II. What does my reader know about the ancient history of Armenia? At least he remembers the wonderful march of Xenophon (401–400 B.C.), who crossed the entire block of the Armenian tableland from the plains of Mesopotamia to the Black Sea. At that time the country was under the overlordship of the Achæmenian king of Persia—that splendid dynasty which was at length destroyed by a great wave from Europe, and of which the latest champion was murdered by a satrap of Bactria after his decisive defeat in the belt of mountains south of Lake Van by Alexander the Great (331 B.C.). The name of the Greek hero is still alive in Southern Armenia, sharing the honours in this respect with Solomon. Perhaps our next familiar memory will be the visit of Hannibal to the court of Artaxias, one of the numerous governors in the empire of the successors of Alexander, and a ruler whose territory embraced the scene of these travels.[68] Nor are we likely to have forgotten the recoil of the East upon the West which took place under the leadership of the picturesque Mithradates, that strangely composite embodiment of two diverse cultures. Behind Mithradates looms the power of a great king of Armenia, whom, again, we know as a scion of a new dynasty which had arisen in Asia—the Arsakid or Parthian dynasty. With these Arsakid kings of Armenia we are fairly familiar; the Parthian archers ride unrevenged through the polished verse of Horace, and the Arsakids of Persia and Armenia supply the pages of Tacitus with several lively interludes to his throbbing narrative. Some acquaintance with these various events is part of the equipment of most among us—a little less or a little more. We may learn a great deal more of the subsequent history of Armenia; but from what sources shall we collect material for a fuller knowledge of the older period? The Armenian historians are all but worthless; the West was little inquisitive; and even now we can scarcely answer the leading questions: whence the Armenians came to the seats which they have occupied throughout the historical period, and how they fared in culture, in art, or in arms. Upon these subjects the Fool is almost as well instructed as the Wise Man; we search the mists in vain for any definite image; till from among them emerge the thrones of these Arsakids—a Northern or Scythian dynasty, holding Persia as well as Armenia, and crowning a polity which was of a strongly feudal type.[69]
The last of the kings of this dynasty who ruled over Persia was the ally and kinsman of the father of King Tiridates, who was destined, after much vicissitude of fortune, to embrace Christianity and to adopt it as the religion of the State. Ardavan and Chosroes were seated on the thrones of Persia and Armenia, when a prince of the Persian province which is now known under the name of Fars (Shiraz, Persepolis) overthrew the former of these monarchs by a decisive battle, in which Ardavan himself was slain (A.D. 227). The victor, Ardashir, became master of the great Persian monarchy in which the king of Armenia held the second place. His dynasty, the Sasanian, supplanted the Arsakids in Persia, and continued to rule until the middle of the seventh century, when it succumbed to the Arabs and to Islam. The Sasanians are familiar to all of us as the permanent enemies of the Roman Empire; and the traveller may be said to be on terms of intimacy with them, for they have left him several monuments of great solidity and architectural merit which mock the squalor of their surroundings at the present day. These, it is true, they erected with the aid of architects and artisans taken captive in their wars with the Empire.[70] Fars was in those days a centre of Zoroastrianism or Mazdaism; and Ardashir was the champion of the fire-worshippers, leaned on their support and closely identified them with his dynasty.
