The Historians' History of the World 08

According to Dion Cassius,c a contemporary, we are led to believe that Ardashir defeated the Parthians in three battles. His decisive encounter with Ardavan (Artabanus), the last Parthian Great King, probably took place on April 22nd, 224 A.D.[30] Ardavan fell in the battle, and from that time forward Ardashir assumed the title of “king of kings,” which from ancient days had been borne by the ruler of the empire of anterior Asia. All the evidence points to the decisive battle having taken place in Babylonia or Susiana. This would fit in with Dion’s statement that the first expedition afterwards undertaken was directed against Atra, in the midst of the Mesopotamian desert, where a small independent state had come into being in the near neighbourhood of the Parthian capital. At first Ardashir beat in vain upon the walls of Atra, whose strength can still be seen from the mighty ruins that remain, but the place was soon taken and destroyed either by him or his successor. He succeeded in conquering Media, where he was opposed by a scion of the Arsacid family, and the greater part of the Iranian highlands; but not Armenia, whither sons of Ardavan had fled.

The Romans had watched the rise of Ardashir with apprehension. There is no question that he cherished the design of seizing upon as many of their Asiatic possessions as he could. He gained some successes at first, but was forced to give ground when Alexander Severus marched against him. The history of the empire of the Sassanids was conditioned from the outset by its relations with Rome. Peace was again and again concluded between the two, but they invariably looked upon each other as adversaries, and as adversaries of equal rank. Under capable rulers and tolerable internal conditions Rome (that is Byzantium) maintained the ascendency of the European over the Asiatic, but circumstances were frequently adverse, and the Persians heaped disgrace upon the Roman name. This struggle fills the chief place in the political history of the Sassanids.

SASSANIAN POWER

[236-260 A.D.]

Istakhr remained the capital in theory, as Persepolis had formerly been. There stood the Fire temple of the royal house, in which the heads of vanquished foreign kings were hung up among other trophies. But the real metropolis was Ctesiphon, the capital of the Arsacids, and Seleucia, which was divided from it only by the Tigris and which Ardashir restored under the name of Veh-Ardashir (good Ardashir). The rich country in which this double city lay was neither geographically nor ethnographically a part of Iran, for the deep valley was peopled principally by Semites; the choice of it as the seat of government was due to the precedent set by the elder empire and in part, probably, to its nearness to Roman territory. We cannot in all cases be sure over which countries Ardashir ruled at the end of his life, for the national tradition tells of some conquests really made by his successors, and others which the Sassanids never made at all. But Ardashir won and consolidated a great empire that held together for four centuries, giving a powerful blow to the system of vassal states, which had become more and more prevalent under the Arsacids, and reducing most of these states to provinces.

SAPOR FIGHTS ROME

The statement that he associated his son Sapor with him in the government gains a degree of confirmation from the existence of coins bearing a youthful head beside his own. He died at the end of 241 or the beginning of 242. Sapor I (older form Shahpur; among Occidentals Sapor or Sapores) was in all likelihood solemnly crowned on March 20th, 242. The mythical statement that his mother was an Arcadian princess whom Ardashir took to wife at the conquest of Ctesiphon is incompatible with the probably more correct tradition that he had distinguished himself in the decisive battle against Ardavan; nor is it likely that a child of thirteen or fourteen would have taken so energetically in hand the war against Rome. For Ardashir had resumed the struggle in his later years (in the reign of Maximin, between February, 236, and about May, 238), and had taken Nisibis (Nesibin) and Carrhæ (Haran), the two fortresses round which so many battles were fought in the course of these wars.

In 242 Sapor had pressed forward to Antioch; but there he was met by the emperor Gordian, and the latter, or rather his father-in-law Timesitheus, drove him back and retook the two Mesopotamian strongholds. He defeated the Persians at Reshaina, and purposed to march upon the Persian capital. Like Julian after him, he chose the way along the Euphrates; and somewhat below the junction of the Chaboras with the Euphrates, nearly on the frontier between the two empires, Gordian was slain by the commander of the guard, Philip the Arab (beginning of 244). The murderer had himself proclaimed emperor and hastily concluded a shameful peace with Sapor, by which he is said to have resigned Armenia and Mesopotamia to him.