Of course the Romans did not wait for the morning. The lieutenant-generals Cassius and Octavius - Crassus himself had completely lost his judgment - ordered the men still capable of marching to set out immediately and with the utmost silence (while the whole - said to amount to 4000 - of the wounded and stragglers were left), with the view of seeking protection within the walls of Carrhae. The fact that the Parthians, when they returned on the following day, applied themselves first of all to seek out and massacre the scattered Romans left behind, and the further fact that the garrison and inhabitants of Carrhae, early informed of the disaster by fugitives, had marched forth in all haste to meet the beaten army, saved the remnants of it from what seemed inevitable destruction.
The squadrons of Parthian horsemen could not think of undertaking a siege of Carrhae. But the Romans soon voluntarily departed, whether compelled by want of provisions, or in consequence of the desponding precipitation of their commander-in-chief, whom the soldiers had vainly attempted to remove from the command and to replace by Cassius. They moved in the direction of the Armenian mountains; marching by night and resting by day Octavius with a band of 5000 men reached the fortress of Sinnaca, which was only a day's march distant from the heights that would give shelter, and liberated even at the peril of his own life the commander-in-chief, whom the guide had led astray and given up to the enemy.
Then the vizier rode in front of the Roman camp to offer, in the name of his king, peace and friendship to the Romans, and to propose a personal conference between the two generals. The Roman army, demoralized as it was, adjured and indeed compelled its leader to accept the offer. The vizier received the consular and his staff with the usual honours, and offered anew to conclude a compact of friendship; only, with just bitterness recalling the fate of the agreements concluded with Lucullus and Pompeius respecting the Euphrates boundary[9], he demanded that it should be immediately reduced to writing. A richly adorned horse was produced; it was a present from the king to the Roman commander-in-chief; the servants of the vizier crowded round Crassus, zealous to mount him on the steed. It seemed to the Roman officers as if there was a design to seize the person of the commander-in-chief; Octavius, unarmed as he was, pulled the sword of one of the Parthians from its sheath and stabbed the groom. In the tumult which thereupon arose, the Roman officers were all put to death; the gray-haired commander-in-chief also, like his grand-uncle[10], was unwilling to serve as a living trophy to the enemy, and sought and found death.
The multitude left behind in the camp without a leader were partly taken prisoners, partly dispersed. What the day of Carrhae had begun, the day of Sinnaca completed (June 9, 701); the two took their place side by side with the days of the Allia, of Cannae, and of Arausio. The army of the Euphrates was no more. Only the squadron of Gaius Cassius, which had been broken off from the main army on the retreat from Carrhae, and some other scattered bands and isolated fugitives succeeded in escaping from the Parthians and Bedouins and separately finding their way back to Syria. Of above 40,000 Roman legionaries, who had crossed the Euphrates, not a fourth part returned; the half had perished; nearly 10,000 Roman prisoners were settled by the victors in the extreme east of their kingdom - in the oasis of Merv - as bondsmen compelled after the Parthian fashion to render military service.
For the first time since the eagles had headed the legions, they had become in the same year trophies of victory in the hands of foreign nations, almost contemporaneously of a German tribe in the west[11] and of the Parthians in the east. As to the impression which the defeat of the Romans produced in the east, unfortunately no adequate information has reached us; but it must have been deep and lasting. King Orodes was just celebrating the marriage of his son Pacorus with the sister of his new ally, Artavasdes the king of Armenia, when the announcement of the victory of his vizier arrived, and along with it, according to Oriental usage, the cut-off head of Crassus. The tables were already removed; one of the wandering companies of actors from Asia Minor, numbers of which at that time existed and carried Hellenic poetry and the Hellenic drama far into the east, was just performing before the assembled court the Bacchae of Euripides. The actor playing the part of Agave, who in her Dionysiac frenzy has torn in pieces her son and returns from Cithaeron carrying his head on the thyrsus, exchanged this for the bloody head of Crassus, and to the infinite delight of his audience of half-Hellenized barbarians began afresh the well-known song:
It was, since the times of the Achaemenids, the first serious victory which the Orientals had achieved over the west; and there was a deep significance in the fact that, by way of celebrating this victory, the fairest product of the western world - Greek tragedy - parodied itself through its degenerate representatives in that hideous burlesque. The civic spirit of Rome and the genius of Hellas began simultaneously to accommodate themselves to the chains of sultanism.
The disaster, terrible in itself, seemed also as though it was to be dreadful in its consequences, and to shake the foundations of the Roman power in the east. It was among the least of its results that the Parthians now had absolute sway beyond the Euphrates; that Armenia, after having fallen away from the Roman alliance even before the disaster of Crassus, was reduced by it into entire dependence on Parthia; that the faithful citizens of Carrhae were bitterly punished for their adherence to the Occidentals by the new master appointed over them by the Parthians, one of the treacherous guides of the Romans, named Andromachus.
The Parthians now prepared in all earnest to cross the Euphrates in their turn, and, in union with the Armenians and Arabs, to dislodge the Romans from Syria. The Jews and various other Occidentals awaited emancipation from the Roman rule there, no less impatiently than the Hellenes beyond the Euphrates awaited relief from the Parthian; in Rome civil war was at the door; an attack at this particular place and time was a grave peril. But fortunately for Rome the leaders on each side had changed. Sultan Orodes was too much indebted to the heroic prince, who had first placed the crown on his head and then cleared the land from the enemy, not to get rid of him as soon as possible by the executioner. His place as commander-in-chief of the invading army destined for Syria was filled by a prince, the king's son Pacorus, with whom on account of his youth and inexperience the prince Osaces had to be associated as military adviser. On the other side the interim command in Syria in room of Crassus was taken up by the prudent and resolute quaestor Gaius Cassius.
9. V. IV. Difficulty with the Parthians.