of a surrender.  As the danger drew nearer, fresh messengers had been despatched to Corbulo, and he had been implored to come at his best speed in order to save the poor remnant of a defeated army.  That commander was on his march, by way of Commagene and Cappadocia; it could not be very long before he would arrive; and the supplies in the camp of Paetus were sufficient to have enabled him to hold out for weeks and months.  But an unworthy terror had seized both Paetus and his soldiers.  Instead of holding out to the last, the alarmed chief proposed negotiations, and the result was that he consented to capitulate.  His troops were to be allowed to quit their entrenchments and withdraw from the country, but were to surrender their strongholds and their stores.  Armenia was to be completely evacuated by the Romans; and a truce was to be observed and Armenia not again invaded, until a fresh embassy, which Volagases proposed to send to Rome, returned.  Moreover, a bridge was to be made by the Romans over the Arsanias, a tributary of the Euphrates, which, as it was of no immediate service to the Parthians, could only be intended as a monument of the Roman defeat.  Paetus assented to these terms, and they were carried out; not, however, without some further ignominy to the Romans.  The Parthians entered the Roman entrenchments before the legionaries had left them, and laid their hands on anything which they recognized as Armenian spoil.  They even seized the soldiers’ clothes and arms, which were relinquished to them without a struggle, lest resistance should provoke an outbreak.  Paetus, once more at liberty; proceeded with unseemly haste to the Euphrates, deserting his wounded and his stragglers, whom he left to the tender mercies of the Armenians.  At the Euphrates he effected a junction with Corbulo, who was but three days’ march distant when Paetus so gracefully capitulated.

The chiefs, when they met, exchanged no cordial greeting.  Corbulo complained that he had been induced to make a useless journey, and to weary his troops to no purpose, since without any aid from him the legions might have escaped from their difficulties by simply waiting until the Parthians had exhausted their stores, when they must have retired.  Paetus, anxious to obliterate the memory of his failure, proposed that the combined armies should at once enter Armenia and overrun it, since Volagases and his Parthians had withdrawn.  Corbulo replied coldly—­that “he had no such orders from the Emperor.  He had quitted his province to rescue the threatened legions from their peril; now that the peril was past, he must return to Syria, since it was quite uncertain what the enemy might next attempt.  It would be hard work for his infantry, tired with the long marches it had made, to keep pace with the Parthian cavalry, which was fresh and would pass rapidly through the plains.”  The generals upon this parted.  Paetus wintered in Cappadocia; Corbulo returned into Syria, where a demand reached him from Volagases that he would evacuate Mesopotamia.  He agreed to do so on the condition that Armenia should be evacuated by the Parthians.  To this Volagases consented; since he had re-established Tiridates as king, and the Armenians might be trusted, if left to themselves, to prefer Parthian to Roman ascendancy.