Iran: Empire of the Mind

by Michael Axworthy

  Rome’s Great Rival in the East

  The Parthians were also masters of the Art of War, as was to be demonstrated in the next period of conflict, with Rome. Driven on to ever-wider conquests by the ambitions of over-mighty patricians like Pompey, Lucullus and Crassus, who saw conquest and military glory as the necessary adjuncts of a successful political career, the Roman republic by the first half of the first century BCE had taken over the eastern Mediterranean from its previous Hellenistic overlords and had begun to press further eastwards. From the beginning the main area of conflict with the Parthians was in Armenia and the area to the south—eastern Syria and northern Mesopotamia. In 57-54 BCE Aulus Gabinius, the governor of Roman Syria, supported one brother against another in a dispute over the Parthian royal succession, but his favoured candidate lost out and the other brother, Orodes, took the throne.

  In 53 BCE Marcus Licinius Crassus, a fabulously rich Roman politician who had destroyed the slave revolt of Spartacus in southern Italy in earlier years, became the new governor of Syria. Hoping to make conquests in the east to rival those recently achieved by Caesar in Gaul, Crassus marched an army of over 40,000 men east to Carrhae (modern Harran)—arrogantly rejecting the advice of the king of Armenia to take advantage of his friendship and follow a more northerly route. At Carrhae his force was met in the open plain by a smaller army of about 10,000 Parthian horsemen; large numbers of fast-moving horse-archers, supported by a much smaller number of heavily armoured cavalrymen on armoured horses, each wielding a long, heavy lance. The Roman force was composed primarily of armoured infantry armed with swords and heavy throwing-spears, with some relatively lightly-armoured or unarmoured Gaulish cavalry.

  The Parthians confronted Crassus with a kind of fighting that the Romans had not previously encountered and against which they had no answer. The Roman infantry advanced, but the Parthian horse archers withdrew before them, circling round to shoot arrows into the flanks of their column. Hour after hour the arrows rained down on the Romans, and despite the heavy Roman armour the powerful Parthian war bows frequently zinged an arrow past the edge of a shield, found a gap at the neck between body-armour and helmet, punched through a weak link in chain-mail or wounded a soldier’s unprotected hands or feet. The Romans grew tired and thirsty in the heat, and their frustration at not being able to get to grips with the Parthians turned to defeatism; especially when they saw the Parthians resupplying themselves with arrows from masses of heavily-laden pack camels.

  Crassus’s son led a detachment against the Parthians, including the Gaulish cavalry. The Parthians pulled away, as if in disorder, but their real intention was to draw the detachment away beyond any possible assistance from the main body. When the Gauls rode ahead to chase off the archers, the Parthian heavy cavalry charged down on them, spearing the lightly-armoured Gauls and their horses with their long lances. In desperation the Gauls tried to attack the Parthian horses by dismounting and rolling under them, to try to stab up at their unprotected bellies, but even this desperate tactic could not remedy the predicament. Then the full strength of the Parthian horse archers turned on the Roman detachment. More and more of them were hit by arrows, while all were disoriented and confused by the clouds of dust thrown up by the Parthians’ horses. Crassus’s son pulled his men back to a small hill, where they were surrounded and eventually killed, with the exception of about 500, who were taken prisoner.

  The defeat of the detachment and the jubilation of the Parthians further demoralised the main Roman force. Finally Crassus himself attempted to negotiate with the Parthian general, Suren; but was killed in a scuffle and beheaded. The survivors of the Roman army withdrew in disorder back into Roman Syria; as many as 10,000 prisoners were marched off by the Parthians to the remote north-east of the empire.

  According to Plutarch the head of Crassus was sent to the Parthian king, Orodes, and it arrived while the king was listening to an actor declaiming some lines from Euripedes’ play The Bacchae. To the applause of the court, the actor took the head and spoke the lines of queen Agave of Thebes, who in the play unwittingly killed her own son, King Pentheus, while in a Bacchic trance:

  We’ve hunted down a lion’s whelp today,

  And from the mountains bring a noble prey4

  Some have suggested that the Parthian general recorded in the western sources as Suren was the warrior-hero later remembered as Rostam and immortalised in Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh. Like Ferdowsi’s Rostam, Suren’s family had their lands in Sistan (originally Sakastan—the land of the Sakae) and like Rostam, he had a troubled relationship with his king. Orodes was resentful of Suren’s victory and had him murdered.

