The defeat of the detachment and the jubilation of the Parthians further demoralized the main Roman force. Finally, Crassus attempted to negotiate with the Parthian general, Suren, only to be killed in a scuffle and beheaded. The survivors of the Roman army withdrew in disorder back into Roman Syria. Meanwhile, as many as ten thousand Roman prisoners were marched off by the Parthians to the remote northeast of the empire.
According to the Greek historian Plutarch the head of Crassus was sent to the Parthian king, Orodes, and it arrived while the king was listening to an actor delivering some lines from Euripedes’s play The Bacchae. To the applause of the court, the actor took the head and spoke the words 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 immortalized in the revered tenth-century Persian poet Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh (Book of Kings). Like Rostam, Suren hailed from Sistan (originally Sakastan—the land of the Sakae), and like Rostam, he also had a troubled relationship with his king. Orodes was so resentful of Suren’s victory that he 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 toward 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—to 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 were dismayed to see much of the gold they paid to have their wives and daughters clothed in expensive silks going to their most redoubtable enemies.
The next Roman to test the Parthians in a major way was Mark Antony. But between the expeditions of Crassus and Antony, the Parthians and the Romans fought several other campaigns, with mixed outcomes. In 51 BC some Roman survivors from Carrhae ambushed an invading Parthian force near Antioch and destroyed it. But in 40 BC another Parthian force, commanded by Orodes’s son Pacorus (with the help of a renegade Roman, Quintus Labienus), broke out of Syria and conquered both Palestine and most of the provinces of Asia Minor. Exploiting the chaos of the civil wars that followed the murder of Julius Caesar in 44 BC, the Parthian invaders received the submission of many towns without a siege. But a year or so later Publius Ventidius, one of Mark Antony’s subordinates, rescued 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 were killed, including Pacorus and Labienus. Back in Rome, Ventidius’s triumph over the Parthians was considered a rare honor. Seeing his lieutenant so praised, Mark Antony wanted the glory of a victory against the Parthians for himself.
In 36 BC he took an army more than double the size of that of Crassus into the same area of upper Mesopotamia.5 Antony soon encountered many of the same difficulties that had frustrated Crassus. 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 defense but slowed the army’s advance to a crawl. The Roman infantry still could not hit back at the Parthian horse archers, whose mobility enabled them to range at will around the marching Romans 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 invading force a liability rather than an asset. Having suffered in this way in the south, Antony attempted a more northerly attack on Parthian territory, penetrating into what is now Azerbaijan. But he achieved little, and was forced to retreat through Armenia in the winter cold, losing as many as twenty-four thousand 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 was vulnerable to ambush by Roman infantry in the hilly, less open terrain of the Roman-controlled territories, and lacked the siege equipment necessary to take the Roman towns. At the same time, the Romans were vulnerable to the Parthians in the open Mesopotamian plain and would always find it difficult to protect their supply lines against the more mobile Parthian forces. These factors were more or less permanent.
Perhaps recognizing 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 BC, Augustus followed a policy of diplomacy with the Parthians. In this way he 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 counterattacked with some success thereafter, capturing a Roman force.6 It has been suggested that the Roman armor 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. This began the process that, several centuries later, led to the assembly of the texts of the Avesta and the other holy scriptures of Zoroastrianism.7 If indeed it was Vologases I who gave out those instructions (a conjecture supported by the fact that his brother Tiridates was known also for his Mazdaean piety8), it would perhaps 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. Vologases I 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 atypical in the Arsacid period.9 Although his immediate successors did not follow through with all of these novelties, they do prefigure the policies of the Sassanids. 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 westward (in the west he became known as Mithras rather than Mithra). 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 nam
e.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 (sol invictus—the Invincible Sun), Mithraism seems to have taken on some of the ritualized 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. Its tenets included 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 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. It 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 the rise of Christianity). Mithras’s followers believed he was born on December 25, 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, and it was from the blood of that bull that 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, whom the Romans did not like. Instead of trying to toil south in the heat toward Ctesiphon on foot, under a hail of arrows, in AD 115 Trajan put his men and equipment 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 farther, emulating Alexander. But in 116 he fell ill while besieging Hatra, which his armies had bypassed earlier. A year later, he died.
Trajan’s conquests, although impressive enough to win him the title Parthicus, could not destroy the centers of Parthian power further east. In the end, they proved to be little more permanent than the Parthian conquests of Pacorus and Labienus in Palestine and Asia Minor of 40 BC. Before Trajan died, the Romans had been assailed by revolts in Mesopotamia and elsewhere in their eastern provinces. 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 River. 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 next century, Roman armies penetrated to Seleuceia/Ctesiphon twice more—in AD 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.
In 216, at the instigation of Emperor Caracalla, the Romans again invaded, but got no farther than Arbela (Irbil/Hewler). Caracalla was one of the most brutal of the Roman emperors (in 215 he had massacred thousands of people in Alexandria because the citizens were reported to have ridiculed him). While relieving himself on the side of a road near Carrhae, he was apparently stabbed to death by his own bodyguards. 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 that, in 218, Macrinus had to yield up a heavy war reparation that cost two hundred million sesterces (according to Dio Cassius) to secure peace.
