The Provinces of the Roman Empire, from Caesar to Diocletian. v. 2

by Theodor Mommsen

Difficulties of the retreat.The soldierly nature of Antonius was often brilliantly conspicuous during these troublesome days, in his dexterous use of any favourable moment, in his sternness towards the cowardly, in his power over the minds of the soldiers, in his faithful care for the wounded and the sick. Yet the rescue was almost a miracle; already had Antonius instructed a faithful attendant in case of extremity not to let him fall alive into the hands of the enemy. Amidst constant attacks of the artful enemy, in weather of wintry cold, without adequate food and often without water, they reached the protecting frontier in twenty-seven days, where the enemy desisted from following them. The loss was enormous; there were reckoned up in those twenty-seven days eighteen larger engagements, and in a single one of them the Romans counted 3000 dead and 5000 wounded. It was the very best and bravest that those constant assaults on the vanguard and on the flanks swept away. The whole baggage, a third of the camp-followers, a fourth of the army, 20,000 foot soldiers, and 4000 horsemen had perished in this Median campaign, in great part not through the sword, but through famine and disease. Even on the Araxes the sufferings of the unhappy troops were not yet at an end. Artavazdes received them as a friend, and had no other choice; it would doubtless have been possible to pass the winter there. But the impatience of Antonius did not tolerate this; the march went on, and from the ever increasing inclemency of the season and the state of health of the soldiers, this last section of the expedition from the Araxes to Antioch cost, although no enemy hampered it, other 8000 men. No doubt this campaign was a last flash of what was brave and capable in the character of Antonius; but it was politically his overthrow all the more, as at the same time Caesar by the successful termination of the Sicilian war gained the dominion in the West and the confidence of Italy for the present and all the future.

Last years of Antonius in the East.The responsibility for the miscarriage, which Antonius in vain attempted to deny, was thrown by him on the dependent kings of Cappadocia and Armenia, and on the latter so far with justice, as his premature marching off from Praaspa had materially increased the dangers and the losses of the retreat. For the plan of the campaign, however, it was not he who was responsible, but Antonius;[26] and the failure of the hopes placed on Monaeses, the disaster of Statianus, the breaking down of the siege of Praaspa, were not brought about by the Armenian. Antonius did not abandon the subjugation of the East, but set out next year (719)35 B.C. once more from Egypt. The circumstances were still even now comparatively favourable. A friendly alliance was formed with the Median king Artavazdes; he had not merely fallen into variance with his Parthian suzerain, but was indignant above all at his Armenian neighbour, and, considering the well-known exasperation of Antonius against the latter, he might reckon on finding a support in the enemy of his enemy. Everything depended on the firm accord of the two possessors of power—the victory-crowned master of the West and the defeated ruler in the East; and, on the news that Antonius proposed to continue the war, his legitimate wife, the sister of Caesar, resorted from Italy to the East to bring up to him new forces, and to strengthen anew his relations to her and to her brother. If Octavia was magnanimous enough to offer the hand of reconciliation to her husband in spite of his relations to the Egyptian queen, Caesar must—as was further confirmed by the commencement, which just then took place, of the war on the north-east frontier of Italy—have been still ready at that time to maintain the subsisting relation.