  The defeat at Carrhae was a great blow to Roman prestige in the east, and after it the Parthians were able to extend their control to include Armenia. But in the fiercely competitive environment of Rome towards the end of the republic, the defeat, humiliation and death of Crassus were a challenge as much as a warning. To succeed where Crassus had failed and win a Parthian triumph became an inviting political prize. Another incentive was the wealth of the silk trade. While the hostile Parthians controlled the central part of the route to China, wealthy Romans saw much of the gold they paid to clothe their wives and daughters with expensive silks going to their most redoubtable enemies. The next to try was Mark Antony, who in 36 BCE took an army more than double the size of that of Crassus into the same area of upper Mesopotamia5.

  Between the expeditions of Crassus and Antony various campaigns had been fought between the Parthians and the Romans, with mixed outcomes. In 51 BCE some Roman survivors from Carrhae ambushed a Parthian invading force near Antioch and destroyed it. In 40 BCE another Parthian force, commanded by Orodes’ son Pacorus (with the help of a renegade Roman, Quintus Labienus) broke out of Syria and divided, conquering both Palestine and most of the provinces of Asia Minor (exploiting the chaos caused by the civil wars that followed the murder of Caesar in 44 BCE, the invaders received the submission of many towns without a siege). But in 39-38 BCE Publius Ventidius, one of Mark Antony’s subordinates, came to the rescue of the eastern provinces with some of the veteran legions of Caesar’s army. He defeated the Parthians in a series of battles in which all the main Parthian commanders, including Pacorus and Labienus, were killed; and won for himself the rare honour of a Parthian triumph in Rome. But Mark Antony wanted the glory of a victory against the Parthians for himself.

  Mark Antony encountered many of the same difficulties as Crassus in his campaign against the Parthians. The Romans found that their best remedy against the Parthian arrows was to form the close formation called the testudo (tortoise), in which the soldiers closed up so that their shields made a wall in front, with the ranks behind holding their shields over their heads, overlapping, to make a roof. This made an effective defence, but slowed the advance to a crawl, and the legionary infantry could not hit back at the Parthian horse archers, whose mobility enabled them to range at will around the Roman armies on the march and attack them at their most vulnerable. The Parthians were also able to attack Antony’s supply columns, and the difficulty of finding food and water made the large numbers of the force a liability rather than an asset. Having suffered in this way in the south, Antony attempted a more northerly attack on Parthian territory, and penetrated into what is now Azerbaijan, but achieved little there and was forced to retreat through Armenia in the winter cold, losing as many as 24,000 men.

  Antony saved some face by a later campaign in Armenia, but the overall message of these Roman encounters with the Parthians was that the styles of warfare of the opponents, and the geography of the region, dictated a stalemate that would be difficult for either side to break. The Parthian cavalry were vulnerable to ambush by infantry in the hilly, less open terrain of the Roman-controlled territories, and lacked the siege equipment necessary to take the Roman towns. The Romans, strong in infantry but weak in cavalry, were vulnerable to the Parthians in the open Mesopotamian plain and would always find it difficult to protect their supply lines a
gainst the more mobile Parthian forces. These factors were more or less permanent, and can be seen at work in the later, Sassanid period also.

