Media, as well as also in Armenia, the king Artaxes, who, in requital for the execution of his father, caused all the Romans scattered in the land to be seized and put to death. That Phraates did not turn to fuller account the great feud between Antonius and Caesar, while it was in preparation and was being fought out, was probably due to his being once more hampered by the troubles breaking out in his own land. These ended in his expulsion, and in his going to the Scythians of the East. Tiridates was proclaimed as great-king in his stead. When the decisive naval battle was fought on the coast of Epirus, and thereupon the overthrow of Antonius was completed in Egypt, this new great-king sat on his tottering throne in Ctesiphon, and at the opposite frontier of the empire the hordes of Turan were making arrangements to reinstate the earlier ruler, in which they soon afterwards succeeded.

First arrangements of Augustus in the East.The sagacious and clear-seeing man, to whom it fell to liquidate the undertakings of Antonius and to settle the relations of the two portions of the empire, needed moderation quite as much as energy. It would have been the gravest of errors to enter into the ideas of Antonius as to conquering the East, or even merely making further conquests there. Augustus perceived this; his military arrangements show clearly that, while he viewed the possession of the Syrian coast as well as that of Egypt as an indispensable complement to the empire of the Mediterranean, he attached no value to inland possessions there. Armenia, however, had now been for a generation Roman, and could, in the nature of the circumstances, only be Roman or Parthian; the country was by its position, in a military point of view, a sally-port for each of the great powers into the territory of the other. Augustus had no thought of abandoning Armenia and leaving it to the Parthians; and, as things stood, he could hardly think of doing so. But, if Armenia was retained, the matter could not end there; the local relations compelled the Romans further to bring under their controlling influence the basin of the river Cyrus, the territories of the Iberians on its upper, and of the Albanians on its lower course—that is, the inhabitants of the modern Georgia and Shirvan, skilled in combat on horseback and on foot—and not to allow the domain of the Parthian power to extend to the north of the Araxes beyond Atropatene. The expedition of Pompeius had already shown that the settlement in Armenia necessarily led the Romans on the one hand as far as the Caucasus, on the other as far as the western shore of the Caspian Sea. The initial steps were everywhere taken. The legates of Antonius had fought with the Iberians and Albanians; Polemon, confirmed in his position by Augustus, ruled not merely over the coast from Pharnacea to Trapezus, but also over the territory of the Colchians at the mouth of the Phasis. To this general state of matters fell to be added the special circumstances of the moment, which most urgently suggested to the new monarch of Rome not merely to show his sword in presence of the Orientals, but also to draw it. That king Artaxes, like Mithradates formerly, had given orders to put to death all the Romans within his bounds, could not be allowed to remain unrequited. The exiled king of Media also had now sought help from Augustus, as he would otherwise have sought it from Antonius. Not merely did the civil war and the conflict of pretenders in the Parthian empire facilitate the attack, but the expelled ruler Tiridates likewise sought protection with Augustus, and declared himself ready as a Roman vassal to accept his kingdom in fief from the latter. The restitution of the Romans who had fallen into the power of the Parthians at the defeats of Crassus and of the Antonians, and of the lost eagles, might not in themselves seem to the ruler worth the waging of war; the restorer of the Roman state could not allow this question of military and political honour to drop.