The Romano-Parthian frontier regions.We have set forth in its due place how the attitude of the Parthians to the Romans came to be shaped and the boundaries of the two great powers to be established. While the Armenians had been rivals of the Parthians, and the kingdom on the Araxes set itself to play the part of great-king in anterior Asia, the Parthians had in general maintained friendly relations with the Romans as the foes of their foes. But, after the overthrow of Mithradates and Tigranes, the Romans had, particularly through the arrangements made by Pompeius, taken up a position which was hardly compatible with serious and lasting peace between the two states. In the south Syria was now under direct Roman rule, and the Roman legions kept guard on the margin of the great desert which separates the lands of the coast from the valley of the Euphrates. In the north Cappadocia and Armenia were vassal-principalities of Rome. The tribes bordering on Armenia to the northward, the Colchians, Iberians, Albanians, were thereby necessarily withdrawn from Parthian influence, and were, at least according to the Roman way of apprehending the matter, likewise Roman dependencies. The lesser Media or Atropatene (Aderbijân), adjoining Armenia to the south-east, and separated from it by the Araxes, had maintained, despite the Seleucidae, its ancient native dynasty reaching back to the time of the Achaemenids, and had even asserted its independence; under the Arsacids the king of this region appears, according to circumstances, as a vassal of the Parthians or as independent of these by leaning on the Romans. The determining influence of Rome consequently reached as far as the Caucasus and the western shore of the Caspian Sea. This involved an overlapping of the limits indicated by the national relations. The Hellenic nationality had doubtless so far gained a footing on the south coast of the Black Sea and in the interior of Cappadocia and Commagene, that here the Roman ascendency found in it a base of support; but Armenia, even under the long years of Roman rule, remained always a non-Greek land, knit to the Parthian state with indestructible ties, by community of language and of faith, the numerous intermarriages of people of rank, and similarity of dress and of armour.[21] The Roman levy and the Roman taxation were never extended to Armenia; at most the land defrayed the raising and the maintenance of its own troops, and the provisioning of the Roman troops stationed there. The Armenian merchants formed the channel for the exchange of goods over the Caucasus with Scythia, over the Caspian Sea with east Asia and China, down the Tigris with Babylonia and India, towards the west with Cappadocia; nothing would have been more natural than to include the politically dependent land in the domain of Roman tribute and customs; yet this step was never taken.
The incongruity between the national and the political connections of Armenia forms an essential element in the conflict—prolonged through the whole imperial period—with its eastern neighbour. It was discerned doubtless on the Roman side that annexation beyond the Euphrates was an encroachment on the family-domain of Oriental nationality, and was not any increase proper of power for Rome. But the ground or, if the phrase be preferred, the excuse for the continuance of such encroachment lay in the fact that the subsistence side by side of great states with equal rights was incompatible with the system of Roman policy, we may even say with the policy of antiquity in general. The Roman empire knew as limit, in the strict sense, only the sea or a land-district unarmed. To the weaker but yet warlike commonwealth of the Parthians the Romans always grudged a position of power, and took away from it what these in their turn could not forego; and therefore the relation between Rome and Iran through the whole imperial period was one of perpetual feud, interrupted only by armistices, concerning the left bank of the Euphrates.
The Parthians during the civil wars.In the treaties concluded with the Parthians by Lucullus (iv. 71) iv. 67. and Pompeius (iv. 127) iv. 122. the Euphrates was recognised as the boundary, and so Mesopotamia was ceded to them. But this did not prevent the Romans from receiving the rulers of Edessa among their clients, and from laying claim to a great part of northern Mesopotamia at least for their indirect rule, apparently by extending the limits of Armenia towards the south (iv. 146)iv. 140.. On that account, after some delay, the Parthian government began the war against the Romans, in the form of declaring it against the Armenians. The answer to this was the campaign of Crassus, and, after the defeat at Carrhae (iv. 351 f.)iv. 335 f., the bringing back of Armenia under Parthian power; we may add, the resumption of their claims on the western half of the Seleucid state, the carrying out of which, it is true, proved at that time unsuccessful (iv. 356)iv. 339.. During the whole twenty years of civil war, in which the Roman republic perished and ultimately the principate was established, the state of war between the Romans and Parthians continued, and not seldom the two struggles became intermixed. Pompeius had, before the decisive battle, attempted to gain king Orodes as ally; but, when the latter demanded the cession of Syria, Pompeius could not prevail on himself to deliver up the province which he had personally made Roman. After the catastrophe he had nevertheless resolved to do so; but accidents directed his flight not to Syria, but to Egypt, where he met his end (iv. 446)iv. 424.. The Parthians appeared on the point of once more breaking into Syria; and the later leaders of the republicans did not disdain the aid of the public foe. Even in Caesar’s lifetime Caecilius Bassus, when he raised the banner of revolt in Syria, had at once called in the Parthians. They had followed this call; Pacorus, the son of Orodes, had defeated Caesar’s lieutenant and liberated the troops of Bassus besieged by him in Apamea (709)44 B.C.. For this reason, as well as in order to take revenge for Carrhae, Caesar had resolved to go in the next spring personally to Syria and to cross the Euphrates; but his death prevented the execution of this plan. When Cassius thereupon took arms in Syria, he entered into relations with the Parthian king; and in the decisive battle at Philippi (712)42 B.C. Parthian mounted archers joined in fighting for the freedom of Rome. When the republicans succumbed, the great-king, in the first instance, maintained a quiet attitude; and Antonius, while designing probably to execute the plans of the dictator, had at first enough to do with the settlement of the East. The collision could not fail to take place; the assailant this time was the Parthian king.