  Perhaps recognising the intractability of this situation, after Augustus eventually achieved supremacy in the Roman empire and ended the civil wars by defeating Mark Antony in 31/30 BCE he followed a policy of diplomacy with the Parthians, and was able to retrieve the eagle standards of the legions that had been lost at Carrhae. The Parthians seem to have used the period of peace in the west to create a new Indo-Parthian empire in the Punjab, under a line descended from the Suren family. But the wars in the west began again in the reign of Nero, after the Parthian king Vologases I (Valkash) had appointed a new king in Armenia, which the Romans regarded as a dependent state of the Roman empire. The general Gnaeus Domitius Corbulo conquered Armenia in AD 58-60, but the Parthians counter-attacked with some success thereafter, capturing a Roman force.6 It has been suggested that the Roman armour made of overlapping plates (lorica segmentata), familiar from films and children’s books, was developed as a counter to Parthian arrows around the time of the campaign of Corbulo. The outcome of the Armenian war was that the Romans and Parthians signed a treaty agreeing to the establishment of an independent Arsacid dynasty in Armenia as a buffer state, but with the succession subject to Roman approval.

  Vologases I may also be significant in the history of Mazdaism and the beginnings of its transition into the modern religion of Zoroastrianism. Later Zoroastrian texts say that a king Valkash (they do not specify which one—several Arsacid kings took that name) was the first to tell the Magian priests to bring together all the oral and written traditions of their religion and record them systematically, beginning the process that eventually (several centuries later) led to the assembly of the texts of the Avesta and the other holy scriptures of Zoroastrianism.7 If it was Vologases I that gave out those instructions (which is perhaps supported by the fact that his brother Tiridates was known also for his Mazdaean piety8), it may fit with other decisions and policies during his reign, which seem consistently to have stressed a desire to reassert the Iranian character of the state. He is believed to have built a new capital named after himself near Seleuceia and Ctesiphon, with the aim of avoiding the Greek character of those places. Some of his coins were struck with lettering in Aramaic script (the script in which the Parthian language was usually written) rather than in Greek as had been the case before. And there are suggestions also that he was hostile to the Jews, which was untypical in the Arsacid period.9 Although his successors did not follow through with many of these novelties, they do prefigure the policies of the Sassanids, and the gradual erosion of Greek influence and the strengthening of Iranian identity are features of the reigns after Vologases I.

  Sol Invictus

  Something else taken west by the Roman soldiers from their encounters in the east was a new religion—Mithraism. Having been one of the subordinate deities of Mazdaism in the Achaemenid period, Mithras became the central god of a religion in its own right after his transition westwards—but it may be that his significance had grown in a particular context or location in Persia or Asia Minor at an earlier stage, and some have suggested that the cult was a wholly new one that took little from Persia beyond the name.10 As worshipped in the west, Mithras always remained primarily a god of soldiers (which may point up a connection with the Parthian wars), and was an important bonding element in the lives of military men who might find themselves separated from friends and familiar places again and again in the course of their lives, as they were posted from place to place. Although Mithras was associated with the sun (the Invincible Sun—sol invictus), Mithraism seems to have taken on some of the ritualised cult character of western paganism, losing most of the ethical content of Iranian Mazdaism and becoming a kind of secret society a little like the Freemasons, with secret ceremonies (mysteries), initiation rites and a hierarchy of grades of membership. The underground temples of Mithras are found all over the empire, as far away from Iran as by the Walbrook in the City of London and at Carrawburgh (Roman Brocolitia) on Hadrian’s Wall. The period of the cult’s early popularity and spread was the first century AD.

  Mithraism joins the list of important religious and intellectual influences from the Iranian lands on the West, along with the influences on Judaism and Platonism we have already considered (among others). Mithraism is thought to have had an important influence on the early Christian church, as the Christian bishops made converts and tried to make the new religion as acceptable as possible to former pagans (though the rise of Mithraism only narrowly predates that of Christianity, and there may also have been influences in the opposite direction). To illustrate this: his followers believed that Mithras was born on 25 December, of a virgin (though some accounts say he was born from a rock), with shepherds as his first worshippers. His rites included a kind of baptism and a sacramental meal. Other aspects of the cult reflected its Mazdaean origins: Mithras was believed to have killed a bull as a sacrifice, from the blood of which all other living things emerged. Mithras was the ally of Ahura Mazda against the evil principle in the world, Ahriman.

