Murder, Usurpation, and Fratricide: Parthian Civil War and the Role of Rome

In the third and second centuries BCE, the Romans came to dominate the Mediterranean and a lesser-known eastern people named the Parthians came to dominate the Middle East. Over the first half of the first century BCE, the imperial ambitions of Rome and Parthia overlapped in the lands of the Near East. Suddenly in 58 BCE, two ambitious Parthian princes, Mithridates and Orodes, murdered their father the king (Dio 39.56.2). Unlike the longstanding Rome-centric tradition, which contends that the avarice, foolishness, and impiety of one man, the Roman statesman Crassus, initiated the great rivalry of Rome and Parthia through glory seeking and unprovoked war, this presentation challenges these long held assumptions by reevaluating the available source materials to emphasize Parthian agency in these events. Mithridates gained the Parthian throne, but a strong faction of Parthian nobles rebelled against him and put forth his brother as a rival (Dio 39.56.2; Appian Syr. 8.51; Justin 42.4.1-4; Plut. Crass. 21.7). Mithridates fled westward to Syria, and, in an act of desperation, he solicited military aid from the Roman commander, Gabinius, in winter 56 BCE. Although unsure about his participation in the conflict, Gabinius, like many Roman statesmen before him, accepted the plea of a suppliant to intervene in a foreign affair. Mithridates’ decision to seek Roman support in a Parthian conflict was unprecedented and forever changed Roman and Parthian relations. Through a Parthian invitation, Rome began the First Romano-Parthian War.