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The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 6. (of 7): Parthia
by George Rawlinson
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Why would you want to spend time reading a history of a place millennia old, which no longer exists, and seems irrelevant to our times?
It's far from being irrelevant. This is the area of the world where one of the great dramas of our current millennium is being played out right now. Getting to know its people is a good idea.
George Rawlinson is one of the great classical scholars of Europe and Asia, especially where the continents meet or have met, and people melded and clashed. One of the 'fault-lines of history', it could well be said. Straddling the fault-lines between academic disciplines without a trace of a wobble, he wrote an absorbing historical tale of this vast meeting of people, as far as we understand it. Greeks, the Medes and the Persians, Macedonians, Turks and Afghans were some of the players.
The last line of the snippet is as relevant today as it ever was.
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The exact circumstances under which the Parthian revolt took place are involved in much obscurity. According to one account the leader of the revolt, Arsaces, was a Bactrian, to whom the success of Diodotus was disagreeable, and who therefore quitted the newly-founded kingdom, and betook himself to Parthia, where he induced the natives to revolt and to accept him for their monarch.
Another account, which is attractive from the minute details into which it enters, is the following: – "Arsaces and Tiridates were brothers, descendants of Phriapites, the son of Arsaces. Pherecles, who had been made satrap of their country by Antiochus Theus, offered a gross insult to one of them, whereupon, as they could not brook the indignity, they took five men into counsel, and with their aid slew the insolent one. They then induced their nation to revolt from the Macedonians, and set up a government of their own, which attained to great power."
A third version says that the Arsaces, whom all represent as the first king, was in reality a Scythian, who at the head of a body of Parnian Dahce, nomads inhabiting the valley of the Attrek (Ochus), invaded Parthia, soon after the establishment of Bactrian independence, and succeeded in making himself master of it. With this account, which Strabo seems to prefer, agrees tolerably well that of Justin, who says that "Arsaces, having been long accustomed to live by robbery and rapine, attacked the Parthians with a predatory band, killed their satrap, Andragoras, and seized the supreme authority."
As there was in all probability a close ethnic connection between the Dahae and the Parthians, it would be likely enough that the latter might accept for a king a chieftain of the former who had boldly entered their country, challenged the Greek satrap to an encounter, and by defeating and killing him freed them – at any rate for the time – from the Greek yoke.
An oppressed people gladly adopts as chief the head of an allied tribe if he has shown skill and daring, and offers to protect them from their oppressors.
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