeated, and there were fears as to the
fidelity of the Syrians. The Roman government had no choice. As the
troops of the East showed on this occasion their small capacity for
fighting, and were besides weakened and demoralised by the defeat
which they had suffered, further legions were despatched to the East
from the West, even from the Rhine, and levies were ordered in Italy
itself. Lucius Verus, one of the two emperors who shortly before had
come to govern, went in person to the East (162) to take up the chief
command, and if he, neither warlike nor yet even faithful to his duty,
showed himself unequal to the task, and of his deeds in the East hardly
anything else is to be told than that he married his niece there and
was ridiculed for his theatrical enthusiasm even by the Antiochenes,
the governors of Cappadocia and Syria—in the former case first Statius
Priscus, then Martius Verus, in the latter Avidius Cassius,62 the
best generals of this epoch—managed the cause of Rome better than
the wearer of the crown. Once more, before the armies met, the Romans
offered peace; willingly would Marcus have avoided the severe war. But
Vologasus abruptly rejected the reasonable proposals; and this time
the pacific neighbour was also the stronger. Armenia was immediately
recovered; already, in the year 163, Priscus took the capital Artaxata,
and destroyed it. Not far from it the new capital of the country,
Kainepolis, in Armenia Nôr-Khalakh or Valarshapat (Etshmiazin) was
built by the Romans and provided with a strong garrison.63 In the
succeeding year instead of Pacorus Sohaemus, by descent also an
Arsacid, but a Roman subject and Roman senator, was nominated as king
of Great Armenia.64 In a legal point of view nothing was changed in
Armenia; yet the bonds which joined it to Rome were drawn tighter.
Conflicts in Syria and Mesopotamia.The conflicts in Syria and Mesopotamia were more serious. The line
of the Euphrates was obstinately defended by the Parthians; after a
keen combat on the right bank at Sura the fortress of Nicephorium
(Ragga) on the left was stormed by the Romans. Still more vehemently
was the passage at Zeugma contested; but here too victory remained
with the Romans in the decisive battle at Europus (Djerabis to the
south of Biredjik). They now advanced on their part into Mesopotamia.
Edessa was besieged, Dausara not far from it stormed; the Romans
appeared before Nisibis; the Parthian general saved himself by
swimming over the Tigris. The Romans might from Mesopotamia undertake
the march to Babylon. The satraps forsook in part the banners of the
defeated great-king; Seleucia, the great capital of the Hellenes on
the Euphrates, voluntarily opened its gates to the Romans, but was
afterwards burnt down by them, because the burgesses were rightly
or wrongly accused of an understanding with the enemy. The Parthian
capital, Ctesiphon, was also taken and destroyed; with good reason at
the beginning of the year 165 the senate could salute the two rulers
as the Parthian grand-victors. In the campaign of this year Cassius
even penetrated into Media; but the outbreak of a pestilence, more
especially in these regions, decimated the troops and compelled them to
return, accelerating perhaps even the conclusion of peace. The result
of the war was the cession of the western district of Mesopotamia; the
princes of Edessa and of Osrhoene became vassals of Rome, and the town
of Carrhae, which had for long Greek leanings, became a free town under
Roman protection.65 As regards extent, especially in presence of the
complete success of the war, the increase of territory was moderate,
but yet of importance, inasmuch as thereby the Romans gained a footing
on the left bank of the Euphrates. We may add that the territories
occupied were given back to the Parthians and the status quo was
restored. On the whole, therefore, the policy of reserve adopted by
Hadrian was now abandoned once more, and there was a return to the
course of Trajan. This is the more remarkable, as the government of
Marcus certainly cannot be reproached with ambition and longing after
aggrandisement; what it did it did under compulsion and in modest
limits.
Parthian wars under Severus.The emperor Severus pursued the same course further and more decidedly.
The year of the three emperors, 193, had led to the war between the
legions of the West and those of the East, and with Pescennius Niger
the latter had succumbed. The Roman vassal-princes of the East, and
as well the ruler of the Parthians, Vologasus V., son of Sanatrucius,
had, as was natural, recognised Niger, and even put their troops at
his disposal; the latter had at first gratefully declined, and then,
when his cause took a turn to the worse, invoked their aid. The other
Roman vassals, above all the prince of Armenia, cautiously kept back;
only Abgarus, the prince of Edessa, sent the desired contingent.
The Parthians promised aid, and it came at least from the nearest
districts, from the prince Barsemias of Hatra in the Mesopotamian
desert, and from the satrap of the Adiabeni beyond the Tigris. Even
after Niger’s death (194) these strangers not merely remained in the
Roman Mesopotamia, but even demanded the withdrawal of the Roman
garrisons stationed there and the giving back of this territory.66
Province of Mesopotamia.Thereupon Severus advanced into Mesopotamia and took possession of the
whole extensive and important region. From Nisibis an expedition was
conducted against the Arab prince of Hatra, which, however, did not
succeed in taking the fortified town; even beyond the Tigris against
the satrap of Adiabene the generals of Severus accomplished nothing
of importance.67 But Mesopotamia, i.e. the whole region between
the Euphrates and Tigris as far as the Chaboras, became a Roman
province, and was occupied with two legions newly created on account
of this extension of territory. The principality of Edessa continued
to subsist as a Roman fief, but was now no longer border-territory
but surrounded by land directly imperial. The considerable and strong
city of Nisibis, thenceforth called after the name of the emperor and
organised as a Roman colony, became the capital of the new province
and seat of the governor. After an important portion of territory had
thus been torn from the Parthian kingdom, and armed force had been
used against two satraps dependent on it, the great-king made ready
with his troops to oppose the Romans. Severus offered peace, and ceded
for Mesopotamia a portion of Armenia. But the decision of arms was
thereby only postponed. As soon as Severus had started for the West,
whither the complication with his co-ruler in Gaul recalled him, the
Parthians broke the peace68 and advanced into Mesopotamia; the prince
of Osrhoene was driven out, the land was occupied, and the governor,
Laetus, one of the most excellent warriors of the time, was besieged
in Nisibis. He was in great danger, when Severus once more arrived
in the East in the year 198, after Albinus had succumbed. Thereupon
the fortune of war turned. The Parthians retreated, and now Severus
took the offensive. He advanced into Babylonia, and won Seleucia
and Ctesiphon; the Parthian king saved himself with a few horsemen
by flight, the crown-treasure became the spoil of the victors, the
Parthian capital was abandoned to the pillage of the Roman soldiers,
and more than 100,000 captives were brought to the Roman slave market.