The Parthians in Syria and Asia Minor.In 713 41 B.C. when Caesar the son fought in Italy with the generals and the wife of Antonius, and the latter tarried inactive in Egypt beside queen Cleopatra, Orodes responded to the pressure of a Roman living with him in exile, Quintus Labienus, and sent the latter, a son of the dictator’s embittered opponent Titus Labienus, and formerly an officer in the army of Brutus, as well as (713) 44 B.C. his son Pacorus with a strong army over the frontier. The governor of Syria, Decidius Saxa, succumbed to the unexpected attack; the Roman garrisons, formed in great part of old soldiers of the republican army, placed themselves under the command of their former officer; Apamea and Antioch, and generally all the towns of Syria, except the island-town of Tyre which could not be subdued without a fleet, submitted; on the flight to Cilicia Saxa, in order not to be taken prisoner, put himself to death. After the occupation of Syria Pacorus turned against Palestine, Labienus towards the province of Asia; here too the cities far and wide submitted or were forcibly vanquished, with the exception of the Carian Stratonicea. Antonius, whose attention was claimed by the Italian complications, sent no succour to his governors, and for almost two years (from the end of 71341 B.C. to the spring of 71539 B.C.) Syria and a great part of Asia Minor were commanded by the Parthian generals and by the republican imperator Labienus—Parthicus, as he called himself with shameless irony, not the Roman who vanquished the Parthians, but the Roman who with Parthian aid vanquished his countrymen.
Driven out by Ventidius Bassus.Only after the threatened rupture between the two holders of power was averted, Antonius sent a new army under the conduct of Publius Ventidius Bassus, to whom he entrusted the command in the provinces of Asia and Syria. The able general encountered in Asia Labienus alone with his Roman troops, and rapidly drove him out of the province. At the boundary between Asia and Cilicia, in the passes of the Taurus, a division of Parthians wished to rally their fugitive allies; but they too were beaten before they could unite with Labienus, and thereupon the latter was caught on his flight in Cilicia and put to death. With like good fortune Ventidius gained by fighting the passes of the Amanus on the border of Cilicia and Syria; here Pharnapates, the best of the Parthian generals, fell (715)39 B.C.. Thus was Syria delivered from the enemy. Certainly in the following year Pacorus once more crossed the Euphrates; but only to meet destruction with the greatest part of his army in a decisive engagement at Gindarus, north-east of Antioch (9th June 716)38 B.C.. It was a victory which counterbalanced in some measure the day of Carrhae, and one of permanent effect; for long the Parthians did not again show their troops on the Roman bank of the Euphrates.
Position of Antonius.If it was in the interest of Rome to extend her conquests towards the East, and to enter on the inheritance of Alexander the Great there in all its extent, the circumstances were never more favourable for doing so than in the year 71638 B.C.. The relations of the two rulers to each other had become re-established seasonably for that purpose, and even Caesar at that time had probably a sincere wish for an earnest and successful conduct of the war by his co-ruler and brother-in-law. The disaster of Gindarus had called forth a severe dynastic crisis among the Parthians. King Orodes, deeply agitated by the death of his eldest and ablest son, resigned the government in favour of his second son Phraates. The latter, in order the better to secure for himself the throne, exercised a reign of terror, to which his numerous brothers and his old father himself, as well as a number of the high nobles of the kingdom, fell victims; others of them left the country and sought protection with the Romans, among them the powerful and respected Monaeses. Never had Rome in the East an army of equal numbers and excellence as at this time: Antonius was able to lead over the Euphrates no fewer than 16 legions, about 70,000 Roman infantry, about 40,000 auxiliaries, 10,000 Spanish and Gallic, and 6000 Armenian horsemen; at least half of them were veteran troops brought up from the West, all ready to follow anywhere their beloved and honoured leader, the victor of Philippi, and to crown the brilliant victories, which had been already achieved not by but for him over the Parthians, with still greater successes under his own leadership.