The brother and sister subordinated their personal interests magnanimously to those of the commonwealth. But loudly as interest and honour called for the acceptance of the offered hand, Antonius could not prevail on himself to break off the relation with the Egyptian queen; he sent back his wife, and this was at the same time a rupture with her brother, and, as we may add, an abandonment of the idea of continuing the war against the Parthians. Now, ere that could be thought of, the question of mastery between Antonius and Caesar had to be settled. Antonius accordingly returned at once from Syria to Egypt, and in the following year undertook nothing further towards the execution of his plans of Oriental conquest; only he punished those to whom he assigned the blame of the miscarriage. He caused Ariarathes the king of Cappadocia to be executed,[27] and gave the kingdom to an illegitimate kinsman of his, Archelaus. The like fate was intended for the Armenian. If Antonius in 72034 B.C. appeared in Armenia, as he said, for the continuance of the war, this had simply the object of getting into his power the person of the king, who had refused to go to Egypt. This act of revenge was ignobly executed by way of surprise, and was not less ignobly celebrated by a caricature of the Capitoline triumph exhibited in Alexandria. At that time the son of Antonius, destined for lord of the East, as was already stated, was installed as king of Armenia, and married to the daughter of the new ally, the king of Media; while the eldest son of the captive king of Armenia executed some time afterwards by order of queen Cleopatra, Artaxes, whom the Armenians had proclaimed king instead of his father, took refuge with the Parthians. Armenia and Media Atropatene were thus in the power of Antonius or allied with him; the continuance of the Parthian war was announced doubtless, but remained postponed till after the overcoming of the western rival. Phraates on his part advanced against Media, at first without success, as the Roman troops stationed in Armenia afforded help to the Medians; but when Antonius, in the course of his armaments against Caesar, recalled his forces from that quarter, the Parthians gained the upper hand, vanquished the Medians, and installed in Media, as well as also in Armenia, the king Artaxes, who, in requital for the execution of his father, caused all the Romans scattered in the land to be seized and put to death. That Phraates did not turn to fuller account the great feud between Antonius and Caesar, while it was in preparation and was being fought out, was probably due to his being once more hampered by the troubles breaking out in his own land. These ended in his expulsion, and in his going to the Scythians of the East. Tiridates was proclaimed as great-king in his stead. When the decisive naval battle was fought on the coast of Epirus, and thereupon the overthrow of Antonius was completed in Egypt, this new great-king sat on his tottering throne in Ctesiphon, and at the opposite frontier of the empire the hordes of Turan were making arrangements to reinstate the earlier ruler, in which they soon afterwards succeeded.

First arrangements of Augustus in the East.The sagacious and clear-seeing man, to whom it fell to liquidate the undertakings of Antonius and to settle the relations of the two portions of the empire, needed moderation quite as much as energy. It would have been the gravest of errors to enter into the ideas of Antonius as to conquering the East, or even merely making further conquests there. Augustus perceived this; his military arrangements show clearly that, while he viewed the possession of the Syrian coast as well as that of Egypt as an indispensable complement to the empire of the Mediterranean, he attached no value to inland possessions there. Armenia, however, had now been for a generation Roman, and could, in the nature of the circumstances, only be Roman or Parthian; the country was by its position, in a military point of view, a sally-port for each of the great powers into the territory of the other. Augustus had no thought of abandoning Armenia and leaving it to the Parthians; and, as things stood, he could hardly think of doing so. But, if Armenia was retained, the matter could not end there; the local relations compelled the Romans further to bring under their controlling influence the basin of the river Cyrus, the territories of the Iberians on its upper, and of the Albanians on its lower course—that is, the inhabitants of the modern Georgia and Shirvan, skilled in combat on horseback and on foot—and not to allow the domain of the Parthian power to extend to the north of the Araxes beyond Atropatene. The expedition of Pompeius had already shown that the settlement in Armenia necessarily led the Romans on the one hand as far as the Caucasus, on the other as far as the western shore of the Caspian Sea. The initial steps were everywhere taken. The legates of Antonius had fought with the Iberians and Albanians; Polemon, confirmed in his position by Augustus, ruled not merely over the coast from Pharnacea to Trapezus, but also over the territory of the Colchians at the mouth of the Phasis. To this general state of matters fell to be added the special circumstances of the moment, which most urgently suggested to the new monarch of Rome not merely to show his sword in presence of the Orientals, but also to draw it. That king Artaxes, like Mithradates formerly, had given orders to put to death all the Romans within his bounds, could not be allowed to remain unrequited. The exiled king of Media also had now sought help from Augustus, as he would otherwise have sought it from Antonius. Not merely did the civil war and the conflict of pretenders in the Parthian empire facilitate the attack, but the expelled ruler Tiridates likewise sought protection with Augustus, and declared himself ready as a Roman vassal to accept his kingdom in fief from the latter. The restitution of the Romans who had fallen into the power of the Parthians at the defeats of Crassus and of the Antonians, and of the lost eagles, might not in themselves seem to the ruler worth the waging of war; the restorer of the Roman state could not allow this question of military and political honour to drop.