When the news of the death of his kinsman and ally was brought to the Arsakid king of Armenia, profound grief filled the soul of Chosroes. For the moment he was powerless to arrest the triumph of the usurper; but in the following year (A.D. 228) he had matured extensive preparations, and, at the head of an army which comprised Huns from beyond Caucasus as well as other nomads, marched to the frontiers of Persia and laid waste her provinces to the gates of Ctesiphon. Thirsting to avenge his race, he endeavoured to enlist the Parthian satraps in the empire of Ardashir; but these temporising or jealous princelets had thrown in their lot with the Sasanian monarch and could not be induced to stir. He was, however, assisted by a portion of the Medes and by the sons of Ardavan.[71]
For a period of ten years the war was continued by the Armenian potentate; his capital, Vagharshapat,[72] was filled with the booty of successful raids; and, while the temples of the gods throughout Armenia were adorned with costly offerings, their priests received munificent largesses. His fortunes were assisted by an alliance with the Empire; the reigning Cæsar, Alexander Severus, was alarmed by the rise of the new dynasty, and may have been stung by impertinent messages on the part of Ardashir. A Roman army attacked Persia from the side of Armenia, while two more divisions, one under the leadership of the emperor, assailed other portions of the dominions of the king of kings.[73] If the result of the various engagements may appear ambiguous (231–233), it at least ensured the quiescence of the Persian during several years. Ardashir continued to be harassed by the Armenian ally of the Romans, and resolved to rid himself by any means of his inveterate foe. A Parthian of the blood royal volunteered to execute his desire; he went over with his family as a refugee to the court of Chosroes, who received him with the greatest warmth as a valuable ally. After much pleasant intercourse, when spring came on and the king was preparing to take the field, Anak—for such was his name—bethought himself of the pledge which he had given and of the reward promised by Ardashir. In company with his own brother he succeeded in drawing the king aside, when the two villains despatched him with their swords. The crime was committed at Vagharshapat; the guilty pair fled down the valley, hoping to cross the Araxes at the bridge of Artaxata. But they were cut off by the Armenian horsemen and precipitated into the river. The king, before he expired, gave orders that the family of Anak should forthwith be massacred. Only two little children were rescued from the carnage; one was brought up in Persia, and the other, Gregory, in Greece (A.D. 238).[74]
This unnatural treachery on the part of a Parthian towards the Parthian King of Armenia in the interests of a dynasty which had supplanted the Parthians on the throne of Persia came near to costing the Armenians the permanent loss of their independence. But Ardashir appears to have contented himself with the enjoyment of his personal revenge and of a few raids into Armenian territory. His death occurred a few years after the date of the tragedy (in 241 or 242); and the government of Armenia appears to have been conducted by the nobles, under the nominal sovereignty of the son of Chosroes, by name Tiridates, a child of tender years. It was not until the year 252 or 253 that the successor of Ardashir was enabled to establish his sway over Armenia with the assistance of the uncles of Tiridates, whose cruel treatment compelled the youthful king to take refuge in the Empire.[75] But the triumph of Shapur was not destined to be of long duration; the young Tiridates grew up and prospered in the territory and under the protection of the Romans; and, after distinguishing himself by personal bravery in a campaign of the emperor against the Goths, was restored to his native dominions with the support of a Roman army and perhaps in consequence of the victory of Odaenathus, prince of Palmyra, over the armies of the Persian king (264 or 265).[76] It was in the first year of his restoration that occurred an event which no Armenian can hear related without experiencing a thrill of emotion.
When the son of Anak, the murderer, who was being educated in Roman territory, at Cæsarea, the capital of Cappadocia, had come to years of discretion, he was informed—perhaps after his marriage and the birth of two children—by the faithful guardian or governess under whose care he had grown up, of the crime committed by his father. Forthwith the pious youth—for he had been brought up in the Christian faith—sallied forth in search of the son of the murdered monarch, and attached himself to the person of the exiled Tiridates, whom he commenced to serve with the utmost zeal. Upon the subject of his origin and parentage Gregory maintained a wise silence; but he was unable or unwilling to conceal his religion, which at that time happened to be not only unpopular, but subject to persecution.[77] Tiridates in vain endeavoured to wean his servant from the Christian faith; time after time he assailed his constancy with reproach and even with imprisonment; but the decisive moment arrived when he had recovered his long-lost dominions, and stood within the famous temple of Anahid, hard by the present town of Erzinjan. At the feast which followed the sacrifice he gave vent to his emotion in words characteristic of a king. Addressing his trusty counsellor among the assembled guests, he commanded him to make an offering of garlands and leafy branches to the shrine of the great goddess; and, upon his refusal, “How dare you,” exclaimed the king, “adore a God whom I do not adore?” The resources of persuasion and torture were without effect upon the will of the Christian; and the monarch was meditating some fresh inducement when one of the nobles approached and said: “Sire, this Gregory is not deserving of life, and hence his unwillingness to live and see the light. We knew not who he was, this long while that he has sojourned among us—but now we know: he is son of that Anak who killed thy royal father, and to whom Armenia owed her exhaustion and captivity.” When Tiridates heard these words, he gave orders to bind the martyr and to conduct him to the castle of Artaxata. There he was cast into a pit of great depth, where he was left to perish.
For thirteen years Gregory languished in this noisome dungeon, forgotten by the world but saved from death by the ministrations of a widow who resided in the castle. The hatred or fear of the Christians, so early manifest in the new reign, was emphasised by Tiridates in a pompous edict, which admonished his subjects to beware of the resentment of the gods—of Aramazd, who gave fertility; of Anahid, the goddess defender; of Vahagn, the courageous god. The king had been a witness—so it proceeded—during his sojourn in the Empire, of the great solicitude of the Cæsars for the cult of the national divinities, to the prosperity and glory of their people. Following the example of his august instructors, he bade his subjects, nobles and peasants, to lay hands on any offender against the gods. They should bind him, hand and foot, and bring him to the gate of the palace. His lands and possessions would be bestowed upon the denouncer. The religious policy of a Decius and a Valerian was at least extended by Tiridates to the holier sphere of legitimate homicide. At the head of the Roman cavalry he rode down the Persian cohorts, and among his levies were reckoned a contingent of Huns. Of lofty stature and broad shoulders, his appearance was the signal of victory; and it became a proverb that Tiridates would destroy the dams in his impatience, and in his courage arrest the rivers in their course towards the sea.