His aims.In reality Antonius had in view the erection of an Asiatic great-kingdom after the model of that of Alexander. As Crassus before his invasion had announced that he would extend the Roman rule as far as Bactria and India, so Antonius named the first son, whom the Egyptian queen bore to him, by the name of Alexander. He appears to have directly intended, on the one hand, to bring—excluding the completely Hellenised provinces of Bithynia and Asia—the whole imperial territory in the East, so far as it was not already under dependent petty princes, into this form; and on the other hand, to make all the regions of the East once occupied by Occidentals subject to himself in the form of satrapies. Of eastern Asia Minor the largest portion and the military primacy were assigned to the most warlike of the princes there, the Galatian Amyntas (I. 335). Alongside of the Galatian prince stood the princes of Paphlagonia, the descendants of Deiotarus, dispossessed from Galatia; Polemon, the new prince in Pontus, and the husband of Pythodoris the granddaughter of Antonius; and moreover, as hitherto, the kings of Cappadocia and Commagene. Antonius united a great part of Cilicia and Syria, as well as of Cyprus and Cyrene, with the Egyptian state, to which he thus almost restored its limits as they had been under the Ptolemies; and as he had made queen Cleopatra, Caesar’s mistress, his own or rather his wife, so her illegitimate child by Caesar, Caesarion, already earlier recognised as joint ruler of Egypt,[22] obtained the reversion of the old kingdom of the Ptolemies, and her illegitimate son by Antonius, Ptolemaeus Philadelphus, obtained that of Syria. To another son, whom she had borne to Antonius, the already mentioned Alexander, Armenia was for the present assigned as a payment to account for the rule of the East conceived as in reserve for him. With this great-kingdom organised after the Oriental 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.
Preparations for the Parthian war.Whether Antonius apprehended his position in this way, immediately on his taking up the government in the East, cannot be decided; it may be conjectured that the creation of a new Oriental great-kingdom in connection with the Occidental principate ripened in his mind gradually, and that the idea was only thought out completely, after, in the year 71737 B.C., on his return from Italy to Asia, he had once more entered into relations with the last queen of the Lagid house not to be again broken off. But his temperament was not equal to such an enterprise. One of those men of military capacity, who knew how, in presence of the enemy, and especially in a position of difficulty, to strike prudently and boldly, he lacked the will of the statesman, the sure grasp and resolute pursuit of a political aim. Had the dictator Caesar assigned to him the problem of subduing the East, he would probably have solved it: the marshal was not fitted to be the ruler. After the expulsion of the Parthians from Syria, almost two years (summer of 71638 B.C. to summer of 718 36 B.C. ) elapsed without any step being taken towards the object aimed at. Antonius himself, inferior also in this respect that he grudged to his generals important successes, had removed the conqueror of Labienus and of Pacorus, the able Ventidius, immediately after this last success, and taken the chief command in person in order to pursue and to miss the pitiful honour of occupying Samosata, the capital of the small Syrian dependent state, Commagene; annoyed at this, he left the East, in order to negotiate in Italy with his father-in-law as to the future arrangements, or to enjoy life with his young spouse Octavia. His governors in the East were not inactive. Publius Canidius Crassus advanced from Armenia towards the Caucasus, and there subdued Pharnabazus king of the Iberians, and Zober king of the Albanians. Gaius Sossius took in Syria the last town still adhering to the Parthians, Aradus; he further re-established in Judaea the rule of Herodes, and caused the pretender to the throne installed by the Parthians, the Hasmonean Antigonus, to be put to death. The consequences of the victory on Roman territory were thus duly drawn, and the recognition of Roman rule was enforced as far as the Caspian Sea and the Syrian desert. But Antonius had reserved for himself the beginning of the warfare against the Parthians, and he came not.
