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IN 53 B.C., the same year that Julius Caesar invaded Britain, the Roman general Marcus Licinius Crassus invaded Persia. He was over sixty, and looked older than his age, a round-faced bullet-headed man who thirsted for wealth and fame, and seems never to have been satisfied with the wealth and fame he had acquired. He had already fought in many batdes and shown himself to be a capable commander. He was already the wealthiest man in Rome, with a huge fortune founded upon money-lending and the control of the unscrupulous Roman fire-brigade, whose officers were not above setting fires and rescuing for their own profit whatever they could lay their hands on in the burning buildings. He was one of the three triumtairi, who together ruled the Roman Empire. Power, money, women, enormous estates all these were at his command. If he had been asked why he troubled to invade Persia, he would have answered that though he was a millionaire many times over, he wanted above everything else to lay his hands on the great treasures of gold known to be in Persia and he wanted also to return to Rome as a triumphator, a man who had subdued the enemy in battle, secured vast treasure and many prisoners, and was therefore entitled to take his place in the great ceremonial procession known as a Triumph.
All through the long summer of 54 B.C. Crassus prepared his plans for the invasion. After ravaging Mesopotamia, he wintered in Syria, plundering the temple in Jerusalem and securing his bases. Then, at the head of seven legions amounting to 3s,ooo foot soldiers and 4,ooo highly trained cavalry, he marched into Persia. He believed the war would be over in a few weeks. It would provide an easy victory and yield a great booty, and he was not overly troubled by the thought that the Roman Senate had refused to grant him permission to carry on the war, for had not his intelligence staff reported that the Persians were divided among themselves? Crassus saw himself as the new Alexander. He would dictate terms to the Persians, and for a while rule them as King. And sometimes, as he rode over the desert sands in all the panoply of a man who was at once a great political figure and the commander-in-chief of all the Roman forces in the East, it would occur to him that Persia was only part of the booty. He would go on to India, and even beyond, until all the East lay in his sway.
He was famous for his wealth, his elegance, his hot temper, his extraordinary energy. He was a master strategist in politics and a consummate organizer, but there is no evidence that he had ever studied oriental history. He knew little about the history of Persia. He did not realize that a Roman attack in force would put an end to all the tribal quarrels in the country. Nominally the Persians were being ruled by a succession of Parthian chieftains, who took care to claim descent from the Achaemenian Kings. They were men of heavy build, with broad faces, large chins, and bristling mustaches, and they had driven down from their camping grounds on the southeastern shores of the Caspian Sea. In time they had compelled the Persian princes to acknowledge them as overlords, but the empire they had carved out was constantly shifting in shape and the princes were continually acting as independent kings.
It was high summer when Crassus led his army across the Euphrates near the ancient city of Carshemish. He was in good heart. Near a place called Carrhae, several days' march beyond the Euphrates, he received reports that a small detachment of light Parthian cavalry was approaching. He summoned his generals, who suggested caution. It would be better, they said, to camp and rest beside the river Balisus, while sending off a reconnoitering party. Crassus was inclined to agree with his generals until his son, who thirsted for military glory, urged an immediate attack. The Roman legionaries were already weary of their long march across the desert sands, but the order for the attack was given. Almost at once the army was surrounded by wildly galloping mounted bowmen, who riddled the Romans with a continuous shower of arrows.
Surena, the commander of the Parthian forces, had studied Roman tactics and trained his cavalry well. He hadkcalculated in advance the strategy Crassus would employ. He had drilled his troops until they knew exactly how to draw on the enemy, how to disperse, how to unite again. He had a nucleus of heavy cavalry, who wore steel armor and carried lances and swords, but he relied chiefly on his light cavalry, whose equipment consisted of nothing more than headstalls, a single rein for each horse, and for the rider, a tunic, a bow and a handful of arrows. The heavy cavalry wore chain mail which reached to their horses' knees: for the moment these remained in hiding in a small wood.