At the point where the historian I have been following was perhaps about to change his theme, and to present the opposite picture of a king and people overtaken by calamities which could only be attributed to the wrath of heaven, the priestly compiler of the Agathangelus treatise has gone to work with his scissors, and has substituted for the more straightforward account of the authority he was using one of those prolix and portentous legends, familiar to the student of hagiographical literature, which were at once the outcome of the diseased fancy of the cloister and the food with which it was sustained. The tale of the advent of the Roman virgins, of the assault upon the modesty of the fairest among them, of their martyrdom and of the transformation of the royal violator into a wild boar, wallowing in mud and eating grass, bears the imprint at every phase of a monkish invention, which was probably stolen in its essential features from the literature of Greek monasteries and adapted to the local conditions at Vagharshapat.[78] But carelessness or want of skill on the part of the compiler has happily preserved for us a fragment of the original story, from which we learn that the Armenians were afflicted by an extraordinary outbreak of diverse diseases: leprosy, palsy, dropsy, madness.[79] We are given to infer that the king himself was visited by some grave malady, and that he was cured in a miraculous manner upon the appearance and at the hands of Gregory, who had long been numbered among the dead.[80] We are told how, from all parts of Armenia, the people flocked to the province of Ararat, to Vagharshapat, the royal residence; how they were cured of their various disorders; and how king and people embraced the faith in the service of which the saintly doctor had effected their cure. The testimony of the historian is supported by a Greek writer of the fifth century, who attributes the conversion of King Tiridates to a miracle.[81]
It is not unlikely that the mind of the monarch was influenced by some occurrence of the nature deducible from the mangled narrative of the original biographer. Tiridates was a full-blooded heathen, prone to all forms of superstition, and free from any taint of rationalising tendencies. Yet we may suspect that the number and power of the Armenian Christians prior to his conversion loomed much larger in the consciousness of himself and of his contemporaries than we are led to suppose by Armenian histories. Was he desirous of finding a counterpoise to the Mazdaism of his Persian enemy, which had been elevated by the Sasanians into a strongly organised State religion and identified with the throne? Was he impressed with the cohesion of the Christians among themselves, and by the contrast thus offered to the fissiparous tendencies of his feudal polity? Was the widow in the castle of Artaxata a Christian, and was the old authority of the prisoner in the king’s counsels exploited by her co-religionists at an opportune moment, when his wisdom should appear restored, as by a miracle, to a necessitous land? If such questions be mere matters of surmise, we at least know that at the date of the conversion the Roman Empire was hesitating in a policy towards the Christians, and that the repressive measures of a Valerian were no longer in repute.[82] The Armenian king became a convert before their revival under Diocletian (284–305); and Christianity was adopted as the religion of the State in Armenia some thirty years prior to its triumph in the West by the decisive action of the Milvian Bridge (312), and over a hundred years before the edicts of Theodosius the First against the practice of paganism.[83]
The measures taken by Tiridates and his statesman and mentor, Gregory, to supplant polytheism by Christianity were such as might have excited the envy of a Cæsar, and which only an Eastern despot could hope to enforce. From Vagharshapat the king proceeded down the valley to Artaxata at the head of the troops which garrisoned the capital. On the way he set fire to the temple of the god Dir, from whom he is said to have derived his name (Dirtad or gift of Dir).[84] In a graphic figure our historian likens the priests and their followers to demons; and he relates how, some on horseback, others on foot, and all fully armed, they hurried hither and thither, gesticulating and screaming, until they were put to flight. But the swarm took refuge in the temple of Anahid at Artaxata, where from the roof they discharged arrows and precipitated a hail of stones upon the advancing host. Gregory, making the sign of the Cross, ran to the gate of the edifice, which dissolved into its foundations, wreathed in flames. The dusky troop vanished like a puff of smoke from the face of the land, to Caucasus and Chaldia[85] in the north. The treasures of the temple were distributed among the needy; some of the priests were selected or accepted for the service of the Church, to which body was also allotted the confiscated land.