The History of Rome: Rise and Fall of the Empire. John Bagnell Bury
triumvirs. Phraates was deposed, and Tiridates was set up in his stead.
Augustus has been blamed for not dealing resolutely with the Eastern question immediately after his victory over his rival. It has been said that he should have at once taken steps to plant his power in Armenia, and make that country securely and permanently Roman, at the same time establishing a recognized authority over the Colchians, the Iberians, and the Albanians, who inhabited the regions between Armenia and the Caucasus, the Euxine and the Caspian. It seemed incumbent on him, too, to recover the standards captured at Carrhae; and at the same time two exiles were imploring his help, Tiridates, who had been overthrown soon after his elevation, and Artavasdes, king of Atropatene. The desire which the Romans felt at this time to see the Parthians humbled is reflected in the earlier writings of Horace. Augustus is called juvenis Parthis horrendous, and “will be regarded as a true god upon earth if he adds the Britons and the dangerous Persians to the empire!”. Men clearly looked forward to a Parthian war. But Augustus, after the conquest of Egypt, postponed the settlement of the Eastern question. Perhaps he was influenced by the ill-success of Antonius; and his army, doubtless, eager for rewards and rest, would have been little disposed to undertake an arduous campaign in Armenia. And above all Augustus himself was not a general. Observing the domestic discords in Parthia, he hoped to settle the eastern frontier advantageously for Rome by diplomacy, and not by arms. He consoled Artavasdes with the kingdom of Lesser Armenia and gave refuge in Syria to Tiridates. In 23 B.C. an opportunity came for recovering the standards and captives which had been taken at Carrhae. Phraates sent an embassy demanding that Tiridates should be given up to him, and also an infant son of his own whom Tiridates had carried off. The child was sent back, but it was stipulated that in return the captives and the standards should be restored. It was in connection with this affair that Agrippa was sent to the East with proconsular imperium. Phraates did not fulfill the conditions immediately, but in 20 B.C. Augustus appeared in the East himself, and the Parthian king yielded. The Emperor was proud of his success, which in his account of his own deeds he records thus : “I compelled the Parthians to restore to me the standards and spoils of three Roman armies, and suppliantly to beg the friendship of the Roman people. Those standards I deposited in the temple of Mars Ultor”. Poets celebrated the event as if it ranked with the most brilliant achievements of Roman arms. Virgil sings of “following Aurora, and claiming the standards from the Parthians”, and imagines the Euphrates as flowing with less haughty stream; and the ensigns so peacefully recovered are described by Horace as “torn from” the enemy.
In the same year a more solid success was obtained, the recovery of Armenia. A conspiracy had been formed there against the king Artaxes, and a message was sent to the Emperor, requesting that Tigranes (the younger brother of Artaxes), who was educated at Rome, should be sent to reign in his stead. Tiberius, the Emperor’s stepson, was entrusted with the task of deposing Artaxes and installing Tigranes. Artaxes was murdered by the party which had conspired against him; and Tigranes was established in the kingdom, which thus became once more a dependency of Rome. Atropatene, however, was separated, and given to Ariobarzanes, son of its former king Artavasdes, but it seems to have remained under Parthian supremacy. Ariobarzanes, like Tigranes, had been educated at Rome.
New troubles, however, soon arose in Armenia. Tigranes died, and the kingdom was agitated by struggles between the friends of Parthia and the friends of Rome. Augustus again entrusted to his stepson the office of restoring order in Armenia; but Tiberius, from motives of private resentment, declined the commission (6 B.C.).