The Arabians indeed in Hatra defended themselves better than the
Parthian state itself; in vain Severus endeavoured in two severe sieges
to reduce the desert-stronghold. But in the main the success of the
two campaigns of 198 and 199 was complete. By the erection of the
province of Mesopotamia and of the great command there, Armenia lost
the intermediate position which it hitherto had; it might remain in
its previous relations and apart from formal incorporation. The land
retained thus its own troops, and the imperial government even paid for
these subsequently a contribution from the imperial chest.69
The change of government in the West and in the East.The further development of these relations as neighbours was
essentially influenced by the changes which internal order underwent
in the two empires. If under the dynasty of Nerva, and not less
under Severus, the Parthian state, often torn asunder by civil war
and contention for the crown, had been confronted by the relatively
stable Roman monarchy as superior, this order of things broke down
after Severus’s death, and almost for a century there followed in the
western empire mostly wretched and thoroughly ephemeral regents, who
in presence of other countries were constantly hesitating between
arrogance and weakness. While the scale of the West thus sank that
of the East rose. A few years after the death of Severus (211)
a revolution took place in Iran, which not merely, like so many
earlier crises, overthrew the ruling regent, nor even merely called
to the government another dynasty instead of the decayed Arsacids,
but, unchaining the national and religious elements for a mightier
upward flight, substituted for the bastard civilisation—pervaded
by Hellenism—of the Parthian state the state-organisation, faith,
manners, and princes of that province which had created the old Persian
empire, and, since its transition to the Parthian dynasty, preserved
within it as well the tombs of Darius and Xerxes as the germs of the
regeneration of the people. The re-establishment of the great-kingdom
of the Persians overthrown by Alexander ensued through the emergence of
the dynasty of the Sassanids. Let us cast a glance at this new shape of
things before we pursue further the course of Romano-Parthian relations
in the East.
The Sassanids.It has already been stated that the Parthian dynasty, although it had
wrested Iran from Hellenism, was yet regarded by the nation as, so to
speak, illegitimate. Artahshatr, or in new Persian Ardashir—so the
official biography of the Sassanids reports—came forward to revenge
the blood of Dara murdered by Alexander, and to bring back the rule to
the legitimate family and re-establish it, such as it had been at the
time of his forefathers before the divisional kings. Under this legend
lies a good deal of reality. The dynasty which bears the name of Sasan,
the grandfather of Ardashir, was no other than the royal dynasty of the
Persian province; Ardashir’s father, Papak or Pabek,70 and a long
list of his ancestors had, under the supremacy of the Arsacids, swayed
the sceptre in this ancestral land of the Iranian nation,71 had
resided in Istachr, not far from the old Persepolis, and marked their
coins with Iranian language and Iranian writing, and with the sacred
emblems of the Persian national faith, while the great-kings had their
abode in the half-Greek border-land, and had their coins stamped in the
Greek language and after the Greek style. The fundamental organisation
of the Iranian state-system—the great-kingdom holding superiority
over the divisional kings—was under the two dynasties as little
different as that of the empire of the German nation under the Saxon
and the Suabian emperors. Only for this reason in that official version
the time of the Arsacids is designated as that of the divisional-kings,
and Ardashir as the first common head of all Iran after the last
Darius, because in the old Persian empire the Persian province stood
related alike to the other provinces and to the Parthians, as in the
Roman state Italy stood related to the provinces, and the Persian
disputed with the Parthian the legitimate title to the great-kingdom
connected de jure with his province.72
Extent of the Sassanid kingdom.What was the relation of the Sassanid kingdom to that of the Arsacids
in point of extent, is a question to which tradition gives no
sufficient answer. The provinces of the west collectively remained
subject to the new dynasty after it sat firm in the saddle, and the
claims which it set up against the Romans went, as we shall see, far
beyond the pretensions of the Arsacids. But how far the rule of the
Sassanids reached towards the West, and when it advanced to the Oxus
which was subsequently regarded as the legitimate boundary between Iran
and Turan, are matters withdrawn from our field of vision.73
The state of the Sassanids.The state-system of Iran did not undergo quite a fundamental
transformation in consequence of the coming in of the new dynasty. The
official title of the first Sassanid ruler, as it is given uniformly
in three languages under the rock-relief of Nakshi-Rustam, “The
Mazda-servant God Artaxares, king of kings of the Arians, of divine
descent,”74 is substantially that of the Arsacids, except that the
Iranian nation, as already in the old native regal title, and the
indigenous god are now expressly named. That a dynasty having its
home in Persis came in lieu of one originally alien in race and only
nationalised, was a work and a victory of national reaction; but the
force of circumstances placed various insurmountable barriers in the
way of the consequences thence resulting. Persepolis, or, as it is now
called, Istachr, becomes again nominally the capital of the empire,
and there on the same rock-wall, alongside of the similar monuments of
Darius, the remarkable statues and still more remarkable inscriptions
just mentioned proclaim the fame of Ardashir and Shapur; but the
administration could not well be conducted from this remote locality,
and Ctesiphon continued still to be its centre. The new Persian
government did not resume the de jure prerogative of the Persians,
as it had subsisted under the Achaemenids; while Darius named himself
"a Persian son of a Persian, an Arian from Arian stock," Ardashir named
himself, as we saw, simply king of the Arians. We do not know whether
Persian elements were introduced afresh into the great houses apart
from the royal; in any case several of them remained, like the Surên
and the Carên; only under the Achaemenids, not under the Sassanids
these were exclusively Persian.
Church and priesthood under the Sassanids.Even in a religious point of view no change, strictly so called, set
in; but the faith and the priests gained under the Persian great-kings
an influence and a power such as they had never possessed under
the Parthian. It may well be that the twofold diffusion of foreign
worships in the direction of Iran—of Buddhism from the East and
of the Jewish-Christian faith from the West—brought by their very
hostility a regeneration to the old religion of Mazda. The founder of
the new dynasty, Ardashir, was, as is credibly reported, a zealous
fire-worshipper, and himself took priestly orders; therefore, it is
further said, from that time the order of the Magi became influential
and arrogant, while it had hitherto by no means had such honour and
such freedom, but on the contrary had not been held in much account
by the rulers. “Thenceforth all the Persians honour and revere the
priests; public affairs are arranged according to their counsels and
oracles; each treaty and each law-dispute undergoes their inspection
and their judgment, and nothing appears to the Persian right and legal
which has not been confirmed by a priest.” Accordingly we encounter
an arrangement of spiritual administration which reminds us of the
position of the Pope and the bishops alongside of the Emperor and
the princes. Each circle is placed under a chief-Magian (Magupat,
lord of Magians, in new Persian Mobedh), and these all in turn under
the chiefest of the chief Magians (Mobedhan-Mobedh), the counterpart
of “the king of kings,” and now it is he who crowns the king. The
consequences of this priestly dominion did not fail to appear: the
rigid ritual, the restrictive precepts as to guilt and expiation,
science resolving itself into a wild system of oracles and of magic,
while belonging from the first to Parsism, in all probability only
attained to their full development at this epoch.
