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Phraates, who thought that after forty years of residence in Rome it was necessary to fit himself for the position of Parthian king by resuming the long-disused habits of his nation, was carried off, after a short residence in Syria, by a disease which he was supposed to have contracted through the change in his mode of life.
Artavasdes pointed out that the Median monarch was absent from his own country, having joined his troops to those which Phraates had collected for the defence of Parthia. His territory therefore would be open to ravage, and even Praaspa, his capital, might prove an easy prey.
Meanwhile the aged Sanatroeces died, and was succeeded by his son, Phraates III. This prince followed at first his father's example, and abstained from mixing himself up in the Mithridatic war; but in B.C. 66, being courted by both sides, and promised the restoration of the provinces lost to Tigranes, he made alliance with Pompey, and undertook, while the latter pressed the war against Mithridates, to find occupation for the Armenian monarch in his own land.
Phraates IV. had married, late in life, an Italian slave-girl, sent him as a present by Augustus; and she had borne him a son for whom she was naturally anxious to secure the succession. According to some, it was under her influence that the monarch had sent his four elder boys to Rome, there to receive their education.
But Phraates could not, without prophetic foresight, have counted on such utter prostration following as the result of a single albeit a terrible blow. Accordingly, we find him still exhibiting a dread of the Seleucid power even after his great victory. He had released Demetrius too late to obtain any benefit from the hostile feeling which that prince probably entertained towards his brother.
Virtue, differing from the vulgar, excepts Phraates though restored to the throne of Cyrus, from the number of the happy; and teaches the populace to disuse false names for things, by conferring the kingdom and a safe diadem and the perpetual laurel upon him alone, who can view large heaps of treasure with undazzled eye.
That arrangement not taking effect, and the tract being disputed between Phraates and the elder Tigranes, he sent his legate, Afranius, to drive the Parthians out of the country, and delivered it over into the hands of the Armenians. At the same time he insulted the Parthian monarch by refusing him his generally recognized title of "King of Kings."
There alone during the century and a half that intervened between Antony and Trajan did the interests of Rome and Parthia come into collision, and in connection with this kingdom alone did any struggle between the two countries continue. Phraates, after yielding to Augustus in the matter of the standards and prisoners, appears for many years to have studiously cultivated his good graces.
The winter was not over; but the snow was beginning to melt through the increasing warmth of the sun's rays, and the day appointed for the general rising was probably drawing near. Phraates felt that no time was to be lost. Accordingly, he sent ambassadors to Antiochus to propose peace, and to inquire on what conditions it would be granted him.
The singular preference, which the father Tigranes experienced from Pompeius as contrasted with his son the ally and son-in-law of the Parthian king, was already part of this policy; it was a direct offence, when soon afterwards by the orders of Pompeius the younger Tigranes and his family were arrested and were not released even on Phraates interceding with the friendly general for his daughter and his son-in-law.
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