THE PROVINCES
OF THE
ROMAN EMPIRE

FROM CAESAR TO DIOCLETIAN

BY
THEODOR MOMMSEN

TRANSLATED
WITH THE AUTHOR’S SANCTION AND ADDITIONS
BY
WILLIAM P. DICKSON, D.D., LL.D.
PROFESSOR OF DIVINITY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW

VOL. II

WITH TWO MAPS BY PROFESSOR KIEPERT

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN’S STREET, LONDON
1909

First Edition 1886
Reprinted with corrections 1909

CONTENTS

BOOK EIGHTH

THE PROVINCES AND PEOPLE, FROM CAESAR TO DIOCLETIAN

CHAPTER IX.

THE EUPHRATES FRONTIER AND THE PARTHIANS.

The only great state with which the Roman empire bordered was the empire of Iran,1 based upon that nationality which was best known in antiquity, as it is in the present day, under the name of the Persians, consolidated politically by the old Persian royal family of the Achaemenids and its first great-king Cyrus, united religiously by the faith of Ahura Mazda and of Mithra. No one of the ancient peoples of culture solved the problem of national union equally early and with equal completeness. The Iranian tribes reached on the south as far as the Indian Ocean, on the north as far as the Caspian Sea; on the north–east the steppes of inland Asia formed the constant battle-ground between the settled Persians and the nomadic tribes of Turan. On the east mighty mountains formed a boundary separating them from the Indians. In western Asia three great nations early encountered one another, each pushing forward on its own account: the Hellenes, who from Europe grasped at the coast of Asia Minor, the Aramaic peoples, who from Arabia and Syria advanced in a northern and north–eastern direction and substantially filled the valley of the Euphrates, and lastly, the races of Iran, not merely inhabiting the country as far as the Tigris, but even penetrating to Armenia and Cappadocia, while primitive inhabitants of other types in these far–extending regions succumbed under these leading powers and disappeared. In the epoch of the Achaemenids, the culminating point of the glory of Iran, the Iranian rule went far beyond this wide domain proper to the stock on all sides, but especially towards the west. Apart from the times, when Turan gained the upper hand over Iran and the Seljuks and Mongols ruled over the Persians, foreign rule, strictly so called, has only been established over the flower of the Iranian stocks twice, by Alexander the Great and his immediate successors and by the Arabian Abbasids, and on both occasions only for a comparatively short time; the eastern regions—in the former case the Parthians, in the latter the inhabitants of the ancient Bactria—not merely threw off again the yoke of the foreigner, but dislodged him also from the cognate west.

The rule of the Parthians.When the Romans in the last age of the republic came into immediate contact with Iran as a consequence of the occupation of Syria, they found in existence the Persian empire regenerated by the Parthians. We have formerly had to make mention of this state on several occasions; this is the place to gather together the little that can be ascertained regarding the peculiar character of the empire, which so often exercised a decisive influence on the destinies of the neighbouring state. Certainly to most questions, which the historical inquirer has here to put, tradition has no answer. The Occidentals give but occasional notices, which may in their isolation easily mislead us, concerning the internal condition of their Parthian neighbours and foes; and, if the Orientals in general have hardly understood how to fix and to preserve historical tradition, this holds doubly true of the period of the Arsacids, seeing that it was by the later Iranians regarded, together with the preceding foreign rule of the Seleucids, as an unwarranted usurpation between the periods of the old and the new Persian rule—the Achaemenids and the Sassanids; this period of five hundred years is, so to speak, eliminated by way of correction2 from the history of Iran, and is as if nonexistent.

The Parthians Scythian.The standpoint, thus occupied by the court-historiographers of the Sassanid dynasty, is more the legitimist–dynastic one of the Persian nobility than that of Iranian nationality. No doubt the authors of the first imperial epoch describe the