The consequences of Crassus' invasion of Mesopotamia in 54-53 BCE were unanticipated and unintended; however, his disastrous failure shocked the Roman world and suddenly established the Parthians as a serious rival to Rome. Moreover, the shame the Romans felt after the Battle of Carrhae was considerable. The battle scarred the Roman psyche and severely damaged the Roman ego. This study synthesizes and investigates what became a vicious and virulent Roman literary tradition of anti-Crassus propaganda, examining how numerous Roman writers over the course of numerous centuries used the dead and disgraced Crassus as a convenient scapegoat to help explain Rome's failure to dominate the East and subdue the Parthian rival. It demonstrates that these writers ignored the legitimate causes for the First Romano-Parthian War (56 BCE -1 CE), which Crassus had inherited, and illustrates that the disaster at Carrhae became a popular moralizing lesson about the consequences of greed, impiety, and hubris.
Alexander the Great’s conquests ushered in the Hellenistic era throughout the ancient Mediterranean and Middle East. In this period, the Seleucids, one of most successful of the Successor dynasties, ruled over most of the Middle East at the height of their power. Yet two rising powers in the ancient world, Rome and Parthia, played a crucial role in the decline and eventual fall of the Seleucids. In a prior article, I argued that geopolitical developments around the Eastern Mediterranean in the middle third century BCE were indirectly responsible for the emergence of the Parthian state in Iran. Disastrous military conflicts at home and abroad in the west caused a sudden decline of Seleucid power in the 240s–230s, triggering what political scientists call a power-transition crisis. This article utilizes similar approaches to historical analysis and International Relations theory to contend that, after a period of recovery, a further sudden decline of Seleucid power in the 160s–130s triggered another power-transition crisis that brought an end to Seleucid hegemony over the Middle East permanently. The crisis facilitated the rapid transformation of the Parthian state from a minor kingdom to a major empire, drastically changing the international environment of the ancient world.
This chapter introduces the establishment of the Parthian state on the Iranian plateau in the middle third century. The unexpected decline of the power of the Seleucid Empire in the 240s because of dynastic turmoil caused a crisis in the Hellenistic Middle East. This crisis encouraged eastern satraps to rebel and the nomadic Parni tribe (known afterward as the Parthians) to invade northeastern Iran. The successful invasion of the Parni to seize Parthia and establish a new kingdom, paired with the sudden rise of their regional power and the failure of the Seleucids to eliminate this new threat, helped create a new interstate system in which the Seleucids, Parthians, and the newly independent Bactrians shared power. The sweeping success of the first Parthian king, Arsaces I, established Parthia as a limited regional power; however, its existence for several decades remained precarious.
SummaryBy 128 BCE the Parthians had emerged temporarily as the de facto leading power throughout the Hellenistic Middle East. Their defeat of Demetrius II’s invasion of Mesopotamia in 138 BCE had furthered their heated rivalry with the Seleucids; however, their destruction of Antiochus VII’s invasion of Mesopotamia and Media in 129 BCE finally ended the threat of the Seleucids to their eastern lands. For the first time in their history, the Parthians considered expanding their hegemony over Armenia, Syria, and the regions along the Eastern Mediterranean coast, thus firmly establishing their unrivaled hegemony. Yet any hopes of immediately occupying these regions quickly vanished because of calamities and miscalculations in the early 120s BCE. Although nomadic incursions ravaged the Iranian plateau in the east throughout the 120s BCE, in the west Phraates II’s sudden release of Demetrius to contest the Seleucid throne in Syria before the death of Antiochus became a political debacle that hindered Parthian influence in the region. Despite the arguments of recent scholarship, Phraates’ decision to release Demetrius was shortsighted and haphazard, and Demetrius never served in Syria as a Parthian vassal. This article is a reevaluation of the western policy of the Parthians in the early 120s BCE and the actions of Demetrius during his second reign concerning the Parthians.
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