Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 18.djvu/632

604 PERSIA [PARTHIAN 115-191. its close Mesopotamia was made a Roman province ; the Cardueni and the Marcomedi l of the Armenian frontier had also been reduced, and Trajan received the title of " Parthicus." In 116 the Tigris was crossed in face of the enemy (probably at Jezirat ibn Omar), 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, whose intestine disorders continued. 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 north-east 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 rebels, whose centre was in Mesopotamia, set Meher- dates VI. at their head ; 2 and, when he died by a fall from his horse in a foray on Commagene, his son, Sinatruces II., took his place, and was aided by an army which Osroes sent from Armenia under his son Parthamaspates. The reconciliation of the Arsacids among themselves was rewarded by the defeat and death of the Roman general Maximus; but jealousy now sprang up between the cousins, and of this Lusius, a second general sent by Trajan from Babylon, took advantage to draw Parthamaspates to the Roman side by a promise of the Parthian throne. Sina truces was defeated and slain, Nisibis retaken, Edessa stormed and destroyed, and the whole rebellion 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 117). An unsuccessful siege of Atra (Hatra) 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 August 117) Hadrian wisely withdrew the garrisons from the new provinces, which would have demanded the con stant 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. 3 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. 4 And the discord did not cease even now, for, though Osroes was restored, Vola- gases still continued to coin, whether as rival or as partner of his rule, in some part of the realm. Hadrian continued to preserve peace, though a war threatened in 123, 5 and in 130 he restored to Osroes his daughter taken captive by Trajan at Ctesiphon. Osroes died soon after, and Volagases II. became sole monarch, dying in November 148 at the age of about ninety-six, after a reign of seventy-one years. 6 1 Eutr. , viii. 3 ; Festus Rufus, Brev., 20. Marcomedi are the Medea called Markh, the plural of Mar, " Mede " in Armenian. 2 What follows is drawn from Malalas, who has two passages (i. 351- 352 and 357-358) drawn from Arrian s Parthica, but placed in a wrong context. . 3 He is the Parnathsapat who was king of Edessa from 119 to 123 ; this fact and its relation to Spart. , JIadr., 5, has escaped notice owing to the false chronology of Dion. Telm. 4 A proof of this is that very few silver drachmae and no tetra- drachms were struck between 96 and 120. 5 See Diirr, Iteisen des K. Hadrian, p. 48. The removal of Partha maspates and restoration of the old dynasty of Osrhoene may have been a concession made on this occasion. 6 The Volagsesus who appears in connexion with an Alan invasion of Media, Armenia, and Cappadocia in 135 is from the context a different person, viz., the unnamed king of Armenia who was appointed by Hadrian in 117 (Spart., Hadr., 21), and whose successor took the throne between 140 and 143 (Eckhel, Jjoct. num. vet., vii. 14). Volagases III., who succeeded, had designs on Armenia, Tola- but an interview between him and Antoninus Pius (spring gases 155) delayed for a time the outbreak of war. 7 However, martial preparations went on, and on the death of Antoninus Volagases entered Armenia (162), s expelled the Arsacid Sohonnus, who was a client of Rome, and made Pacorus king. The destruction of a Roman legion under the legate of Cappadocia (yElius Severianus), who fell on his own sword, laid Cappadocia and Syria open to the Parthians ; Attidius Cornelianus, legate of Syria, was routed, and the provincials were in such distress that they even began to speak of revolt from Rome. AY hen late in the year vElius Verus arrived from the capital lie found the troops so demoralized 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 Soha3inus restored by Statins Priscus and Martius Verus (163, 164), 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. 10 At length, deserted by his allies (i.e., by the local kings, who were becoming more and more independent), Volagases abandoned Meso potamia, and Cassius entered Babylonia, where, on a frivo lous pretext, he gave up to rapine and fire the friendly city of Seleucia, still the first city of the East, Avith 400,000 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 Ctesi phon, razed the palace of Volagases to the ground may, on the other hand, be defended as a symbolical act calcu lated more than anything else to impair the prestige of the Parthian with his Oriental subjects. Cassius returned to Syria in 165, 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. 11 The peace which followed in 166 gave Meso potamia to Rome. This was the greatest of all wars between Rome and Parthia, alike in the extent of the lands involved and the energy of attack shown by the Parthians. The Romans used their victory with modera tion, but Parthia, after this last effort, continued steadily to sink. The Romans at the same time made an effort to compete with Parthia for the Chinese trade (especially in silk), which the latter had jealously kept in their own hands, and in 166 an envoy of An-thun (M. Antoninus) reached the court of the emperor Huan-ti, via the sea and Tong- king. But the effort to establish a direct trade with China was unavailing, and the trade still flowed in its old channels when a second Roman agent reached China in 226, a little before the fall of the Parthian empire. The Chinese tell us that with India also the Parthians drove a considerable trade. 12 7 Aristides, Or. Sacra, . 493, Cant. ; cp. Waddington, in Mem. Ac. Inscr., xxvi. (1867) p. 260 sq. 8 For this war cp. the excellent monograph of E. Napp, J)c rebus imp. M. Aur. Ant. in Or. getstis, 1879. 9 C. I. L., vi. Nos. 1377, 1457, 1497. For the order of events cp. Lucian, De C onsc. Hist. , 30. 10 Details in Suidas, s.v. Zevy/jLO. ; Luc., op. cit., 29 ; Fronto, Epp. ad Verum, ii. 1, 121, Naber. 11 This seems to follow from the fact that both emperors, who were already called "Armeniacus" and "Parthicus Maximus, " also call them- selves " Medicus " (on a coin earlier than 28th August 165), Eckhel, iv. 76 ; inscr. of Sigma, Orelli, No. 859. l 2 The " Annals of the Second Han," in Deguignes, Mtm.Ac. Inscr.,