The languages of the country under the Sassanids.Traces of the national reaction appear also in the use of the native
language and the native customs. The largest Greek city of the Parthian
empire, the ancient Seleucia, continued to subsist, but it was
thenceforth called not after the name of the Greek marshal, but after
that of its new master, Beh, or better, Ardashir. The Greek language
hitherto at any rate always in use, although debased and no longer
ruling alone, disappears on the emergence of the new dynasty at once
from the coins, and only on the inscriptions of the first Sassanids
is it still to be met with by the side of, and behind, the language
proper of the land. The “Parthian writing,” the Pahlavî, maintains its
ground, but alongside of it comes a second little different and indeed,
as the coins show, as properly official, probably that used hitherto in
the Persian province, so that the oldest monuments of the Sassanids,
like those of the Achaemenids, are trilingual, somewhat as in the
German middle ages Latin, Saxon, and Franconian were employed side by
side. After king Sapor I. († 272) the bilingual usage disappears, and
the second mode of writing alone retains its place, inheriting the
name Pahlavî. The year of the Seleucids, and the names of the months
belonging to it, disappear with the change of dynasty; in their stead
come, according to old Persian custom, the years of the rulers and the
native Persian names of months.75 Even the old Persian legend is
transferred to the new Persia. The still extant “history of Ardashir,
son of Papak,” which makes this son of a Persian shepherd arrive at
the Median court, perform menial offices there, and then become the
deliverer of his people, is nothing but the old tale of Cyrus changed
to the new names. Another fable-book of the Indian Parsees is able to
tell how king Iskander Rumi, i.e. “Alexander the Roman,” had caused
the holy books of Zarathustra to be burnt, and how they were then
restored by the pious Ardaviraf when king Ardashir had mounted the
throne. Here the Romano-Hellene confronts the Persian; the legend has,
as might be expected, forgotten the illegitimate Arsacid.
Government of the Sassanids.In other respects the state of things remained essentially the same.
In a military point of view in particular, the armies of the Sassanids
were certainly not regular and trained troops, but the levy of men
capable of arms, into which with the national movement a new spirit
may doubtless have passed, but which afterwards, as before, was based
in the main on the cavalry-service of the nobility. The administration
too remained as it was; the able ruler took steps with inexorable
sternness against the highway-robber as against the exacting official,
and, compared at least with the later Arabic and the Turkish rule, the
subjects of the Sassanid empire found themselves prosperous and the
state-chest full.
The new Persians and the Romans.But the alteration in the position of the new kingdom with reference
to the Roman is significant. The Arsacids never felt themselves quite
on a level with the Caesars. Often as the two states encountered each
other in war and peace as powers equal in weight, and decidedly as
the view of two great-powers dominated the Roman East (p. 1), there
remained with the Roman power a precedence similar to that which the
holy Roman empire of the German nation possessed throughout centuries,
very much to its hurt. Acts of subjection, such as the Parthian kings
took upon themselves in presence of Tiberius (p. 44) and of Nero (52),
without being compelled to them by extreme necessity, cannot be at
all conceived of on the Roman side. It cannot be accident that a gold
coin was never struck under the government of the Arsacids, and the
very first Sassanid ruler practised coining in gold; this is the most
palpable sign of sovereignty unrestricted by any duties of a vassal.
To the claim of the empire of the Caesars alone to the power of
coining money for universal circulation the Arsacids without exception
yielded, at least in so far that they themselves refrained generally
from coining, and left coinage in silver and copper to the towns or the
satraps; the Sassanids again struck gold pieces, as did king Darius.
The great-kingdom of the East at length demanded its full right; the
world no longer belonged to the Romans alone. The submissiveness of
the Orientals and the supremacy of the Occidentals were of the past.
Accordingly, in place of the relations between Romans and Parthians,
as hitherto, always reverting afresh to peace, there now came for
generations embittered hostility.
Parthian war of Severus Antoninus.After having set forth the new state organisation, with which the
sinking Rome was soon to contend, we resume the thread of our
narrative. Antoninus, son and successor of Severus, not a warrior and
statesman like his father, but a dissolute caricature of both, must
have had the design—so far as in the case of such personages we can
speak of design at all—to bring the East entirely into the Roman
power. It was not difficult to place the princes of Osrhoene and of
Armenia, after they had been summoned to the imperial court, under
arrest, and to declare their fiefs forfeited. But on the arrival of the
news a revolt broke out in Armenia. The Arsacid prince Tiridates was
proclaimed king, and invoked the protection of the Parthians. Thereupon
Antoninus put himself at the head of a large military force, and
appeared in the East in the year 216, to put down the Armenians, and
in case of need also the Parthians. Tiridates himself at once gave up
the cause as lost, although the division sent to Armenia subsequently
encountered vehement resistance there; and he fled to the Parthians.
The Romans demanded his surrender. The Parthians were not inclined on
his account to enter into a war, the more especially as just then the
two sons of king Vologasus V., Vologasus VI. and Artabanus, were in
bitter feud over the succession to the throne. The former yielded when
the Roman demand was imperiously repeated, and delivered up Tiridates.
Thereupon the emperor desired from Artabanus, who had meanwhile
obtained recognition, the hand of his daughter for the express object
of thus obtaining the kingdom by marriage, and of bringing East and
West under one rule. The rejection of this wild proposal76 was the
signal for war; the Romans declared it, and crossed the Tigris. The
Parthians were unprepared; without encountering resistance the Romans
burnt down the towns and villages in Adiabene, and ruthlessly destroyed
even the old royal tombs at Arbela.77 But Artabanus made the utmost
exertions for the next campaign, and put into the field a powerful
force in the spring of 217. Antoninus, who had spent the winter in
Edessa, was assassinated by his officers just as he was setting out
for this second campaign. His successor Macrinus, unconfirmed in the
government and held in little repute, at the head, moreover, of an
army defective in discipline and tone and shaken by the murder of the
emperor, would gladly have rid himself of a war wantonly instigated
and assuming very serious proportions. He sent the prisoners back to
the Parthian king, and threw the blame of the outrages committed on
his predecessor. But Artabanus was not content with this; he demanded
compensation for all the devastation committed, and the evacuation
of Mesopotamia. Thus matters came to a battle at Nisibis, in which
the Romans had the worst. Nevertheless the Parthians, partly because
their levy seemed as though it would break up, perhaps also under
the influence of Roman money, granted peace (218) on comparatively
favourable terms. Rome paid a considerable war compensation (50,000,000
denarii), but retained Mesopotamia. Armenia remained with Tiridates,
but the latter took it as in dependency on the Romans. In Osrhoene also
the old princely house was reinstated.
