While the general of King Orodes was thus successful against the Romans in Mesopotamia, the king himself had in Armenia obtained advantages of almost equal value, though of a different kind.  Instead of contending with Artavasdes, he had come to terms with him, and had concluded a close alliance, which he had sought to confirm and secure by uniting his son, Pacorus, in marriage with a sister of the Armenian monarch.  A series of festivities was being held to celebrate this auspicious event, when news came of Surenas’s triumph, and of the fate of Crassus.  According to the barbarous customs of the East, the head and hand of the slain proconsul accompanied the intelligence.  We are told that at the moment of the messenger’s arrival the two sovereigns, with their attendants, were amusing themselves with a dramatic entertainment.  Both monarchs had a good knowledge of the Greek literature and language, in which Artavasdes had himself composed historical works and tragedies.  The actors were representing the famous scene in the “Bacchae” of Euripides, where Agave and the Bacchanals come upon the stage with the mutilated remains of the murdered Pentheus, when the head of Crassus was thrown in among them.  Instantly the player who personated Agave seized the bloody trophy, and placing it on his thyrsus instead of the one he was carrying, paraded it before the delighted spectators, while he chanted the well-known lines: 

     From the mountain to the hall
     New-cut tendril, see, we bring—­
     Blessed prey!

The horrible spectacle was one well suited to please an Eastern audience:  it was followed by a proceeding of equal barbarity and still more thoroughly Oriental.  The Parthians, in derision of the motive which was supposed to have led Crassus to make his attack, had a quantity of gold melted and poured it into his mouth.

Meanwhile Surenas was amusing his victorious troops, and seeking to annoy the disaffected Seleucians, by the performance of a farcical ceremony.  He spread the report that Crassus was not killed but captured; and, selecting from among the prisoners the Roman most like him in appearance, he dressed the man in woman’s clothes, mounted him upon a horse, and requiring him to answer to the names of “Crassus” and “Imperator,” conducted him in triumph to the Grecian city.  Before him went, mounted on camels, a band, arrayed as trumpeters and lictors, the lictors’ rods having purses suspended to them, and the axes in their midst being crowned with the bleeding heads of Romans.  In the rear followed a train of Seloucian music-girls, who sang songs derisive of the effeminacy and cowardice of the proconsul.  After this pretended parade of his prisoner through the streets of the town, Surenas called a meeting of the Seleucian senate, and indignantly denounced to them the indecency of the literature which he had found in the Roman tents.  The charge, it is said, was true; but the Seleucians were not greatly impressed by the moral lesson read to them, when they remarked the train of concubines that had accompanied Surenas himself in the field, and thought of the loose crowd of dancers, singers, and prostitutes, that was commonly to be seen in the rear of a Parthian army.