Iran: Empire of the Mind (8 page)

The Parthians established a powerful empire and ruled successfully for several centuries, but they did so with a relatively light touch, taking over and assimilating the practices of previous rulers and being content to tolerate the variety of religious, linguistic and cultural patterns of their subject provinces. A system of devolved power (
parakandeh shahi
, also called
muluk al-tawa’if
in later Arab sources) through satraps continued, often maintaining in power families that had ruled before, under the Seleucids
²
. Their scribes continued to use Aramaic, as in the time of the Achaemenids, and there appears to have been a continued diversity of religion. Names like Mithradates and Phraates (the latter a name thought to be related to the fravashi of the Avesta) show the Mazdaean allegiances of the Arsacids themselves, but Babylonians, Greeks, Jews and others were allowed to follow their own religious traditions as before, and Mazdaism itself in the Parthian period, as earlier, seems to have encompassed a variety of practices and beliefs. In the Jewish tradition (with the important exception of the reign of one later king) the Parthians were recorded and remembered as tolerant and friendly toward the Jews
³
(this may in part reflect the fact that the rise of the Parthians in the east was helped by the prolonged struggle between the Maccabean Jews and the Seleucids in Palestine).

The succession struggles of the Arsacids were frequently protracted and bloody, but this had more to do with the nature of court politics and perhaps, the effect of the involvement of a group of noble families, than any other factor. Central to their rule seems to have been their alliance with a small group of wealthy families, including the Suren, Karen and Mehran. The Parthians were not just crude nomads assuming the culture of their subjects for lack of any of their own (or at least, they did not remain so). Parthian sculpture, with its strong emphasis on frontality and its own particular style, was different in kind from any predecessor. Parthian architecture, as excavated at Nisa for example, shows the emergence of the audience hall or
ivan
for the first time (to be of great importance in Sassanid and Islamic architecture later). The Parthians again exemplified the best of Iranian genius; the recognition, acceptance and tolerance of
the complexity of the cultures and influences over which they ruled, while retaining a strong central principle of identity and integrity.

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 chainmail 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 prey
⁴

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 Mesopotamia
⁵
.

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 against 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 counterattacked 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 piety
⁸
), 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.