King Ardashir.This was the last treaty of peace which the Arsacid dynasty concluded
with Rome. Almost immediately afterwards, and perhaps partly in
consequence of this bargain, which certainly, as things stood, might be
looked upon by the Orientals as an abandonment by their own government
of the victories achieved, the insurrection began, which converted the
state of the Parthians into a state of the Persians. Its leader, king
Ardashir or Artaxares (A.D. 224–241) strove for several years with
the adherents of the old dynasty before he attained full success;78
after three great battles, in the last of which king Artabanus fell,
he was master in the Parthian empire proper, and could march into the
Mesopotamian desert to subdue the Arabs of Hatra and thence to advance
against the Roman Mesopotamia. But the brave and independent Arabs
defended themselves now against the Persians as formerly against the
Roman invasion, in their huge walls with good success; and Artaxares
found himself led to operate in the first instance against Media and
Armenia, where the Arsacids still maintained themselves, and the sons
of Artabanus had found a refuge. It was not till about the year 230
that he turned against the Romans, and not merely declared war against
them, but demanded back all the provinces which had formerly belonged
to the kingdom of his predecessors, Darius and Xerxes—in other words,
the cession of all Asia. To emphasise his threatening words, he led a
mighty army over the Euphrates; Mesopotamia was occupied and Nisibis
besieged; the enemy’s cavalry appeared in Cappadocia and in Syria.
Severus Alexander.The Roman throne was then occupied by Severus Alexander, a ruler in
whom nothing was warlike but the name, and for whom in reality his
mother Mamaea conducted the government. Urgent, almost humble proposals
of peace on the part of the Roman government remained without effect;
nothing was left but the employment of arms. The masses of the Roman
army gathered together from all the empire were divided; the left wing
took the direction of Armenia and Media, the right that of Mesene at
the mouth of the Euphrates and Tigris, perhaps in the calculation that
they might in the former as in the latter quarter have the support
of the adherents of the Arsacids; the main army went to Mesopotamia.
The troops were numerous enough, but without discipline and tone; a
Roman officer of high position at this time himself testifies that
they were pampered and insubordinate, refused to fight, killed their
officers, and deserted in crowds. The main force did not get beyond
the Euphrates,79 for his mother represented to the emperor that it
was not his business to fight for his subjects, but theirs to fight
for him. The right wing, assailed in the level country by the Persian
main force and abandoned by the emperor, was cut up. Thereupon, when
the emperor issued orders to the wing which had pushed forward towards
Media to draw back, the latter also suffered severely in the winter
retreat through Armenia. If the matter went no further than this sorry
return of the great Oriental army to Antioch, if no complete disaster
occurred, and even Mesopotamia remained in Roman power, this appears
due, not to the merit of the Roman troops or their leaders but to the
fact that the Persian levy was weary of the conflict and went home.80
But they went not for long, the more especially as soon after, upon
the murder of the last offshoot of the dynasty of Severus, the several
army-commanders and the government in Rome began to fight about the
occupation of the Roman throne, and consequently were at one in their
concern for the affairs of external foes. Under Maximinus (235–238) the
Roman Mesopotamia fell into the power of Ardashir, and the Persians
once more prepared to cross the Euphrates.81
The Persian war of Gordian.After the internal troubles were in some measure pacified, and Gordian
III., almost still a boy, under the protection of the commandant of
Rome and soon of his father-in-law Furius Timesitheus, bore undisputed
sway in the whole empire, war was solemnly declared against the
Persians, and in the year 242 a great Roman army advanced under the
personal conduct of the emperor, or rather of his father-in-law, into
Mesopotamia. It had complete success; Carrhae was recovered, at Resaina
between Carrhae and Nisibis the army of the Persian king Shahpuhr or
Sapor (reigning 241–272), who shortly before had followed his father
Ardashir, was routed, and in consequence of this victory Nisibis was
occupied. All Mesopotamia was reconquered; it was resolved to march
back to the Euphrates, and thence down the stream against the enemy’s
capital Ctesiphon. Unhappily Timesitheus died, and his successor,
Marcus Julius Philippus, a native of Arabia from the Trachonitis,
used the opportunity to set aside the young ruler. When the army had
accomplished the difficult march through the valley of the Chaboras
towards the Euphrates, the soldiers in Circesium, at the confluence of
the Chaboras with the Euphrates, did not find—in consequence, it is
alleged, of arrangements made by Philippus—the provisions and stores
which they had expected, and laid the blame of this on the emperor.
Nevertheless the march in the direction of Ctesiphon was begun, but at
the very first station, near Zaitha (somewhat below Mejadîn), a number
of insurgent guards killed the emperor (in the spring or summer of
244), and proclaimed their commandant, Philippus, as Augustus in his
stead. The new ruler did what the soldiers or at least the guardsmen
desired, and not merely gave up the intended expedition against
Ctesiphon, but led the troops at once back to Italy. He purchased
the permission to do so from the conquered enemy by the cession of
Mesopotamia and Armenia, and so of the Euphrates frontier. But this
conclusion of peace excited such indignation that the emperor did not
venture to put it in execution, and allowed the garrisons to remain
in the ceded provinces.82 The fact that the Persians, at least
provisionally, acquiesced in this, gives the measure of what they
were then able to do. It was not the Orientals, but the Goths, the
pestilence that raged for fifteen years, and the dissensions of the
corps-leaders quarrelling with one another for the crown, that broke
the last strength of the empire.
Palmyra.At this point, when the Roman East in its struggle with the Persian
is left to its own resources, it will be appropriate to make mention
of a remarkable state, which, created by and for the desert-traffic,
now for a short time takes up a leading part in political history.
The oasis of Palmyra, in the native language Tadmor, lies half-way
between Damascus and the Euphrates. It is of importance solely as
intermediate station between the Euphrates and the Mediterranean;
this significance it was late in acquiring, and early lost again, so
that the flourishing time of Palmyra coincides nearly with the period
which we are here describing. As to the rise of the town there is an
utter absence of tradition.83 It is mentioned first on occasion
of the abode of Antonius in Syria in the year 71341 B.C., when he
made a vain attempt to possess himself of its riches; the documents
found there—the oldest dated Palmyrene inscription is of the year 745
9 B.C.—hardly reach much further back. It is not improbable that
its flourishing was connected with the establishment of the Romans
in the Syrian coast-region. So long as the Nabataeans and the towns
of Osrhoene were not directly Roman, the Romans had an interest in
providing another direct communication with the Euphrates, and this
thereupon led necessarily by way of Palmyra. Palmyra was not a Roman
foundation; Antonius took as the occasion for that predatory expedition
the neutrality of the merchants who were the medium of traffic between
the two great states, and the Roman horsemen turned back, without
having performed their work, before the chain of archers which the
Palmyrenes opposed to the attack. But already in the first imperial
period the city must have been reckoned as belonging to the empire,
because the tax-ordinances of Germanicus and of Corbulo issued for
Syria applied also for Palmyra; in an inscription of the year 80 we
meet with a Claudian phyle there; from Hadrian’s time the city calls
itself Hadriana Palmyra, and in the third century it even designates
itself a colony.
