[53-40 B.C.]
The token of victory, the hand and head of Crassus, reached Orodes in Armenia just as he had made peace with Artavasdes and betrothed his eldest son Pacorus to the daughter of the Armenian king. The Roman disaster was due primarily to the novelty of the Parthian way of assault, which took them wholly by surprise, and partly also to bad generalship; but the Romans always sought a traitor to account for a defeat, and in the present case they threw the blame partly on Andromachus of Carrhæ, who really did mislead Crassus in his retreat, and was rewarded by the Parthians with the tyranny of his native town, but had no great influence on the disaster; and partly on Abgar, whose advice was no doubt bad, but not necessarily treacherous.
Surenas, the victor of Carrhæ, whose fame was now too great for the condition of a mere subject, was put to death a little later, the victim of Orodes’ jealousy; the victory itself was weakly followed up. Not till 52 B.C. was Syria invaded, and then with forces so weak that Cassius found the defence easy.
Orodes avoided a threatened breach with his son Pacorus, by associating him in the empire; but the Parthians took little advantage of the civil wars that preceded the fall of the Roman Republic. They occasionally stepped in to save the weaker party from utter annihilation, but even this policy was not followed with energy, and Orodes refused to help Pompey in his distress because the Roman would not promise to give him Syria. Labienus was with Orodes negotiating for help on a larger scale when the news of Philippi arrived, and remained with him till 40 B.C., when he was at last sent back to Syria, together with Pacorus and a numerous host. The Roman garrisons in Syria were old troops of Brutus and Cassius, who had been taken over by Antony; those in the region of Apamea joined Labienus; Antony’s legate Decidius Saxa was defeated, and fled from the camp afraid of his own men.
[43-36 B.C.]
Apamea, Antioch, and all Syria soon fell into the hands of the Parthians, and Decidius was pursued and slain. Pacorus advanced along the great road and received the submission of all the Phœnician cities save Tyre. Simultaneously the satrap Barzaphranes appeared in Galilee; the patriots all over Palestine rose against Phasael and Herod; and five hundred Parthian horse appearing before Jerusalem were enough to overthrow the Roman party and substitute Antigonus for Hyrcanus. The Parthian administration was a favourable contrast to the rule of the oppressive proconsuls, and the justice and clemency of Pacorus won the hearts of the Syrians. Meantime Labienus had penetrated Asia Minor as far as Lydia and Ionia. The Roman governor Plancus could only hold the islands; most of the cities opened their gates to Labienus, the “Parthicus imperator.”
But Rome even in its time of civil divisions was stronger than Parthia; in 39 B.C. Ventidius Bassus, general for Antony, suddenly appeared in Asia and drove Labienus and his provincial levies before him without a battle as far as the Taurus. Here the Parthians came to Labienus’ help, but, attacking rashly and without his co-operation, they were defeated by Ventidius and Labienus’ troops were involved in the disaster; Phranipates, the ablest lieutenant of Pacorus, fell, and the Parthians evacuated Syria. Before Ventidius had completed the resettlement of the Roman power in Syria and Palestine, and while his troops were dispersed in winter quarters, the Parthians fell on him again with a force of more than twenty thousand men and an unusually large proportion of free cavaliers in full armour. A battle was fought near the shrine of Hercules at Gindarus in Cyrrhestica, on the anniversary, it is said, of the defeat of Crassus (9th of June, 38 B.C.); the Parthians were utterly routed and Pacorus himself was slain. His head was sent round to the cities of Syria which were still in revolt, to prove to them that their hopes had failed. There was no further resistance save from Aradus and Jerusalem.
Orodes, now an old man and sorely afflicted by the death of his favourite son, nominated his next son, Phraates, as his colleague, and the latter began to reign by making away with brothers of whom he was jealous, and then strangling his father, who had not concealed his anger at the former crime (37 B.C.). The reign of Orodes was the culminating point of Parthian greatness, and all his successors adopted his title of king of kings, “Arsaces Euergetes.” It was he who moved the capital westward to Seleucia, or rather to Ctesiphon (Taisefún), its eastern suburb.
