and designed to advance on India. Although not uniformly victorious, he transformed the kingdom of Armenia into a Roman province, and almost reduced Parthia to the condition of a vassal state.[1] Death, or the more pressing claims of home affairs, imposed a term to his activity in the field, and his great schemes of conquest were never again entertained; but several later emperors, notably Severus, Carus, and Galerius, often demonstrated the superiority of the Roman forces under competent generalship over their Oriental antagonists.[2] But after the Graeco-Roman supremacy had declined to the stagnant mediocrity of Byzantinism this ascendancy could no longer be maintained; and as often as East and West came into collision the honours of war almost invariably rested with the Asiatic power.
For more than five centuries after the overthrow of Darius by the armies of Macedon the remnants of the Persian race languished in the Province of Persis, a small state lying east of the Persian Gulf, to which was allowed a semi-independence by the supreme government. Here was the original home of Cyrus, and here he matured his plans
- ↑ The campaigns of Trajan are very imperfectly recorded in the only extant account, that of Dion Cassius as preserved in the careless epitome of Xiphilinus; Zonaras, xi, 21. It is certain that he took the twin capitals of Parthia, Seleucia and Ctesiphon, which faced each other from opposite sides of the Euphrates, and advanced to the Persian Gulf. He marched into Arabia, but the evidence that he penetrated to the Indian Ocean, as Tillemont thinks, is insufficient.
- ↑ The capture of Seleucia by Avidius Cassius (165), and his brutal massacre of 300,000 of its inhabitants, mostly Greeks, is often alluded to as an irreparable blow to Western civilization in the East; Dion Cas., lxxi, 2, etc. Severus took Ctesiphon in 199; Herodian; Hist. August. In 283 Carus also took Ctesiphon; Hist. August.; Aurelius Vict. Under Diocletian, Galerius extended the Empire beyond the Tigris; Aurel. Vict.; Eutropius, ix.