Military independence of Palmyra.The subjection of the Palmyrenes to the empire was, however, of a
different nature to the ordinary one, and similar in some measure to
the client-relation of the dependent kingdoms. Even in Vespasian’s time
Palmyra is called an intermediate region between the two great powers,
and in every collision between the Romans and Parthians the question
was asked, what policy the Palmyrenes would pursue. We must seek the
key to its distinctive position in the relations of the frontier and
the arrangements made for frontier-protection. The Syrian troops, so
far as they were stationed on the Euphrates itself, had their chief
position at Zeugma, opposite to Biredjik, at the great passage of the
Euphrates. Further down the stream, between the immediately Roman and
the Parthian territory was interposed that of Palmyra, which reached to
the Euphrates and included the next important place of crossing at Sura
opposite to the Mesopotamian town Nicephorium (later Callinicon, now
er-Ragga). It is more than probable that the guarding of this important
border-fortress as well as the securing of the desert-road between the
Euphrates and Palmyra, and also perhaps of a portion of the road from
Palmyra to Damascus, was committed to the community of Palmyra, and
that it was thus entitled and bound to make the military arrangements
necessary for this far from slight task.84 Subsequently doubtless
the imperial troops were brought up closer to Palmyra, and one of the
Syrian legions was moved to Danava between Palmyra and Damascus, and
the Arabian legion to Bostra; after Severus united Mesopotamia with
the empire, even here both banks of the Euphrates were in the Roman
power, and the Roman territory on the Euphrates ended no longer at
Sura but at Circesium, at the confluence of the Chaboras with the
Euphrates above Mejadîn. Then Mesopotamia also was strongly occupied
with imperial troops. But the Mesopotamian legions lay on the great
road in the north near Resaina and Nisibis, and even the Syrian and
Arabian troops did not supersede the need for the co-operation of the
Palmyrenes. Even the protection of Circesium and of this part of the
bank of the Euphrates may have been entrusted to the Palmyrenes. It was
not till after the decline of Palmyra, and perhaps in compensation for
it, that Circesium85 was made by Diocletian a strong fortress, which
thenceforth was here the basis of frontier-defence.
Administrative independence of Palmyra.The traces of this distinctive position of Palmyra are demonstrable
also in its institutions. The absence of the emperor’s name on the
Palmyrene coins is probably to be explained not from it, but from the
fact that the community issued almost nothing but small money. But
the treatment of the language speaks clearly. From the rule elsewhere
followed almost without exception by the Romans—of allowing in their
immediate territory only the use of the two imperial languages—Palmyra
was excepted. Here that language, which in the rest of Syria and
not less after the exile in Judaea was the usual medium of private
intercourse, but was restricted to the latter, maintained its ground in
public use, so long as the city existed at all. Essential differences
cannot be shown between the Palmyrene Syriac and that of the other
regions just named; the proper names, having not seldom an Arabic or
Jewish, or even Persian form, show the striking mixture of peoples, and
numerous words borrowed from Greek or Latin show the influence of the
Occidentals. It becomes subsequently a rule to append to the Syrian
text a Greek one, which in a decree of the Palmyrene common-council
of the year 137 is placed after the Palmyrene, but afterwards usually
precedes it; but mere Greek inscriptions of native Palmyrenes are
rare exceptions. Even in votive inscriptions which Palmyrenes set up
to their native gods in Rome,86 and in tombs of Palmyrene soldiers
that died in Africa or Britain, the Palmyrene rendering is added. So
too in Palmyra—while the Roman year was made the basis of dating
as in the rest of the empire—the names of the months were not the
Macedonian officially received in Roman Syria, but those which were
current in it in common intercourse at least among the Jews, and were
in use, moreover, among the Aramaean tribes living under Assyrian and
subsequently Persian rule.87
Palmyrene magistrates.The municipal organisation was moulded in the main after the pattern
of the Greek municipality of the Roman empire; the designations for
magistrates and council88 and even those of the colony are in
the Palmyrene texts retained for the most part from the imperial
languages. But in administration the district retained a greater
independence than is elsewhere assigned to urban communities. Alongside
of the civic officials we find, at least in the third century, the city
of Palmyra with its territory under a separate “headman” of senatorial
rank and Roman appointment, but chosen from the family of most repute
in the place; Septimius Hairanes, son of Odaenathus, is substantially a
prince of the Palmyrenes,89 who was doubtless not otherwise dependent
on the legate of Syria than were the client-princes on the neighbouring
imperial governors generally. A few years later we meet with his
son,90 Septimius Odaenathus, in the like position—indeed even
raised in rank—of hereditary prince.91 Similarly, Palmyra formed a
customs-district apart, in which the customs were leased on account,
not of the state, but of the community.92
Commercial position of Palmyra.The importance of Palmyra depended on the caravan-traffic. The heads
of the caravans (συνοδιάρχαι), which went from Palmyra to the great
entrepôts on the Euphrates, to Vologasias, the already mentioned
Parthian foundation not far from the site of the ancient Babylon,
and to Forath or Charax Spasinu, twin towns at its mouth, close on
the Persian Gulf, appear in the inscriptions as the most respected
city-burgesses,93 and fill not merely the magistracies of their
home, but in part also imperial offices; the great traders (ἀρχέμποροι)
and the guild of workers in gold and silver testify to the importance
of the city for trade and manufactures, and not less is its prosperity
attested by the still standing temples of the city and the long
colonnades of the city halls, as well as the massy and richly decorated
tombs. The climate is little favourable to agriculture—the place lies
near to the northern limit of the date palm, and does not derive its
Greek name from it—but there are found in the environs the remains of
great subterranean aqueducts and huge water-reservoirs artificially
constructed of square blocks, with the help of which the ground, now
destitute of all vegetation, must once upon a time have artificially
developed a rich culture. This riches, this national idiosyncrasy
not quite set aside even under Roman rule, and this administrative
independence, explain in some measure the part of Palmyra about the
middle of the third century in the great crisis, to the presentation of
which we now return.
Capture of the emperor Valerian.After the emperor Decius had fallen in the year 251 when fighting
against the Goths in Europe, the government of the empire, if at that
time there was still an empire and a government at all, left the East
entirely to its fate. While the pirates from the Black Sea ravaged
the coasts far and wide and even the interior, the Persian king Sapor
again assumed the aggressive. While his father had been content
with calling himself lord of Iran, he first designated himself—as
did the succeeding rulers after his example—the great-king of Iran
and non-Iran (p. 83, note), and thereby laid down, as it were, the
programme of his policy of conquest. In the year 252 or 253 he
occupied Armenia, or it submitted to him voluntarily, beyond doubt
carried likewise away by that resuscitation of the old Persian faith
and Persian habits; the legitimate king Tiridates sought shelter with
the Romans, the other members of the royal house placed themselves
under the banners of the Persian.94 After Armenia thus had become
Persian, the hosts of the Orientals overran Mesopotamia, Syria, and
Cappadocia; they laid waste the level country far and wide, but the
inhabitants of the larger towns, first of all the brave Edessenes,
repelled the attack of enemies little equipped for besieging. In the
West, meanwhile at least, a recognised government had been set up. The
emperor Publius Licinius Valerianus, an honest and well-disposed ruler,
but not resolute in character or equal to dealing with difficulties,
appeared at length in the East and resorted to Antioch. Thence he went
to Cappadocia, which the Persian roving hordes evacuated. But the
plague decimated his army, and he delayed long to take up the decisive
struggle in Mesopotamia. At length he resolved to bring help to the
sorely pressed Edessa, and crossed the Euphrates with his forces.