  In the following century the great soldier-Emperor Trajan managed to break the strategic logjam in the east with a new invasion of Mesopotamia, after the Parthian Vologases III had given him a pretext by deposing one ruler of Armenia and appointing another the Romans did not like. Instead of trying to toil south in the heat towards Ctesiphon under a hail of arrows on foot, in 115 (after completing the conquest of Armenia the previous year) Trajan put the men and equipment of his army into boats and ran them downstream through Mesopotamia along the river Tigris. When they reached Ctesiphon and Seleuceia they drove off the Parthian defenders and applied the most refined techniques of Roman siege engineering. The twin capital fell, and Trajan annexed the provinces of Mesopotamia to the Roman empire. He marched his men as far as the shore of the Persian Gulf, and would have liked to go further, emulating Alexander. But in 116 he fell ill while besieging Hatra, which his armies had bypassed earlier, and he died in 117.

  Trajan’s conquests, although impressive enough to win him the title ‘Parthicus’ could not destroy the centres of Parthian power further east, and proved to be little more permanent than the Parthian conquests of Pacorus and Labienus in Palestine and Asia Minor of 40 BCE. The Romans were assailed by revolts in Mesopotamia and elsewhere in their eastern provinces before Trajan died. His successor Hadrian abandoned Trajan’s conquests in Armenia and Mesopotamia and made peace with the Parthian king Osroes (Khosraw) on the basis of the old frontier on the Euphrates. Nonetheless, Trajan had overcome the ghost of Carrhae and had shown his successors how to crack the strategic problem of Mesopotamia.

  It may be that the Trajanic invasion marks the beginning of a decline of the Arsacids, and it is certainly plain that Mesopotamia had ceased to be the secure possession it had been before. Over the century that followed Roman armies penetrated to Seleuceia/Ctesiphon twice more: in 165 (under Verus), and in 199 (under Septimus Severus). But over the same period the Parthians fought back hard (assisted in 165/166 by the outbreak of a disease among the Romans that may have been smallpox), and made their own incursion into Syria (under Vologases IV in 162-166), as well as dealing with internal revolts and nomad incursions, like that of the Alans into the Caucasus in 134-136.

  In 216, at the instigation of the Emperor Caracalla, the Romans again invaded, but got no further than Arbela (Irbil/Hewler). Caracalla himself, one of the most brutal of the Roman emperors (in 215 he perpetrated a massacre of many thousands of people in Alexandria because the citizens were reported to have ridiculed him), was apparently stabbed to death near Carrhae by members of his own bodyguard while he was relieving himself at the side of the road. The Parthians under Artabanus (Ardavan) IV then struck back at the Romans under Caracalla’s successor Macrinus and inflicted a heavy defeat on them at Nisibis, after which (in 218) Macrinus had to yield up a heavy war reparation of 200 million sesterces (according to Dio Cassius) to se
cure peace.

  Whatever the precise effect of the wars on the Arsacid monarchy, they must have been exhausting and damaging, especially in Mesopotamia and the north-west, which would always have been, in good times, some of the wealthiest provinces of the empire. There had always been vicious succession disputes among the Arsacids, but these seem also to have grown more frequent and intractable, exacerbating a falling-off of the authority of the monarchy.

  The Persian Revival

  Early in the third century AD a new power began to arise in the province of Persis; Fars, the province from which the Achaemenids had emerged. A family came to prominence as local rulers there, owing allegiance to the Arsacids. But in April 224 the latest head of this family, having broadened his support to include Kerman and Isfahan, led an army against Artabanus IV and killed him in battle at Hormuzdgan near Shushtar in Khuzestan. His name was Ardashir; a reference back to the name Artakhshathra (Artaxerxes), which had been the name of several of the Achaemenid kings. Ardashir claimed Achaemenid descent, probably to disguise the more recent, relatively humble origins of his family. The family called themselves Sassanids after a predecessor called Sasan. Ardashir also made a strong association between his cause and that of the form of Mazdaism followed in Fars (his father, Papak, had been a priest of Anahita at the religious centre of Istakhr). The downfall of Artabanus was later celebrated in a dramatic rock-carving at Ferozabad, which showed Ardashir and his followers on galloping chargers, striking the Parthian king and his men from their horses with their lances.