Transcriber's Notes: Italic text is marked _thus_. The original
accentuation, spelling and hyphenation has been retained. See further
Transcriber's Notes which follow the Index.
THE PROVINCES OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE
FROM CAESAR TO DIOCLETIAN
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MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
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THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.
TORONTO
THE PROVINCES
OF THE
ROMAN EMPIRE
FROM CAESAR TO DIOCLETIAN
BY
THEODOR MOMMSEN
TRANSLATED
WITH THE AUTHOR’S SANCTION AND ADDITIONS
BY
WILLIAM P. DICKSON, D.D., LL.D.
PROFESSOR OF DIVINITY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW
VOL. II
_WITH TWO MAPS BY PROFESSOR KIEPERT_
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN’S STREET, LONDON
1909
_First Edition 1886_
_Reprinted with corrections 1909_
CONTENTS
BOOK EIGHTH
_THE PROVINCES AND PEOPLE, FROM CAESAR TO DIOCLETIAN_
PAGE
CHAPTER IX.
THE EUPHRATES FRONTIER AND THE PARTHIANS 1
CHAPTER X.
SYRIA AND THE LAND OF THE NABATAEANS 116
CHAPTER XI.
JUDAEA AND THE JEWS 160
CHAPTER XII.
EGYPT 232
CHAPTER XIII.
THE AFRICAN PROVINCES 303
APPENDIX 347
MAPS I. to II.
INDEX 355
CHAPTER IX.
THE EUPHRATES FRONTIER AND THE PARTHIANS.
[Sidenote: 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.
[Sidenote: 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 correction[2] from
the history of Iran, and is as if nonexistent.
[Sidenote: 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.
[Sidenote: 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.
[Sidenote: 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.
[Sidenote: 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.
[Sidenote: 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.
[Sidenote: 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.
[Sidenote: 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]
[Sidenote: 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.
[Sidenote: 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.
[Sidenote: 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.
[Sidenote: 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.
[Sidenote: 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]
[Sidenote: 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]
[Sidenote: 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 A.D. 78
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.
[Sidenote: 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.
[Sidenote: 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.
[Sidenote: 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.
[Sidenote: 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 713 {41 B.C.} to
the spring of 715 {39 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.
[Sidenote: 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.
[Sidenote: 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 716 {38 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.
[Sidenote: 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 fashion[23] 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.
[Sidenote: 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 717 {37 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 716 {38 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.
[Sidenote: Parthian war of Antonius.]
When at length, in 718 {36 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.
[Sidenote: 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.
[Sidenote: 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.
[Sidenote: 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 720 {34 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.
[Sidenote: 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.
[Sidenote: 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.
[Sidenote: 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 729 {25 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 731 {23 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.
[Sidenote: 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.
[Sidenote: 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 748 {6 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 753 {1 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 (A.D. 2) 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.
[Sidenote: Mission of Germanicus to the East.]
The success had no more endurance than that of the more brilliant
expedition of 734 {20 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 A.D. 10). 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 718 {36 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.
[Sidenote: 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.
[Sidenote: Artabanus and Tiberius.]
[Sidenote: Mission of Vitellius.]
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 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.
[Sidenote: 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.
[Sidenote: 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.
[Sidenote: 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.
[Sidenote: 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.
[Sidenote: 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.
[Sidenote: 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.
[Sidenote: 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.
[Sidenote: 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.
[Sidenote: Corbulo in Armenia.]