Nothing was done during the next four years: but then it was decided that the ordering of the East should be entrusted to the young grandson of the Emperor, Gaius Caesar, and should form a brilliant beginning to the career of the destined Imperator. The young prince started with high hopes, dreaming perhaps of oriental conquests and of rivaling the fame of Alexander. His enthusiasm seems to have been encouraged by, perhaps to have affected, his elders. A courtly poet cried, “Now, far East, you shall be ours”; and Juba, the literary king of Mauretania, wrote an account of Arabia, for the special benefit of Gaius, whose vision was chiefly fixed on the conquest of that unconquerable land. The settlement of the Armenian question was, in the first instance, easily and peacefully accomplished. Gaius and Phraataces, the son of Phraates, met on an island in the middle of the Euphrates, and the Parthian agreed to resign his claim to Armenia. But it was still necessary to enforce submission to this decision in Armenia itself: and accordingly Gaius proceeded thither to install Ariobarzanes, son of Artavasdes. Before the walls of the fortress of Artagira he was wounded by treachery, and some months later he died of the effects of the hurt at Limyra in Lycia (4 A.D.). During the rest of the reign of Augustus, no serious measures were adopted in regard to Armenia, and that state was rent by the contentions between the Parthian and the Roman parties.
The unfortunate death of the young Caesar put an end to the design of conquering Arabia. That enterprise had been seriously entertained by the Roman government, and actually attempted at an earlier date. The possession of southern Arabia would have been an important advantage, not like that of Armenia or Moesia for military purposes, but from a purely mercantile point of view. The chief route of trade from India to Europe was by the Red Sea—Adane (Aden) was then, as now, an important port—and the Arabians, with their born genius for commerce, had it in their hands. The Indian wares were disembarked either at Leuce Come, on the west coast of Arabia, and thence transported overland to Petra and on to some Syrian port, or at Myos Hormos, on the opposite Egyptian coast, whence they were carried by camels to Coptos (near Thebes) and shipped for Alexandria. Once in possession of Egypt, the Roman government could not fail to see that it would be highly profitable to command the Red Sea route entirely, and get the trade into the hands of their own subjects. Not long after the establishment of his power, Augustus took up the question, and here for once, he was aggressive. He planned an expedition, of which the object was to reduce under Roman sway the land of Yemen, the south-western portion of the Arabian peninsula. That land was known to the Romans as Arabia Felix, and its people—the Himyarites—as the Sabaei. It was a rich country, which in itself invited conquest, though, in consequence of the remote situation, the luxurious inhabitant had never been subdued, as Horace tells us, by a foreign master. They supplied the Empire with spices and perfumes, cassia, aloes, myrrh, frankincense, while in return they received the precious metals, which they kept in their land. The expedition started towards the end of 25 B.C., and was entrusted to the care of Aelius Gallus, an officer holding a high post in Egypt. Ten thousand men, half the number of troops in Egypt, were placed under his command, in addition to auxiliaries supplied by the kings of Nabatea and Judea. The Nabateans had constant intercourse with Arabia Felix, and Syllabus, a minister of the Nabatean king Obodas, undertook to play the part of guide. The whole expedition was miserably mismanaged; it is hard to say how far Gallus was to blame and how far his guide may have acted in bad faith. His friend the geographer Strabo, from whom we learn the details of the enterprise, shifts the blame on Syllabus; and it is quite conceivable, that the Nabateans may have secretly wished the expedition to fail, thinking that its success might divert the traffic that had hitherto passed through their country.
The army embarked at Arsinoe (on the Isthmus of Suez) in a fleet of war-vessels. Such vessels were quite needless, as there was no question of hostilities by sea. They disembarked at Leuce Come, which was perhaps at this time subject to Rome, and passed the winter there. In spring they marched southwards by circuitous and laborious routes, and at length reached the capital of the Sabaeans. But the army, though the natives gave little trouble, had suffered severely from disease and hunger, and when at last they came to the residence of the Sabaean kings, Mariba, on its woody hill, both the general and the men were too exhausted and despondent to set to the task of besieging it. Having spent six days there, Gallus abandoned the undertaking, and the expedition returned home, but with more speed than it had gone thither. Something had been accomplished in the way of exploring the country, but the Sabaei were still, as before, unconquered. Augustus, however, did not choose to consider the expedition a failure. He speaks of it complacently among his achievements, and he promoted Aelius Gallus to the prefecture of Egypt.
While half of the Egyptian army was absent on the Arabian enterprise, the other half was called upon to defend the southern frontier against the aggressions of a neighboring power. Upper Egypt extended as far as Elephantine on the Nile, and beyond that limit lay the land of the Ethiopians, at this time ruled by the one-eyed queen