There, not far from Edessa, occurred the disaster which had nearly the
same significance for the Roman East as the victory of the Goths at the
mouth of the Danube and the fall of Decius—the capture of the emperor
Valerianus by the Persians (end of 259 or beginning of 260).95 As to
the more precise circumstances the accounts are conflicting. According
to one version, when he was attempting with a weak band to reach
Edessa, he was surrounded and captured by the far superior Persians.
According to another, he, although defeated, reached the beleaguered
town, but, as he brought no sufficient help and the provisions came to
an end only the more rapidly, he dreaded the outbreak of a military
insurrection, and therefore delivered himself voluntarily into the
hands of the enemy. According to a third, he, reduced to extremities,
entered into negotiations with Sapor; when the Persian king declined
to treat with envoys, he appeared personally in the enemy’s camp, and
was perfidiously made a prisoner.
The East without an emperor.Whichever of these narratives may come nearest to the truth, the
emperor died in the captivity of the enemy,96 and the consequence of
this disaster was the forfeiture of the East to the Persians. Above all
Antioch, the largest and richest city of the East, fell for the first
time since it was Roman into the power of the public foe, and in good
part through the fault of its own citizens. Mareades, an Antiochene
of rank, whom the council had expelled for the embezzlement of public
monies, brought the Persian army to his native town; whether it be a
fable that the citizens were surprised in the theatre itself by the
advancing foes, there is no doubt that they not merely offered no
resistance, but that a great part of the lower population, partly in
consideration of Mareades, partly in the hope of anarchy and pillage,
saw with pleasure the entrance of the Persians. Thus the city with all
its treasures became the prey of the enemy, and fearful ravages were
committed in it; Mareades indeed also was—we know not why—condemned
by king Sapor to perish by fire.97 Besides numerous smaller places,
the capitals of Cilicia and Cappadocia—Tarsus and Caesarea, the
latter, it is stated, a town of 400,000 inhabitants—suffered the same
fate. Endless trains of captives, who were led like cattle once a day
to the watering, covered the desert-routes of the East. On the return
home the Persians, it is alleged, in order the more rapidly to cross
a ravine, filled it up with the bodies of the captives whom they
brought with them. It is more credible that the great “imperial dam”
(Bend-i-Kaiser) at Sostra (Shuster) in Susiana, by which still at the
present day the water of the Pasitigris is conveyed to the higher-lying
regions, was built by these captives; as indeed the emperor Nero’s
architects had helped to build the capital of Armenia, and generally in
this domain the Occidentals always maintained their superiority. The
Persians nowhere encountered resistance from the empire; but Edessa
still held out, and Caesarea had bravely defended itself, and had only
fallen by treachery. The local resistance gradually passed beyond
a mere defensive behind the walls of towns, and the breaking up of
the Persian hosts, brought about by the wide extent of the conquered
territory, was favourable to the bold partisan. A self-appointed Roman
leader, Callistus,98 succeeded in a happy coup de main; with the
vessels which he had brought together in the ports of Cilicia he sailed
for Pompeiopolis—which the Persians were just besieging, while they
at the same time laid waste Lycaonia,—killed several thousand men,
and possessed himself of the royal harem. This induced the king, under
pretext of celebrating a festival that might not be put off, to go home
at once in such haste that, in order not to be detained, he purchased
from the Edessenes free passage through their territory in return for
all the Roman gold money which he had captured as booty. Odaenathus,
prince of Palmyra, inflicted considerable losses on the bands returning
home from Antioch before they crossed the Euphrates. But hardly was the
most urgent danger from the Persians obviated, when two of the most
noted among the army leaders of the East, left to themselves, Fulvius
Macrianus, the officer who administered the chest and the depot of the
army in Samosata,99 and the Callistus just mentioned, renounced
allegiance to the son and co-regent and now sole ruler Gallienus—for
whom, it is true, the East and the Persians were non-existent—and,
themselves refusing to accept the purple, proclaimed the two sons of
the former, Fulvius Macrianus and Fulvius Quietus, emperors (261).
This step taken by the two distinguished generals had the effect of
obtaining recognition for the two young emperors in Egypt and in all
the East, with the exception of Palmyra, the prince of which took the
side of Gallienus. One of them, Macrianus, went off with his father to
the West, in order to install this new government also there. But soon
fortune turned; in Illyricum Macrianus lost a battle and his life, not
against Gallienus, but against another pretender. Odaenathus turned
against the brother who remained behind in Syria; at Hemesa, where the
armies met, the soldiers of Quietus replied to the summons to surrender
that they would rather submit to anything than deliver themselves
into the hands of a barbarian. Nevertheless Callistus, the general of
Quietus, betrayed his master to the Palmyrene,100 and thus ended also
his short government.
Government of Odaenathus in the East.Therewith Palmyra stepped into the first place in the East. Gallienus,
more than sufficiently occupied by the barbarians of the West and the
military insurrections everywhere breaking out there, gave to the
prince of Palmyra, who alone had preserved fidelity to him in the
crisis just mentioned, an exceptional position without a parallel,
but under the prevailing circumstances readily intelligible; he, as
hereditary prince, or, as he was now called, king of Palmyra, became,
not indeed joint ruler, but independent lieutenant of the emperor for
the East.101 The local administration of Palmyra was conducted under
him by another Palmyrene, at the same time as imperial procurator
and as his deputy.102 Therewith the whole imperial power, so far
as it still subsisted at all in the East, lay in the hand of the
"barbarian," and the latter with his Palmyrenes, who were strengthened
by the remains of the Roman army corps and the levy of the land,
re-established the sway of Rome alike rapidly and brilliantly. Asia
and Syria were already evacuated by the enemy. Odaenathus crossed
the Euphrates, relieved at length the brave Edessenes, and retook
from the Persians the conquered towns Nisibis and Carrhae (264).