Parthian war of Antonius.When at length, in 71836 B.C., he escaped from the arms, not of Octavia, but of Cleopatra, and set the columns of the army in motion, a good part of the appropriate season of the year had already elapsed. Still more surprising than this delay was the direction which Antonius chose. All aggressive wars of the Romans against the Parthians, earlier and later, took the route for Ctesiphon, the capital of the kingdom and at the same time situated on its western frontier, and so the natural and immediate aim of operations for armies marching downward on the Euphrates or on the Tigris. Antonius too might, after he had reached the Tigris through northern Mesopotamia, nearly along the route which Alexander had traversed, have advanced down the river upon Ctesiphon and Seleucia. But instead of this he preferred to go in a northerly direction at first towards Armenia, and from that point, where he united his whole military resources and reinforced himself in particular by the Armenian cavalry, to the table-land of Media Atropatene (Aderbijân). The allied king of Armenia may possibly have recommended this plan of campaign, seeing that the Armenian rulers at all times aspired to the possession of this neighbouring land, and King Artavazdes of Armenia might hope now to subdue the satrap of Atropatene of the same name, and to add the latter’s territory to his own. But Antonius himself cannot possibly have been influenced by such considerations. He may have rather thought that he should be able to push forward from Atropatene into the heart of the enemy’s country, and might regard the old Persian court-residences of Ecbatana and Rhagae as the goal of his march. But, if this was his plan, he acted without knowledge of the difficult ground, and altogether underrated his opponents’ power of resistance, besides which the short time available for operations in this mountainous country and the late beginning of the campaign weighed heavily in the scale. As a skilled and experienced officer, such as Antonius was, could hardly deceive himself on such points, it is probable that special political considerations influenced the matter. The rule of Phraates was tottering, as we have said; Monaeses, of whose fidelity Antonius held himself assured, and whom he hoped perhaps to put into Phraates’s place, had returned in accordance with the wish of the Parthian king to his native country;[25] Antonius appears to have reckoned on a rising on his part against Phraates, and in expectation of this civil war to have led his army into the interior of the Parthian provinces. It would doubtless have been possible to await the result of this design in the friendly Armenia, and, if operations thereafter were requisite, to have at least the full summer-time at his disposal in the following year; but this waiting was not agreeable to the hasty general. In Atropatene he encountered the obstinate resistance of the powerful and half independent under-king, who resolutely sustained a siege in his capital Praaspa or Phraarta (southward from the lake of Urumia, presumably on the lower course of the Jaghatu); and not only so, but the hostile attack brought, as it would seem, to the Parthians internal peace. Phraates led on a large army to the relief of the assailed city. Antonius had brought with him a great siege-train, but impatiently hastening forward, he had left this behind in the custody of two legions under the legate Oppius Statianus. Thus he on his part made no progress with the siege; but king Phraates sent his masses of cavalry under that same Monaeses to the rear of the enemy, against the corps of Statianus laboriously pursuing its march. The Parthians cut down the covering force, including the general himself, took the rest prisoners, and destroyed the whole train of 300 waggons. Thereby the campaign was lost.
Progress of the struggle.The Armenian, despairing of the success of the campaign, collected his men and went home. Antonius did not immediately abandon the siege, and even defeated the royal army in the open field, but the alert horsemen escaped without substantial loss, and it was a victory without effect. An attempt to obtain from the king at least the restitution of the old and the newly lost eagles, and thus to conclude peace, if not with advantage, at least with honour, failed; the Parthian did not give away his sure success so cheaply. He only assured the envoys of Antonius that, if the Romans would give up the siege, he would not molest them on their return home. This neither honourable nor trustworthy promise of the enemy would hardly have induced Antonius to break up. It was natural to take up quarters for the winter in the enemy’s country, seeing that the Parthian troops were not acquainted with continuous military service, and presumably most of their forces would have gone home at the commencement of winter. But a strong basis was lacking, and supplies in the exhausted land were not secured; above all Antonius himself was not capable of such a tenacious conduct of the war. Consequently he abandoned the machines, which the besieged immediately burnt; and entered on the difficult retreat, either too early or too late. Fifteen days’ march (300 Roman miles) through a hostile country separated the army from the Araxes, the border river of Armenia, whither in spite of the ambiguous attitude of the ruler the retreat could alone be directed. A hostile army of 40,000 horsemen, in spite of the given promise, accompanied the returning force, and, with the marching off of the Armenians, the Romans had lost the best part of their cavalry. Provisions and draught animals were scarce, and the season of the year far advanced. But in the perilous position Antonius recovered his energy and his martial skill, and in some measure also his good fortune in war; he had made his choice, and the general as well as the troops solved the task in a commendable way. Had they not had with them a former soldier of Crassus, who, having become a Parthian, knew most accurately every step of the way, and, instead of conducting them back through the plain by which they had come, guided them by mountain paths, which were less exposed to cavalry attacks—apparently over the mountains about Tabreez—the army would hardly have reached its goal; and had not Monaeses, paying off in his way his debt of thanks to Antonius, informed him in right time of the false assurances and the cunning designs of his countrymen, the Romans would doubtless have fallen into one of the ambushes which on several occasions were laid for them.