Whatever the precise effect of the wars on the Arsacid monarchy, they must have been exhausting and damaging—especially in Mesopotamia and the northwest, which would always have been, in good times, some of the wealthiest provinces of the empire. There had always been vicious and protracted succession disputes among the Arsacids, thanks mostly to the nature of court politics and, perhaps, the effect of the involvement of a group of noble families (central to Arsacid rule seems to have been alliances with a small group of wealthy families, including those of the Suren, Karen, and Mehran). But these difficult succession struggles 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 owing allegiance to the Arsacids came to prominence as local rulers there, but in April 224 the latest head of this family, having broadened his support to include the cities of Kerman and Isfahan, led an army against Artabanus IV and killed him in battle at Hormuzdgan near Shushtar in Khuzestan. This victor’s name was Ardashir, a reference back to the name Artakhshathra (Artaxerxes), the name of several of the Achaemenid kings. Ardashir claimed Achaemenid descent, probably to disguise the more recent, relatively humble origins of his family (who 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 center 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.
The Arsacid regime did not collapse immediately, and their coins were still minted in Mesopotamia until 228. But in 226 Ardashir had himself crowned King of Kings after taking Ctesiphon, and within a few years he controlled all the territory of the former Parthian Empire. That fact alone suggests that several of the great Parthian families (whose local rulerships are known to have persisted long after 224) cooperated in the change of dynasty.
Ardashir was determined from the beginning that his new dynasty would assert and justify itself in a new way. His coins (and those of his successors) bore inscriptions in Persian script instead of the Greek used on Arsacid coins, and on the reverse showed a Mazdaean fire temple. The Sassanids were to be Iranian, Mazdaean kings before all else. In another massively impressive rock-carving at Naqsh-e Rostam near Persepolis, Ardashir is shown on horseback receiving the symbol of his kingship from Ormuzd (the name of Ahura Mazda in Middle Persian). Artabanus IV is depicted crushed beneath the feet of Ardashir’s horse, and Ahriman under the hooves of the horse on which Ormuzd is seated. The message could not be more clear—Ardashir had been chosen by God. His victory over the last Arsacid had been assisted by God, and he had overcome Artabanus in a struggle that paralleled directly that of Ormuzd against Ahriman, the principle of chaos and evil.11 Coinage inscriptions also declared Ardashir to be of divine descent. This was an innovation with important later resonances.
Paradoxically for this very Iranian monarch, the idea may have originated in the preceding period of Greek influence. The pattern of a new, autocratic ruler from more or less obscure origins, taking power by force after a period of disorder—and claiming the decision of God for his victory and his justification—has been suggested as a recurring theme in Iranian history by Homa Katouzian
, and perhaps has its archetypal image in this relief carving.12 The rebellion of Ardashir also, with its heavy religious overtones, echoes earlier and later religious revolutions in Iran.
This rock-relief at Naqsh-e Rostam also includes the first known inscription referring to Iran, though there are references in the Avesta that probably pre-date the Sassanid period, and the word also appears on Ardashir’s coins. From other contemporary evidence, the term Iran may refer to the territory over which those responsible for the inscriptions considered the Mazdaean religion to be observed. Or it may possibly refer to the territories in which the Iranian family of languages were spoken (though the inclusion of Babylonia and Mesene within Iran makes this doubtful). Or, perhaps, it signified something less clearly defined, about people rather than territory, which partook of both things.
What is more certain is that alongside the concept of Iran was that of a non-Iran (Aniran)—territories ruled by the Sassanid shah but not regarded as Iranian. These included Syria, Cilicia, and Georgia.13 Whatever the precise significance of these terms, their use on the rock-carving strongly suggests a sense of Iranian identity, perhaps centered on Fars but with significance much beyond. It also seems unlikely that Ardashir conjured these concepts from thin air. Their utility for him was as an underpinning for his royal authority. To be effective for that purpose, they must have had some resonance with his subjects—a resonance that touched on an older sense of land, people, and political culture.
In later years Ardashir attempted to round off his success in taking over the Parthian Empire by launching attacks on the Romans, along the old front in upper Mesopotamia and Syria. This suggests that he felt the need to justify his access to power by success against the Romans and, by extension, that the Parthians’ perceived failures against the Romans had been part of the reason for their downfall. At first impression, the interminable series of wars between the Roman Empire and Persia (both in the Parthian period and again in the Sassanid period) look almost inexplicable. They went on and on, century after century. There was a potential economic gain for both sides—the disputed provinces were rich provinces. But it was evident, certainly by the time of Ardashir, that the wars were very costly, that it would be very difficult indeed for either party to deliver a knockout blow to the other, and that any gains would be difficult for either side to hold permanently. The wars and the disputed provinces had taken on a totemic value—they had become part of the apparatus by which Persian shahs and Roman emperors alike justified their rule. This explains their personal participation in the campaigns, the triumphs in Rome and the rock-reliefs carved on the hillsides of Fars. Upper Mesopotamia, Armenia, and Syria had become an unfortunate playground for princes.
A History of Iran Page 6