Carrhae

Chapter 21

Two years after the Battle of Carrhae I led forty thousand horsemen into Syria to satisfy Orodes’ requests. I took Dura’s horse archers, all my lords, seventeen thousand of their men and riders from Hatra, Babylon and Mesene on a great raid that achieved absolutely nothing. The Roman survivors of Carrhae shut themselves in Antioch and we burned and looted many Syrian villages and small towns whose inhabitants had mostly fled before us. Several times the Romans ventured forth from their strongholds and slaughtered small parties of our horsemen but when we pursued them they invariably retreated behind their stonewalls. I eventually ordered a general retreat back to Parthia and never set foot in Syria again.

I thought the whole affair folly as it showed the Romans that Parthian horsemen were not invincible but Orodes was delighted, believing that the Romans would not provoke Parthia again. I had my doubts but for a while both the eastern and western frontiers of the empire were secure and at peace.

Orodes should have enjoyed a long and prosperous reign but the gods had decided otherwise for the birth of his son had been accompanied by tragedy. Three days after she had given birth to the boy they named Phraates in honour of Orodes’ father, Axsen had died.

Orodes had visibly aged before our eyes as grief gripped him with a cruel intensity. He gradually handed over much of his power to courtiers who had too much authority and like all small-minded and mediocre men coveted influence and wealth. Whether Orodes resented the son whose birth had robbed him of his wife I did not know, but the boy grew up in a Ctesiphon once again poisoned by intrigue and ambition and came to despise his father. Pale and thin, Phraates hid his emotions and presented a mask of aloofness and coldness to the world.

As time passed Orodes shut himself off from the world, shunning his old friends as sorrow consumed him while his son’s resentment against his father grew. When he reached his sixteenth birthday Phraates had him murdered before declaring himself king of kings. Shock reverberated throughout Parthia to be quickly replaced by outrage that a good and just ruler had been murdered, but the advisers of Phraates were clever and knew that there was no enthusiasm for a civil war to topple the young high king. Letters were sent from Ctesiphon to the various capitals in the empire demanding allegiance to Phraates and it seemed as though Mithridates had returned to the world. Perhaps he had, the gods having sent back his rotten soul in the body of his nephew.

I ignored his demands for allegiance and requests for troops when, a year later, that young man whose company I had found so entertaining years ago in Syria invaded Parthia with an army of one hundred thousand men. Mark Antony decided not to march through Hatran territory but instead crossed the Euphrates at Zeugma and advanced north into Armenia where he found a warm reception from the treacherous Artavasdes, who offered support to his campaign. And so Mark Antony marched his army into northern Parthia together with thirteen thousand Armenian troops. But he lost his supplies, Artavasdes deserted him and Spartacus, now a king, destroyed his rearguard of ten thousand men. Antony was forced to retreat back to Zeugma, all the while being harried by swarms of Parthian horsemen. He lost a further thirty thousand men during this withdrawal before limping back into Syria where an Egyptian queen named Cleopatra joined him with money and clothes for his exhausted army. I heard that they were lovers and desired to rule the world, but ended up taking their own lives during a great Roman civil war in which a young man by the name of Augustus emerged victorious.