The Historians' History of the World 08

Trajan, who had quite thrown over the principle of the Julii and Flavii (that the Danube and the Euphrates were the boundaries of the empire) and was fully embarked on the old Chauvinist traditions of the republic, would not let such an occasion slip; and refusing an answer to an embassy that met him at Athens, he entered Armenia and took Arsamosata without battle, after receiving the homage of western Armenia (114 A.D.). Parthamasiris submitted himself to the emperor, but Trajan declared that Armenia must be a Roman province, appointed an escort to see the Parthian over the border, and when he resisted and tried to escape ordered his execution—a brutal act, meant to inspire terror and show that the Arsacids should no longer be treated with on equal terms. Armenia and the neighbouring kings to the north having given in their submission, Trajan marched back to Edessa, receiving the homage of Abgar. The campaign of 115 A.D. was in Mesopotamia. At its close Mesopotamia was made a Roman province; the Cardueni and the Marcomedi of the Armenian frontier had also been reduced, and Trajan received the title of “Parthicus.” In 116 A.D. the Tigris was crossed in the face of the enemy, and a third new province of Assyria absorbed the whole kingdom of Mebarsapes. Once more the Tigris was crossed and Babylonia invaded, still without resistance from the Parthians.

[116-166 A.D.]

A Roman fleet descended the Euphrates and the ships were conveyed across on rollers to the Tigris, to co-operate with the army; and now Ctesiphon fell and Osroes fled to Armenia, the northeast parts of which cannot have been thoroughly subdued. The Roman fleet descended the Tigris and received the submission of Mesene; but now, while Trajan was engaged in a voyage of reconnaissance in the Persian Gulf, plainly aiming at Bahrein, all the new provinces revolted and destroyed or expelled the Roman garrisons. The rebellion was at length put down, but Trajan now saw what it would cost to maintain direct Roman rule over such wide and distant conquests, and Parthamaspates was solemnly crowned in the great plain by Ctesiphon in the presence of Romans and Parthians (winter of 117 A.D.). An unsuccessful siege of Atra (Hatrá) in the Mesopotamian desert was Trajan’s next undertaking; illness and the revolt of the Jews prevented him from resuming the campaign, and after Trajan’s death (7th of August, 117 A.D.) Hadrian wisely withdrew the garrisons from the new provinces, which would have demanded the constant presence of the imperial armies, and again made the Euphrates the limit of the empire. Parthamaspates, too, had soon to leave Parthia, and Hadrian gave him Orrhoene. Thus Trajan’s Chauvinist policy had no other result than to show to the world the miserable weakness to which discord had reduced the Parthians. Osroes died soon after, and Volagases II became sole monarch, dying in November, 148 A.D., at the age of about ninety-six, after a reign of seventy-one years.

Volagases III, who succeeded, had designs on Armenia, and in 162 A.D. expelled the Arsacid Sohæmus, who was a client of Rome, and made Pacorus king. The destruction of a Roman legion under the legate of Cappadocia (Ælius Severianus), who fell on his own sword, laid Cappadocia and Syria open to the Parthians. When late in the year Ælius Verus arrived from the capital he found the troops so demoralised by defeat that he was ready to offer peace; but when Volagases refused to treat, the able lieutenants whom Verus directed from Antioch soon changed the face of affairs.

The war had two theatres, and was officially called the Armenian and Parthian War. Armenia was regained and Sohæmus restored (163, 164 A.D.), while Avidius Cassius drove Volagases from Syria in a bloody battle at Europus, and entering north Mesopotamia, took Edessa and Nisibis, though not without serious opposition. At length, deserted by his allies (the local kings, who were becoming more and more independent), Volagases abandoned Mesopotamia, and Cassius entered Babylonia, where, on a frivolous pretext, he gave up to rapine and the flames the friendly city of Seleucia, still the first city of the East, with four hundred thousand inhabitants.

The destruction of Seleucia was a hideous crime, a mortal wound dealt to Eastern Hellenism by its natural protectors; that Cassius next, advancing to Ctesiphon, razed the palace of Volagases to the ground may, on the other hand, be defended as a symbolical act calculated more than anything else to impair the prestige of the Parthian with his oriental subjects. Cassius returned to Syria in 165 A.D., with his victorious army much weakened through the failure of the commissariat and by the plague, which, breaking out in Parthia immediately after the fall of Seleucia, spread over the whole known world. In the same year Martius Verus won hardly less considerable successes in Media Atropatene, then apparently a separate kingdom. The peace which followed in 166 A.D. gave Mesopotamia to Rome.