CHAPTER XIII.

Reign of Phraates IV.  His cruelties.  Flight of Monceses to Antony.  Antony’s great Parthian Expedition, or Invasion of Media Atropatene.  Its Complete Failure.  Subsequent Alliance of the Median King with Antony.  War between Parthia and Media.  Rebellion raised against Phraates by Tiridates.  Phraates expelled.  He recovers his Throne with the help of the Scythians.  His dealings with Augustus.  His death and Character.

The shedding of blood is like, “the letting out of water.”  When it once begins, none can say where it will stop.  The absolute monarch who, for his own fancied security, commences a system of executions, is led on step by step to wholesale atrocities from which he would have shrunk with horror at the outset.  Phraates had removed brothers whose superior advantages of birth made them formidable rivals.  He had punished with death a father who ventured to blame his act, and to forget that by abdication he had sunk himself to the position of a subject.  Could he have stopped here, it might have seemed that his severities proceeded not so much from cruelty of disposition as from political necessity; and historians, always tender in the judgments which they pass on kings under such circumstances, would probably have condoned or justified his conduct.  But the taste for bloodshed grows with the indulgence of it.  In a short time the young king had killed all his remaining brothers, although their birth was no better than his own, and there was no valid ground for his fearing them; and soon afterwards, not content with the murder of his own relations, he began to vent his fury upon the Parthian nobles.  Many of these suffered death; and such a panic seized the order that numbers quitted the country, and dispersed in different directions, content to remain in exile until the danger which threatened them should have passed by.  There, were others, however, who were not so patient.  A body of chiefs had fled to Antony, among whom was a certain Monseses, a nobleman of the highest rank, who seems to have distinguished himself previously in the Syrian wars.  This person represented to Antony that Phraates had by his tyrannical and bloody conduct made himself hateful to his subjects, and that a revolution could easily be effected.  If the Romans would support him, he offered to invade Parthia; and he made no doubt of wresting the greater portion of it from the hands of the tyrant, and of being himself accepted as king.  In that, case he would consent to hold his crown of the Romans, who might depend upon his fidelity and gratitude.  Antony is said to have listened to these overtures, and to have been induced by them to turn his thoughts to an invasion of the Parthian kingdom.  He began to collect troops and to obtain allies with this object.  He entered into negotiations with Artavasdes, the Armenian king, who seems at this time to have been more afraid of Rome than of Parthia, and engaged him