Policy open to him.The Roman statesman had to reckon with these facts; considering the position, which Antonius took in the East, the policy of action was imperative generally, and doubly so from the preceding miscarriages. Beyond doubt it was desirable soon to undertake the organisation of matters in Rome, but for the undisputed monarch there subsisted no stringent compulsion to do this at once. He found himself after the decisive blows of Actium and Alexandria on the spot and at the head of a strong and victorious army; what had to be done some day was best done at once. A ruler of the stamp of Caesar would hardly have returned to Rome without having restored the protectorate in Armenia, having obtained recognition for the Roman supremacy as far as the Caucasus and the Caspian Sea, and having settled accounts with the Parthians. A ruler of caution and energy would have now at once organised the defence of the frontier in the East, as the circumstances required; it was from the outset clear that the four Syrian legions, together about 40,000 men, were not sufficient to guard the interests of Rome simultaneously on the Euphrates, on the Araxes, and on the Cyrus, and that the militia of the dependent kingdoms only concealed, and did not cover, the want of imperial troops. Armenia by political and national sympathy held more to the Parthians than to the Romans; the kings of Commagene, Cappadocia, Galatia, Pontus, were inclined doubtless on the other hand more to the Roman side, but they were untrustworthy and weak. Even a policy keeping within bounds needed for its foundation an energetic stroke of the sword, and for its maintenance the near arm of a superior Roman military power.

Inadequate measures.Augustus neither struck nor protected; certainly not because he deceived himself as to the state of the case, but because it was his nature to execute tardily and feebly what he perceived to be necessary, and to let considerations of internal policy exercise a more than due influence on the relations abroad. The inadequacy of the protection of the frontier by the client states of Asia Minor he well perceived; and in connection therewith, already in the year 72925 B.C., after the death of king Amyntas who ruled all the interior of Asia Minor, he gave to him no successor, but placed the land under an imperial legate. Presumably the neighbouring more important client-states, and particularly Cappadocia, were intended to be in like manner converted after the decease of the holders for the time into imperial governorships. This was a step in advance, in so far as thereby the militia of these countries was incorporated with the imperial army and placed under Roman officers; these troops could not exercise a serious pressure on the insecure border-lands or even on the neighbouring great-state, although they now counted among those of the empire. But all these considerations were outweighed by regard to the reduction of the numbers of the standing army and of the expenditure for the military system to the lowest possible measure.

Equally insufficient, in presence of the relations of the moment, were the measures adopted by Augustus on his return home from Alexandria. He gave to the dispossessed king of the Medes the rule of the Lesser Armenia, and to the Parthian pretender Tiridates an asylum in Syria, in order through the former to keep in check the king Artaxes who persevered in open hostility against Rome, by the latter to press upon king Phraates. The negotiations instituted with the latter regarding the restitution of the Parthian trophies of victory were prolonged without result, although Phraates in the year 73123 B.C. had promised their return in order to obtain the release of a son who had accidentally fallen into the power of the Romans.

Augustus in Syria.It was only when Augustus went in person to Syria in the year 734 20 B.C. , and showed himself in earnest, that the Orientals submitted. In Armenia, where a powerful party had risen against king Artaxes, the insurgents threw themselves into the arms of the Romans and sought imperial investiture for Artaxes’s younger brother Tigranes, brought up at the imperial court and living in Rome. When the emperor’s stepson Tiberius Claudius Nero, then a youth of twenty-two years, advanced with a military force into Armenia, king Artaxes was put to death by his own relatives, and Tigranes received the imperial tiara from the hand of the emperor’s representative, as fifty years earlier his grandfather of the same name had received it from Pompeius (iv. 127). Atropatene was again separated from Armenia and passed under the sway of a ruler likewise brought up in Rome, Ariobarzanes, son of the already-mentioned Artavazdes; yet the latter appears to have obtained the land not as a Roman but as a Parthian dependency. Concerning the organisation of matters in the principalities on the Caucasus we learn nothing; but as they are subsequently reckoned among the Roman client-states, probably at that time the Roman influence prevailed here also. Even king Phraates, now put to the choice of redeeming his word or fighting, resolved with a heavy heart on the surrender—keenly as it did violence to the national feelings of his people—of the few Roman prisoners of war still living and the standards won.