PHRAATES IV REPELS MARK ANTONY
[36-9 B.C.]
Phraates IV continued his reign in a series of crimes, murdering every prominent man among his brothers, and even his own adult son, that the nobles might find no Arsacid to lead their discontent. Many of the nobles fled to foreign parts, and Antony felt encouraged to plan a war of vengeance against Parthia. Antony had no hope of forcing the well-guarded Euphrates frontier; but since the death of Pacorus, Armenia had again been brought under Roman patronage, and he hoped to strike a blow at the heart of Parthia. Keeping the Parthians in play by feigned proposals of peace while he matured his preparations, he appeared in Atropatene in 36 B.C. with sixty thousand legionaries and forty thousand cavalry and auxiliary troops, and at once formed the siege of the capital Phraaspa. The Median king Artavasdes, son of Ariobarzanes, had marched to join Phraates, who looked for the attack in another quarter. Phraates had only forty thousand Parthians, including but four hundred freemen who never left the king, and probably ten thousand Median cavalry; but these forces were well handled, and the two kings had reached the scene of war before Antony was joined by his baggage and heavy siege-train, and opened the campaign by capturing the train and cutting to pieces its escort of seventy-five hundred men under the legate Oppius Statianus. Antony was still able to repel a demonstration to relieve Phraaspa; but his provisions ran short, and the foraging parties were so harassed that the siege made no progress. As it was now October, he was at length forced to open negotiations with Phraates.
The Parthians promised peace if the Romans withdrew; but when Antony took him at his word, abandoning the siege-engines, he began a vigorous pursuit, and kept the Romans constantly on the defensive, chastising one officer who hazarded an engagement by a defeat which cost the Romans three thousand killed and five thousand wounded. Still greater were the losses by famine and thirst and dysentery; and the whole force was utterly demoralised and had lost a fourth part of its fighting men, a third of the camp-followers, and all the baggage when, after a retreat of twenty-seven days from Phraaspa to the Araxes by way of Mianeh (276 miles), they reached the Armenian frontier. Eight thousand more perished of cold and from snow-storms in the Armenian mountains; the mortality among the wounded was terrible; the Romans would have been undone had not Artavasdes of Armenia allowed them to winter in his land.
The failure of the expedition was due partly to the usual Roman ignorance of the geographical and climatic conditions, partly to a rash haste in the earlier operations; but very largely also (as in the case of Napoleon’s Russian campaign) to the lack of discipline in the soldiers of the Civil War, which called for very severe chastisement even during the siege of Phraaspa, and culminated at length in frequent desertions and in open mutiny, driving Antony to think of suicide. The Romans laid the whole blame on Artavasdes, but without any adequate reason. At the same time, the disaster of Antony following that of Crassus seemed to show that within their own country the Parthians could not safely be attacked on any side, and for a century and a half Roman cupidity left them alone.
Media and Armenia fell before the Parthians; the Romans who were still in the country were slain, and Artaxes II was raised to the Armenian throne (30 B.C.). In the very next year, however, the course of the Parthian affairs led Artaxes to make his peace with Rome. Phraates’ tyranny had only been aggravated by his successes, and open rebellion broke out in 33 B.C. We have coins of an anonymous pretender dated March to June 32 B.C. To him succeeded Tiridates II, whose rebellion was at a climax during the war of Actium. Phraates was taken by surprise and fled, slaying his concubines that they might not fall a prey to his victor. Tiridates seated himself on the throne in June, 27 B.C., and Phraates wandered for some time in exile till he persuaded the Scythians to undertake his cause. Before the great host of the Scythians Tiridates retired without a contest. In June, 26 B.C., as the coins prove, Phraates again held the throne. In 10 or 9 B.C. Phraates took the precaution of sending his family to Rome so that the rebels might have no Arsacid pretender to put forward, keeping only and designating as heir his youngest son by his favourite wife Thea Musa Urania, an Italian slave girl presented to him by Augustus. This was mainly a scheme of Urania’s, and she and her son crowned it by murdering the old tyrant.