Crassus observed the light cavalry carefully and came to the conclusion that they would soon exhaust their arrows. When he saw them retiring after galloping wildly round his troops, he sighed with relief. But a few minutes later the light cavalry of the Parthians came wheeling back again, having replenished their supplies of arrows from enormous quivers carried by camels in the rear. Time was running out. He was losing too many of his men. It had become essential to punish these horse-archers, who knew exactly how to "leapfrog." Fresh troops were continually coming up. To make matters worse, the heavy cavalry, all glittering steel armor and pointed helmets, even the horses' heads covered with metallic lace, were now beginning to emerge from their hiding place in the wood. With a mixed body of 6,ooo foot soldiers and cavalry, Crassus sent his son against the heavy cavalry commanded by Surena himself. Most of the Roman soldiers were picked troops from Gaul. Apparently disconcerted by the sudden advance of so many Gauls, Surena withdrew, continuing his withdrawal until the troops of the younger Crassus were out of touch with the main army. Surena pretended tosbe in full flight. Suddenly he gave the order for an enveloping movement. His heavy cavalry wheeled and presented the pursuers with a solid wall of bright metal. Against this wall the Romans broke, and the light cavalry cut down most of the survivors, taking only a few prisoners. The Gauls fought bravely to the end, and the younger Gassus, afraid of the dishonor which would come to him were he almost the sole survivor, persuaded his shieldbearer to kill him. With the death of the younger Gassus, the fate of the father was sealed.
The Parthians were in no hurry. At nightfall Crassus retreated to the walls of Carrhae, where he sheltered his troops and prepared to march westward. There he remained during the whole of the next day. The next night he organized a retreat, but the retreat failed; thousands of horse-archers were buzzing round him like clouds of flies. At daybreak he made another sortie, reaching a hill he hoped to fortify and defend. It was too late. The Parthians charged them. Twenty thousand Romans were killed in a single day, and ten thousand were made prisoner. Among the dead was Gassus himself. His head (so Plutarch says) was cut off and taken to Armenia, where the Parthian "King of Kings" Orodes was attending a conference concerning a marriage treaty. The Parthians had been deeply impressed by Greek culture, called themselves Philhellenes and regarded themselves in some way as the successors of Alexander the Great. Orodes was attending a performance of Euripides' Bacchae. The severed head was brought to him, and he held it up at the moment when the actor spoke of another severed head, which is mentioned in the play. The Romans, remembering Crassus' ill-gotten wealth, liked to tell an apocryphal story of how he was found alive and molten gold was poured into his mouth, before his head was cut off. This curious story suggests that the Parthians possessed a sense of irony, which they showed at no other time.
The Parthian victory was complete. Only once before, at the battle of Gnnae some one hundred and fifty years earlier, were the Romans defeated so disastrossly. The eagles of the Roman legionaries decorated a Parthian temple; the prisoners were taken to distant Merv and made to work as slaves. For the first time Rome had felt the full weight of Persian armor. Rome cried out for revenge.
When Julius Caesar returned to Rome, he spoke pointedly of the need to suppress the Parthian danger on the frontiers; and he was preparing an expedition to punish the Parthians when he was assassinated.
ANTONY, the most beloved of the Romans, with his swelling forehead, his carefully combed beard and his compelling smile, was the new to attack the Parthians. Fresh from his conquest of Cleopatra, he seems to have been convinced that Persia could be taken easily. It was midsummer of 36 B.C. when he set out at the head of the greatest army that had ever been assembled against the Parthians. With him went 16 legions, 100,000 men, 10,000 cavalry from Spain and France, and some 30,000 troops from the Roman allies bordering on Persia. He had entered into a secret treaty with King Artavasdes of Armenia. Everything was in his favor. Orodes, the King of Parthia, had been murdered by his son, Phraates. All Persia seemed once again about to break apart into feudal principalities. Often in the past Antony had discussed with Caesar the battle plan for an invasion of Persia. Now he proceeded to put the plan into effect.
At first everything went well. He struck into the heart of the province of Media Atropane, laying waste all the country. Elated with success, he moved so fast that he far outdistanced the baggagewaggons which contained his siege engines and battering rams. When he reached Phraata, the capital of Media, he thought he could take the city by storm, but it was well-defended. He raised a mound against the walls, this being the only way he could enter the city. It was a long, laborious task, and completely fruitless. Phraata resisted. Worse still, the Parthian King saw that the baggage-waggons were left behind and attacked the baggage trains, taking prisoners, killing 10,000 men and breaking up all the engines which were being brought across the desert. From the walls of Phraata the Parthians taunted the Romans with their failure; and one by one the allies of the Romans slipped away.
Even then Antony refused to acknowledge defeat. His men were already suffering from lack of food. He decided to move away from Phraata with ten legions and three praetorian cohorts of heavy infantry, hoping to draw the clouds of Parthians who were assembling from all directions into battle. It was a suicidal maneuver. He marched his troops as though they were on parade, while the Parthians, who had gradually formed into a semicircle, watched in silence as the Romans advanced in long disciplined columns, rank after rank passing at exactly equal distances, every foot soldier holding his pike in exactly the same way, every officer stern and expressionless. They came in a straight line, huge, mechanical glittering. They held their standards high, and never looked to right or left, and resembled a vast army of jackbooted Prussians marching in strict formation. As for the Parthians, they resembled cowboys. Antony might have guessed that fighting cowboys have advantages sometimes over machinelike armies.
