The story of the Seleucid empire, and the continuous pressures it faced, is told in Chapter 20. Its disintegration in the west at the hands of the Romans is told in Chapter 21. In the east its most formidable opponents were the Parthians. After the absorption of western Asia into the Roman empire, the Parthians were to prove one of the most persistent enemies of Rome. Their empire lasted some 400 years.
It was at the end of the third century Bc that a tribal leader, Arsaces, fought his way to dominance over the many nomadic peoples of Parthia, a remote northern province of the Seleucid empire. His strength lay in his horsemen, who fought either as heavily armed cavalrymen or as archers. He proved impossible for the Seleucids to defeat, and although his kingdom remained part of the Seleucid empire, Arsaces exultantly transformed himself into an independent monarch with a fine new capital built at Hecatompylos.
It took another hard century of fighting before the Parthian empire was fully established. It had to achieve defensible frontiers in both the east and the west. Mith-ridates I (171-138 Bc) was the first Parthian ruler to achieve independence from the Seleucids. He penetrated as far south as Mesopotamia, but had to surrender his conquests when threatened from the east. He initiated a policy of tolerance towards the Greek culture that by now had suffused Persia. (On his coins he portrayed his ancestor Arsaces as Apollo.) A successor, Mithridates II (ruled 123-88 BC, not to be confused with Mithridates VI of Pontus, see page 408), won back the Parthian homeland, pushed the western boundaries of the empire as far as the Euphrates, and subdued the nomadic peoples of the east.
This was the true foundation of the Parthian empire. Mithridates was a gifted ruler who was quick to exploit the position of his empire as a middleman between his two most powerful enemies, China in the east, and, after the demise of the Seleucids, Rome in the west. The Chinese, under the Han dynasty, were happy to respond. They traded silk in return for the majestic horses provided by the Parthi-ans, which they needed for their own defence. (The Chinese were the only people who knew the secret of the moment when to destroy the larvae of the silkworm so that the filament would form a continuous length that could be woven into thread. It was a secret only smuggled into the west in the sixth century ad.) Ambassadors were exchanged. The Parthians sent ostrich eggs and conjurors as their gift to the Chinese court, and in 106 BC the first caravan travelled west from China.
The Romans developed an insatiable desire for silk, and the Parthians were able to charge heavy dues on traffic along the overland trade route, the famous Silk Road. The first official meeting between Romans and Parthians took place on the Euphrates in 92 BC. The Romans were represented by Sulla, later the dictator of Rome. He misjudged the Parthians, assuming that their ambassadors had come to submit themselves as vassals. He treated them with such contempt that the Parthian ambassador was later beheaded for acquiescing in this humiliation. The Roman general Pompey made the same mistake referring to the Parthian monarch only as ‘king’ instead of the traditional ‘king of kings’. At the Battle of Carrhae, 53 BC, the Parthians were to have their revenge, and they followed this up with another defeat, of Mark Antony, in 34 BC (see Chapter 24). The end of the first century BC saw the zenith of the empire, and the emperor Augustus was wise enough to recognize it as an equal to Rome, resting content with the return of the Roman standards captured at Carrhae. Conflict with the Parthians was, however, to continue over the centuries, until the collapse of the Parthian empire in the 200s ad.
Not without reason did gods and men choose this spot for the site of our city— the salubrious hills, the river to bring us produce from the inland regions, and seaborne commerce from abroad, the sea itself, near enough for convenience yet not so near as to bring danger from foreign fleets, our situation in the very heart of Italy—all these advantages make it of all places in the world the best for a city destined to grow great.
(Livy, History of Rome, Book V, translation: Tim Cornell)
The Roman historian Livy (59 bc-ad 17) began writing his history of Rome in 29 Bc, just at the moment when it seemed that all that had been achieved might be lost in the chaos of civil war and national degeneracy. He was looking back at nobler times when there had seemed little doubt that this was a city ‘destined to grow great’ Yet, whatever its advantages, the city’s rise to power had been slow. The hills of Rome had been settled for at least 700 years before the city expanded from a relatively small territory on the plain of Latium and achieved the domination of the Italian peninsula in the fourth and third centuries BC.
World History
