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Updated: June 22, 2025
Phraates was unwilling either to requite services not rendered, or to rush needlessly into a fresh war merely to gratify the avarice of his auxiliaries. He therefore peremptorily refused to comply with either suggestion. Upon this, the Scythians determined to take their payment into their own hands, and began to ravage Parthia and to carry off a rich booty.
Phraates probably hoped that Augustus would draw back before the terrors of a Parthian war under such circumstances, and would allow without remonstrance the passing of Armenia into the position of a subject-ally of Parthia. But if these were his thoughts, he had miscalculated.
After a while they opened communications with Phraates, and offered to return to their allegiance if he would assist them against their oppressors. Phraates gladly listened to these overtures. At his instigation a plot was formed like that which has given so terrible a significance to the phrase "Sicilian vespers."
Another trifling revolt occurred about the same time in Margiana. The Margians rebelled and set up a certain Phraates, a native, to be their king. But the satrap of Bactria, within whose province Margiana lay, quelled the revolt almost immediately.
We are not told what became of the victorious Greeks; but it is to be presumed that, like the Ten Thousand, they fought their way across Asia, and rejoined their own countrymen. Thus died Phraates I., after a reign of about eight or nine years.
When Persia, about A.D. 220, revolted from Artabanus, it was no doubt with a conviction that the Parthians were no longer the terrible warriors who under Mithridates I. had driven all the armies of the East before them like chaff, or who under Orodes and Phraates IV. had gained signal victories over the Romans. It is true that Artabanus had contended not unsuccessfully with Macrinus.
There was a hope at the Pontic court that Phraates king of the Parthians would be induced by the recent considerable successes which the allies had achieved over Rome to enter into the Pontic-Armenian alliance. To counteract this, Roman envoys proceeded to the court of Ctesiphon; and the internal troubles, which distracted the Armenian ruling house, came to their aid.
The remaining years of Phraates and he reigned for nearly twenty years after restoring the standards are almost unbroken by any event of importance. The result of the twenty years' struggle between Rome and Parthia had been to impress either nation with a wholesome dread of the other.
Xerxes is frightened out of his senses; Sysigambis has sent an express to Luton to forbid Phraates coming to town to-morrow; Norton's impudence has forsaken him; Bishop Warburton is at this moment reinstating Mr.
The court of Ctesiphon would thus have had reason enough for going to war with Rome; it seemed the prelude to its doing so, when in 690 it declared war on Armenia on account of the question of the frontier. But Phraates had not the courage to come to an open rupture with the Romans at a time when the dreaded general with his strong army was on the borders of the Parthian empire.
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