Suddenly, at a signal from Antony, the Roman cavalry wheeled sharply and raced against the Parthians, followed by the infantry which made such a noise as they screamed their war-cries and rattled their arms that the Parthian horses turned tail and fled. The Parthian horses were faster than the Roman ones, and when the battle was over, Antony counted only eighty Parthian dead. More significantly, there were only thirty prisoners. In despair Antony returned to Phraata, to discover that the troops he had left there had panicked and the great mound constructed so laboriously had been left unguarded. To punish them, Antony ordered that they should be decimated. One in ten of the Roman guard left behind at Phraata was executed.
The panic of the guards was soon communicated to the rest of the army. The machine liked to fight machines; it seemed not to know how to fight against mounted Parthian bowmen, who came out of the rolling grass-covered hills, made sudden thrusts, then melted. They were wise in guerrilla tactics, those Parthians who could spend three or four days on their horses without dismounting. They had a habit of coming up stealthily upon foraging parties. Theyrefused to fight pitched batdes, and continually exasperated the Romans with taunts. The Parthian King offered Antony a safe conduct through his territory, if only he would depart for Syria. Antony agreed to go, so ashamed dhat when the time came for him to speak to his troops, he asked someone else to speak for him instead. A Persian friendly to the Romans offered to lead the way to safety. Antony, distrusting him, put him in chains, but continually sought his advice; and it was this chained Persian who, seeing the banks of a river broken down, decided that the Parthians were waiting nearby in an ambush and warned Antony in time. Antony had taken the precaution of bringing with him a corps of slingers, who used lead bullets. With their help he forced his way through the ambush, but he was still far from Syria. For twenty-five more days the Romans staggered over rough mountains towards their base, starving, footsore, completely baffled and confused by the Parthians who plundered their tents, cut up foraging parties and hovered round them like vultures awaiting the moment when an animal expires.
It is one of the axioms of war that nothing is so difficult as to lead retreat through hostile country. Antony gained no glory from his conduct in leading his men, and he seems to have known quite early that he was doomed to disaster. Once he threatened to appear before his troops wearing a mourning habit, and was only at the last moment dissuaded. When he addressed his soldiers, wearing a commander's scarlet cloak, he begged heaven to visit punishment on himself alone, so long as his armies gained victories.
There were occasional successes, when the enraged lion raised a heavy paw and scattered the marauding Parthian raiders. More often there was stark failure. Famine had come. The Romans had to fight for their corn. Barley loaves were worth their weight in silver. The soldiers took to eating wild plants, which produced sickness and death. They went about carrying in their helmets their precious supplies of water they found during the retreat. There was one plant which sent men mad: soldiers who should have been defending themselves were seen moving great stones about for no reason at all except that it seemed to be a matter of immense consequence to them. "Through all the camp," relates Plutarch, "there was nothing to be seen but men grubbing upon the ground at stones, which they carried from place to place. In the end they threw up bile and died, and wine, which was thought to be an antidote to their mania, completely failed them." The soldiers quarrelled and killed each other for money; and they would have mutinied against Antony if they had not been so frightened by the presence of the hovering Parthians.
In the course of twenty-seven weary days the Romans fought eighteen battles and lost 20,000 footsoldiers and 4,000 horsemen, and more than half of these perished from hunger and disease. At a place called White River, just north of Tabriz, the survivors of the retreat finally reached safety. A few days later, Queen Cleopatra joined them, bringing much-needed clothing and money for the troops. Phraates celebrated his victory by striking his own emblems on the coins of Antony and Cleopatra captured by the Parthians, which he found in the Roman baggage-trains. In the following year Antony, determined to avenge his honor, entered Persia again, but was no more successful in defeating a powerful enemy. Not long afterwards, having raised his son by Cleopatra to the dignity of King of Persia, though Persia was still unconquered, he killed himself when his fleet was destroyed by Octavian.
"A most peaceful people, the Persians," Cicero had said, before
becoming governor of Cilicia. He was to learn later that they were rarely
peaceful and were especially lacking in peaceful intentions when
confronted with a Roman army. When Octavian became sole Emperor with
the title of Augustus Caesar, many Romans believed the time had come for
one last punitive expedition against Persia. "Who fears the Romans while
Augustus lives?" asked the poet Horace. Augustus feared them, and took
pains to keep the peace with them. The captured eagles of Crassus were
returned to Rome, a sign that peace had been established. Then for a
hundred years Rome and Persia lived peacefully together.
Title: The Splendor of Persia Author: Robert Payne Imprint: New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1957