It seemed to the Roman officers as if there was a design to seize the person of the commander-in-chief; Octavius, unarmed as he was, pulled the sword of one of the Parthians from its sheath and stabbed the groom.  In the tumult which thereupon arose, the Roman officers were all put to death; the gray-haired commander-in-chief also, like his grand-uncle,(10) was unwilling to serve as a living trophy to the enemy, and sought and found death.  The multitude left behind in the camp without a leader were partly taken prisoners, partly dispersed.  What the day of Carrhae had begun, the day of Sinnaca completed (June 9, 701); the two took their place side by side with the days of the Allia, of Cannae, and of Arausio.  The army of the Euphrates was no more.  Only the squadron of Gaius Cassius, which had been broken off from the main army on the retreat from Carrhae, and some other scattered bands and isolated fugitives succeeded in escaping from the Parthians and Bedouins and separately finding their way back to Syria.  Of above 40,000 Roman legionaries, who had crossed the Euphrates, not a fourth part returned; the half had perished; nearly 10,000 Roman prisoners were settled by the victors in the extreme east of their kingdom—­in the oasis of Merv—­as bondsmen compelled after the Parthian fashion to render military service.  For the first time since the eagles had headed the legions, they had become in the same year trophies of victory in the hands of foreign nations, almost contemporaneously of a German tribe in the west(11) and of the Parthians in the east.  As to the impression which the defeat of the Romans produced in the east, unfortunately no adequate information has reached us; but it must have been deep and lasting.  King Orodes was just celebrating the marriage of his son Pacorus with the sister of his new ally, Artavasdes the king of Armenia, when the announcement of the victory of his vizier arrived, and along with it, according to Oriental usage, the cut-off head of Crassus.  The tables were already removed; one of the wandering companies of actors from Asia Minor, numbers of which at that time existed and carried Hellenic poetry and the Hellenic drama far into the east, was just performing before the assembled court the -Bacchae- of Euripides.  The actor playing the part of Agave, who in her Dionysiac frenzy has torn in pieces her son and returns from Cithaeron carrying his head on the thyrsus, exchanged this for the bloody head of Crassus, and to the infinite delight of his audience of half-Hellenized barbarians began afresh the well-known song: 

   —­pheromin ex oreos
   elika neotomon epi melathra
   makarian theiran—.

It was, since the times of the Achaemenids, the first serious victory which the Orientals had achieved over the west; and there was a deep significance in the fact that, by way of celebrating this victory, the fairest product of the western world—­ Greek tragedy—­parodied itself through its degenerate representatives in that hideous burlesque.  The civic spirit of Rome and the genius of Hellas began simultaneously to accommodate themselves to the chains of sultanism.