Cæsar, having given audience to the ambassadors of Phraates and heard the reasons of Tiridates, who desired to be restored to his crown, declaring that the kingdom of Parthia would be in a manner subject to the Romans if he held it from them, said that he would neither surrender Tiridates to the Parthians, nor give assistance to Tiridates against the Parthians. However, that he might not seem to refuse them everything they demanded, he sent Phraates his son to him, without any ransom, and ordered a handsome maintenance for Tiridates, so long as he had a mind to continue amongst the Romans. After this, the Spanish War being ended, when he came into Syria to settle the state of the East, Phraates was afraid that he might have some designs upon Parthia. Wherefore the prisoners who had been taken at the defeat of Crassus and Antony were gathered together, and they, together with the military standards either of them had lost, were sent back to Augustus. Nor was this all, but the sons and grandsons of Phraates were likewise delivered as hostages to Augustus. And thus Augustus did more by the terror of his name than any other general could have done by his arms.b
Modern Accounts of Parthia
This is the history of the Parthians as given by Justin in his abridgement of the lost work of Trogus Pompeius. Later investigations and criticism have thrown a little light on various portions of the history, and from the point where Justin grows briefest other Roman historians took up the chronicles of the Parthians with avid interest. The study of coins has also been of invaluable aid. It has seemed better to give Justin’s account in its original fluency without interpolating criticisms here and there. Now, however, we must make a brief presentation of Parthian history from the start in a modern view.a
THE PARTHIAN EMPIRE
[261-241 B.C.]
Hellenism made no deep impression on Iran as on the West, nor did the loose-jointed empire attain to anything higher than a Hellenistic reproduction of the kingdom of the Achæmenians. Even in the fragmentary records that we possess we hear from the first of rebellions little favourable to consolidation of the realm; Seleucus, like Alexander, still had an army of Macedonians and Persians together, while the later Seleucids, at least in their western wars, used natives sparingly and only as bowmen, slingers, or the like, and preferred for these services the wild desert and mountain tribes of Iran.
Under the weak Antiochus II northeastern Iran was lost to the empire. While the Seleucids were busy elsewhere, probably in the long war with Ptolemy Philadelphus, which occupied Antiochus’ later years, Diodotus, viceroy of Bactria, took the title of king. The new kingdom included Sogdiana and Margiana from the first, while the rest of the East, with a single exception scarcely noticed at the time, adhered to the Seleucids. Now the formation of a strong local kingdom, heartily supported by the Greek colonies and likely to control the neighbouring nomads and strictly to protect its own frontiers, was by no means agreeable to the chief of the desert tribes who, like the modern Turkomans, had been wont to pillage the settled lands and raise blackmail with little hindrance from the weak and distant central authority at Antioch. Accordingly two brothers, Arsaces and Tiridates—whose tribe, the Parnians, a subdivision of the Dahæ, had hitherto pastured their flocks in Bactria on the banks of the Ochus—moved west into Seleucid territory near Parthia. An insult offered to the younger brother by the satrap Pherecles moved them to revolt; Pherecles was slain, and Parthia freed from the Macedonians.
ARSACES AND THE ARSACIDS
Arsaces was then proclaimed first king of Parthia (250 B.C.). Such is the later official tradition, and we possess no other account of the beginnings of the Arsacid dynasty. But when the official account transforms Arsaces, who according to genuine tradition was the leader of a robber horde and of uncertain descent, into a Bactrian, the descendant of Phriapites son of Artaxerxes II (who was called Arsaces before his accession), and makes him conspire with his brother and five others, like the seven who slew the false Smerdis, we detect the invention of a period when the Arsacids had entered on the inheritance of the Achæmenians, and imitated the order of their court. The seven conspirators are the heads of the seven noble houses to whom, beyond doubt, the Karen, the Suren, and the Aspahapet belonged. And further, genuine tradition does not know the first Arsaces as king of Parthia at all, and as late as 105 B.C. the Parthians themselves reckoned the year (autumn) 248-247 B.C. as the first of their empire. But 248 B.C. is the year in which Arsaces I is said to have been killed, after a reign of two years, and succeeded by his brother; who, like all subsequent kings of the line, took the throne name of Arsaces.
The first Arsaces must have existed, for he appears as deified on the reverse of his brother’s drachmæ, but he was not king of Parthia. Nay, we have authentic record that even in the epoch-year 248-247 B.C., the year of the accession of Tiridates, Parthia was still under the Seleucids. These contradictions are solved by a notice of Isidore of Charax, which names a city Asaak, not in Parthia but northwest of it, in the neighbouring Astauene, where Arsaces was proclaimed king and where an everlasting fire was kept burning. This, therefore, was the first seat of the monarchy, and Pherecles was presumably satrap of Astauene, not eparch of Parthia.
[241-238 B.C.]
The times were not favourable for the reduction of the rebels. When Antiochus II died, the horrors that accompanied the succession of his son Seleucus (II) Callinicus (246-226 B.C.) gave the king of Egypt the pretext for a war, in which he overran almost the whole lands of the Seleucids as far as Bactria. Meantime a civil war was raging between Seleucus and his brother Antiochus Hierax, whom the Galatians supported, and at the great battle of Ancyra in 242 or 241 B.C. Seleucus was totally defeated and thought to be slain. At this news Arsaces Tiridates, whom the genuine tradition still represents as a brave robber-chief, broke into Parthia at the head of the Parnians, slew the Macedonian eparch Andragoras, and took possession of the province. These Parnian Dahæ, in consequence of eternal dissensions, had migrated at a remote date to Hyrcania and the desert adjoining the Caspian. Here, and in great measure even after they conquered Parthia, they retained the peculiarities of Scythian nomads.
PARTHIAN CUSTOMS
The common tradition connects the migration with the conquests of the Scythian king Iandysus, a contemporary of Sesostris [Ramses II]. It adds that Parthian means “fugitive” or “exile” (Zend, peretu). But the name Parthava is found on the inscriptions of Darius long before the immigration of the Parnians. The Parthian language is described as a sort of compound between Median and Scythian; and, since the name of the Dahæ and those of their tribes show that they belong to the nomads of Iranian kin, who in antiquity were widely spread from the Jaxartes as far as the steppes of south Russia, we must conclude that the mixed language arose by the action and reaction of two Iranian dialects, that of the Parthians and that of their masters. Their nomad costume the Parnians in Parthia gradually gave up for the Median dress, but they kept their old war-dress, the characteristic scale-armour completely covering man and horse. The founder of the empire appears on coins in this dress, with the addition of a short mantle; and so again does Mithridates II. The hands and feet alone are unprotected by mail; shoes with laces, and a conical helmet with flaps to protect the neck and ears, complete the costume.