Probably Armenia also was at that time brought back under Roman
allegiance.103 Then he took—for the first time since Gordianus—the
offensive against the Persians, and marched on Ctesiphon. In two
different campaigns the capital of the Persian kingdom was invested by
him, and the neighbouring region laid waste, and there was a successful
battle with the Persians under its walls.104 Even the Goths, whose
predatory raids extended into the interior, retired when he set out for
Cappadocia. A development of power of this sort was a blessing for the
hard-pressed empire, and at the same time a serious danger. Odaenathus
no doubt observed all due formalities towards his Roman lord-paramount,
and sent the captured officers of the enemy and the articles of booty
to Rome for the emperor, who did not disdain to triumph over them; but
in fact the East under Odaenathus was not much less independent than
the West under Postumus, and we can easily understand how the officers
favourably disposed towards Rome made opposition to the Palmyrene
vice-emperor,105 and on the one hand there was talk of attempts of
Odaenathus to attach himself to the Persians, which were alleged to
have broken down only through Sapor’s arrogance,106 while on the
other hand the assassination of Odaenathus at Hemesa in 266–7 was
referred to instigation of the Roman government.107 The real murderer
was a brother’s son of Odaenathus, and there are no proofs of the
participation of the government. At any rate the crime made no change
in the position of affairs.
Government of Zenobia.The wife of the deceased, the queen Bat Zabbai, or in Greek, Zenobia,
a beautiful and sagacious woman of masculine energy,108 in virtue of
the hereditary right to the principate claimed for the son of herself
and Odaenathus, still in boyhood, Vaballathus or Athenodorus109—the
elder, Herodes, had perished with his father—the position of the
deceased, and in fact carried her point as well in Rome as in the East:
the regnal years of the son are reckoned from the death of the father.
For the son, not capable of government, the mother took part in counsel
and action,110 and she did not restrict herself to preserving the
state of possession, but on the contrary her courage or her arrogance
aspired to mastery over the whole imperial domain of the Greek tongue.
In the command over the East, which was committed to Odaenathus and
inherited from him by his son, the supreme authority over Asia Minor
and Egypt may doubtless have been included; but de facto Odaenathus
had in his power only Syria and Arabia, and possibly Armenia, Cilicia,
and Cappadocia. Now an influential Egyptian, Timagenes, summoned the
queen to occupy Egypt; accordingly she despatched her chief general
Zabdas with an army of, it is alleged, 70,000 men to the Nile. The land
resisted with energy; but the Palmyrenes defeated the Egyptian levy
and possessed themselves of Egypt. A Roman admiral Probus attempted to
dislodge them again, and even vanquished them, so that they set out
for Syria; but, when he attempted to bar their way at the Egyptian
Babylon not far from Memphis, he was defeated by the better local
knowledge of the Palmyrene general Timagenes, and he put himself to
death.111 When about the beginning of the year 270, after the death
of the emperor Claudius, Aurelian came in his stead, the Palmyrenes
bore sway over Alexandria. In Asia Minor too they made preparations to
establish themselves; their garrisons were pushed forward as far as
Ancyra in Galatia, and even in Chalcedon opposite Byzantium they had
attempted to assert the rule of their queen. All this happened without
the Palmyrenes renouncing the Roman government, nay probably on the
footing that the control of the East committed by the Roman government
to the prince of Palmyra was realised in this way, and they taxed the
Roman officers, who resisted the extension of the Palmyrene rule, with
rebellion against the imperial orders; the coins struck in Alexandria
name Aurelianus and Vaballathus side by side, and give the title of
Augustus only to the former. In substance, no doubt, the East here
detached itself from the empire, and the latter was divided into two
in the execution of an ordinance wrung from the wretched Gallienus by
necessity.
Aurelian against the Palmyrenes.The vigorous and prudent emperor, to whom the dominion now had fallen,
broke at once with the Palmyrene co-ordinate government, which then
could not but have and had as its consequence, that Vaballathus himself
was proclaimed by his people as emperor. Egypt was already, at the
close of the year 270, brought back to the empire after hard struggles
by the brave general Probus, afterwards the successor of Aurelian.112
It is true that the second city of the empire, Alexandria, paid for
this victory almost with its existence, as will be set forth in the
following section. More difficult was the reduction of the remote
Syrian oasis. All other Oriental wars of the imperial period had
chiefly been waged by imperial troops having their home in the East;
here, where the West had once more to subdue the revolted East, there
fought once more, as in the time of the free republic, Occidentals
against Orientals,113 the soldiers of the Rhine and of the Danube
with those of the Syrian desert. The mighty expedition began,
apparently towards the close of the year 271; without encountering
resistance the Roman army arrived at the frontier of Cappadocia; here
the town of Tyana, which barred the Cilician passes, gave serious
opposition. After it had fallen, and Aurelian, by gentle treatment of
the inhabitants, had smoothed his way to further successes, he crossed
the Taurus, and, passing through Cilicia, arrived in Syria. If Zenobia,
as is not to be doubted, had reckoned on active support from the side
of the Persian king, she found herself deceived. The aged king Shapur
did not interfere in this war, and the mistress of the Roman East
continued to be left to her own military resources, of which perhaps
even a portion took the side of the legitimate Augustus. At Antioch the
Palmyrene chief force under the general Zabdas stopped the emperor’s
way; Zenobia herself was present. A successful combat against the
superior Palmyrene cavalry on the Orontes delivered into the hands of
Aurelian the town, which not less than Tyana received full pardon—he
justly recognised that the subjects of the empire were hardly to be
blamed, when they had submitted to the Palmyrene prince appointed as
commander in chief by the Roman government itself. The Palmyrenes,
after having engaged in a conflict on their retreat at Daphne, the
suburb of Antioch, marched off, and struck into the great route which
leads from the capital of Syria to Hemesa and thence through the desert
to Palmyra.
Battle at Hemesa.Aurelian summoned the queen to submit, pointing to the notable losses
endured in the conflicts on the Orontes. These were Romans only,
answered the queen; the Orientals did not yet admit that they were
conquered. At Hemesa114 she took her stand for the decisive battle.
It was long and bloody; the Roman cavalry gave way and broke up in
flight; but the legions decided, and victory remained with the Romans.
The march was more difficult than the conflict. The distance from
Hemesa to Palmyra amounts in a direct line to seventy miles, and,
although at that epoch of highly developed Syrian civilisation the
region was not waste in the same degree as at present, the march of
Aurelian still remains a considerable feat, especially as the light
horsemen of the enemy swarmed round the Roman army on all sides.
