Upon learning the flight of Artabamis, Vitellius advanced to the banks of the Euphrates, and introduced Tiridates into his kingdom.  Fortunate omens were said to have accompanied the passage of the river; and these were followed by adhesions of greater importance.  Ornospades, satrap of Mesopotamia, was the first to join the standard of the pretender with a large body of horse.  He was followed by the conspirator Sinnaces, his father Abdageses, the keeper of the king’s treasures, and other personages of high position.  The Greek cities in Mesopotamia readily opened their gates to a monarch long domiciled at Rome, from whom they expected a politeness and refinement that would harmonize better with their feelings than the manners of the late king, bred up among the uncivilized Scyths.  Parthian towns, like Halus and Artemita, followed their example.  Seleucia, the second city in the Empire, received the new monarch with an obsequiousness that bordered on adulation.  Not content with paying him all customary royal honors, they appended to their acclamations disparaging remarks upon his predecessor, whom they affected to regard as the issue of an adulterous intrigue, and as no true Arsacid.  Tiridates was pleased to reward the unseemly flattery of these degenerate Greeks by a new arrangement of their constitution.  Hitherto they had lived under the government of a Senate of Three Hundred members, the wisest and wealthiest of the citizens, a certain control being, however, secured to the people.  Artabanus had recently modified the constitution in an aristocratic sense; and therefore Tiridates pursued the contrary course, and established an unbridled democracy in the place of a mixed government.  He then entered Ctesiphon, the capital, and after waiting some days for certain noblemen, who had expressed a wish to attend his coronation but continually put off their coming, he was crowned in the ordinary manner by the Surena of the time being, in the sight and amid the acclamations of a vast multitude.

The pretender now regarded his work as completed, and forbore any further efforts.  The example of the Western provinces would, he assumed, be followed by the Eastern, and the monarch approved by Mesopotamia, Babylonia, and the capital would carry, as a matter of course, the rest of the nation.  Policy required that the general acquiescence should not have been taken for granted.  Tiridates should have made a military progress through the East, no less than the West, and have sought out his rival in the distant Hyrcania, and slain him, or driven him beyond the borders.  Instead of thus occupying himself, he was content to besiege a stronghold where Artabanus had left his treasure and his harem.  This conduct was imprudent; and the imprudence cost him his crown.  That fickle temper which Artabanus had noted in his countrymen began to work so soon as the new king was well installed in his office; the coveted post of chief vizier could but be assigned to one, and the