CHAPTER XVIII.

Reign of Chosroes.  General condition of Oriental Affairs gives a handle to Trajan.  Trajan’s Schemes of Conquest.  Embassy of Chosroes to Trajan fails.  Great Expedition of Trajan.  Campaign of A. D. 115.  Campaign of A.D. 116.  Death of Trajan, and relinquishment of his Parthian Conquests by Hadrian.  Interview of Chosroes with Hadrian.  Its Consequences.  Death of Chosroes and Accession of Volagases II.

The general state of Oriental affairs at the accession of Chosroes seems to have been the following.  Upon the demise of Tiridates (about A.D. 100) Pacorus had established upon the Armenian throne one of his sons, named Exedares, or Axidares, and this prince had thenceforth reigned as king of Armenia without making any application to Rome for investiture, or acknowledging in any way the right of the Romans to interfere with the Armenian succession.  Trajan, sufficiently occupied in the West, had borne this insult.  When, however, in A.D. 114, the subjugation of Dacia was completed, and the Roman Emperor found his hands free, he resolved to turn his arms towards Asia, and to make the Armenian difficulty a pretext for a great military expedition, designed to establish unmistakably the supremacy of Rome throughout the East.  The condition of the East at once called for the attention of Rome, and was eminently favorable for the extension of her influence at this period.  Disintegrating forces were everywhere at work, tending to produce a confusion and anarchy which invited the interposition of a great power, and rendered resistance to such a power difficult.  Christianity, which was daily spreading itself more and more widely, acted as a dissolvent upon the previously-existing forms of society, loosening the old ties, dividing man from man by an irreconcilable division, and not giving much indication as yet of its power to combine and unite.  Judaism, embittered by persecution, had from a nationality become a conspiracy; and the disaffected adherents of the Mosaic system, dispersed through all the countries of the East, formed an explosive element in the population which involved the constant danger of a catastrophe.  The Parthian political system was also, as already remarked, giving symptoms of breaking up.  Those bonds which for two centuries and a half had sufficed to hold together a heterogeneous kingdom extending from the Euphrates to the Indus, and from the Oxus to the Southern Ocean, were beginning to grow weak, and the Parthian Empire appeared to be falling to pieces.  There seemed to be at once a call and an opportunity for a fresh arrangement of the East, for the introduction of a unifying power, such as Rome recognized in her own administrative system, which should compel the crumbling atoms of the Oriental world once more into cohesion.