Aurelian, however, reached his goal, and began the siege of the strong
and well-provisioned city; more difficult than the siege itself was
the bringing up of provisions for the besieging army. At length the
courage of the princess sank, and she escaped from the city to seek
aid from the Persians. Fortune still further helped the emperor. The
pursuing Roman cavalry took her captive with her son, just when she had
arrived at the Euphrates and was about to embark in the rescuing boat;
and the town, discouraged by her flight, capitulated (272). Aurelian
granted here too, as in all this campaign, full pardon to the subdued
burgesses. But a stern punishment was decreed over the queen and her
functionaries and officers. Zenobia, after she had for years borne
rule with masculine energy, did not now disdain to invoke a woman’s
privileges, and to throw the responsibility on her advisers, of whom
not a few, including the celebrated scholar, Cassius Longinus, perished
under the axe of the executioner. She herself might not be wanting
from the triumphal procession of the emperor, and she did not take
the course of Cleopatra, but marched in golden chains, as a spectacle
to the Roman multitude, before the chariot of the victor to the Roman
capitol. But before Aurelian could celebrate his victory he had to
repeat it.
Destruction of Palmyra.A few months after the surrender the Palmyrenes once more rose,
killed the small Roman garrison serving there, and proclaimed one
Antiochus115 as ruler, while they at the same time attempted to
induce the governor of Mesopotamia, Marcellinus, to revolt. The
news reached the emperor when he had just crossed the Hellespont.
He returned at once, and stood, earlier than friend or foe had
anticipated, once more before the walls of the insurgent city.
The rebels had not been prepared for this; there was this time no
resistance, but also no mercy. Palmyra was destroyed, the commonwealth
dissolved, the walls razed, the ornaments of the glorious temple of the
sun transferred to the temple which, in memory of this victory, the
emperor built to the sun-god of the East in Rome; only the forsaken
halls and walls remained, as they still stand in part at the present
day. This occurred in the year 273.116 The flourishing of Palmyra
was artificial, produced by the routes assigned to traffic and the
great public buildings dependent on it. Now the government withdrew
its hand from the unhappy city. Traffic sought and found other paths;
as Mesopotamia was then viewed as a Roman province and soon came again
to the empire, and the territory of the Nabataeans as far as the
port of Aelana was in Roman hands, this intermediate station might be
dispensed with, and the traffic may have betaken itself instead to
Bostra or Beroea (Aleppo). The short meteor-like splendour of Palmyra
and its princes was immediately followed by the desolation and silence
which, from that time down to the present day, enwrap the miserable
desert-village and the ruins of its colonnades.
Persian war of Carus.The ephemeral kingdom of Palmyra was in its origin as in its fall
closely bound up with the relations of the Romans to the non-Roman
East, but not less a part of the general history of the empire. For,
like the western empire of Postumus, the eastern empire of Zenobia
was one of those masses into which the mighty whole seemed then about
to resolve itself. If during its subsistence its leaders endeavoured
earnestly to set limits to the onset of the Persians, and indeed the
development of its power was dependent on that very fact, not merely
did it in its collapse seek deliverance from those same Persians,
but probably in consequence of the revolt of Zenobia Armenia and
Mesopotamia were lost to the Romans, and after the subjugation of
Palmyra the Euphrates again for a time formed the frontier. The queen,
when she arrived at it, hoped to find a reception among the Persians;
and Aurelian omitted to lead the legions over it, seeing that Gaul,
along with Spain and Britain, still at that time refused to recognise
the government. He and his successor Probus were not able to take
up this struggle. But when in the year 282, after the premature end
of the latter, the troops proclaimed the commander next in rank,
Marcus Aurelius Carus, as emperor, it was the first saying of the new
ruler that the Persians should remember this choice, and he kept it.
Immediately he advanced with the army into Armenia and re-established
the earlier order there. At the frontier of the land he was met by
Persian envoys, who declared themselves ready to grant all that was
reasonable;117 but they were hardly listened to, and the march
went on incessantly. Mesopotamia too became once more Roman, and the
Parthian residential cities Seleucia and Ctesiphon were again occupied
by the Romans without encountering lengthened resistance—to which the
war between brothers then raging in the Persian empire contributed its
part.118 The emperor had just crossed the Tigris, and was on the
point of penetrating into the heart of the enemy’s country, when he
met his death by violence, presumably by the hand of an assassin, and
thereby the campaign also met its end. But his successor obtained in
peace the cession of Armenia and Mesopotamia;119 although Carus wore
the purple little more than a year, he re-established the imperial
frontier of Severus.
Persian war under Diocletian.Some years afterwards (293) a new ruler, Narseh, son of king Shapur,
ascended the throne of Ctesiphon, and declared war on the Romans in
the year 296 for the possession of Mesopotamia and Armenia.120
Diocletian, who then had the supreme conduct of the empire generally,
and of the East in particular, entrusted the management of the war to
his imperial colleague Galerius Maximianus, a rough but brave general.
The beginning was unfavourable. The Persians invaded Mesopotamia and
reached as far as Carrhae; the Caesar led against them the Syrian
legions over the Euphrates at Nicephorium; between these two positions
the armies encountered each other, and the far weaker Roman force
gave way. It was a hard blow, and the young general had to submit
to severe reproaches, but he did not despair. For the next campaign
reinforcements were brought up from the whole empire, and both rulers
personally took the field; Diocletian took his position in Mesopotamia
with the chief force, while Galerius, reinforced by the flower of
the Illyrian troops that had in the meantime come up, met, with a
force of 25,000 men, the enemy in Armenia, and inflicted on him a
decisive defeat. The camp and the treasure, nay, even the harem, of the
great-king fell into the hands of the warriors, and with difficulty
Narseh himself escaped from capture. In order to recover the women and
the children the king declared himself ready to conclude peace on any
terms; his envoy Apharban conjured the Romans to spare the Persians,
saying that the two empires, the Roman and the Parthian, were, as it
were, the two eyes of the world, and neither could dispense with the
other. It would have lain in the power of the Romans to add one more
to their Oriental provinces; the prudent ruler contented himself with
regulating the state of possession in the north-east. Mesopotamia
remained, as a matter of course, in the Roman possession; the important
commercial intercourse with the neighbouring foreign land was placed
under strict state-control and essentially directed to the strong
city of Nisibis, the basis of the Roman frontier-guard in eastern
Mesopotamia. The Tigris was recognised as boundary of the direct Roman
rule, to such an extent, however, that the whole of southern Armenia as
far as the lake Thospitis (lake of Van) and the Euphrates, and so the
whole upper valley of the Tigris, should belong to the Roman empire.
This region lying in front of Mesopotamia did not become a province
proper, but was administered after the previous fashion as the Roman
satrapy of Sophene. Some decades later the strong fortress of Amida
(Diarbekir) was constructed here, thenceforth the chief stronghold
of the Romans in the region of the upper Tigris. At the same time
the frontier between Armenia and Media was regulated afresh, and
the supremacy of Rome over that land, as over Iberia, was once more
confirmed. The peace did not impose important cessions of territory on
the conquered, but it established a frontier favourable to the Romans,
which for a considerable time served in these much contested regions
as a demarcation of the two empires.121 The policy of Trajan thereby
obtained its complete accomplishment; at all events the centre of
gravity of the Roman rule shifted itself just at this time from the
West to the East.
