more had perished through the effects of past sufferings or the severity of the weather.  Altogether, out of the hundred thousand men whom Antony led into Media Atropatene, less than seventy thousand remained to commence the campaign which was threatened for the ensuing year.  Well may the unfortunate commander have exclaimed as he compared his own heavy losses with the light ones of Xenophon and his Greeks in these same regions, “Oh, those Ten Thousand! those Ten Thousand!”

On the withdrawal of Antony into Armenia a quarrel broke out between Phraates and his Median vassal.  The latter regarded himself as wronged in the division made of the Roman spoils, and expressed himself with so much freedom on the subject as to offend his suzerain.  He then began to fear that he had gone too far, and that Phraates would punish him by depriving him of his sovereignty.  Accordingly, he was anxious to obtain a powerful alliance, and on turning over in his mind all feasible political combinations it seems to have occurred to him that his late enemy, Antony, might be disposed to take him under his protection.  He doubtless knew that Artavasdes of Armenia had offended the Roman leader by deserting him in the hour of his greatest peril, and felt that, if Antony was intending to revenge himself on the traitor, he would be glad to have a friend on the Armenian border.  He therefore sent an ambassador of rank to Alexandria, where Antony was passing the winter, and boldly proposed the alliance.  Antony readily accepted it; he was intensely angered by the conduct of the Armenian monarch, and determined on punishing his defection; he viewed the Median alliance as of the utmost importance in connection with the design, which he still entertained, of invading Parthia itself; and he saw in the powerful descendant of Atropates a prince whom it would be well worth his while to bind to his cause indissolubly.  He therefore embraced the overtures made to him with joy, and even rewarded the messenger who had brought them with a principality.  After sundry efforts to entice Artavasdes into his power, which occupied him during most of B.C. 85, in the spring of B.C. 34 he suddenly appeared in Armenia.  His army, which had remained there from the previous campaign, held all the more important positions, and, as he professed the most friendly feelings towards Artavasdes, even proposing an alliance between their families, that prince, after some hesitation, at length ventured into his presence.  He was immediately seized and put in chains.  Armenia was rapidly overrun.  Artaxias, whom the Armenians made king in the room of his father, was defeated and forced to take refuge with the Parthians.  Antony then arranged a marriage between the daughter of the Median monarch and his own son by Cleopatra, Alexander, and, leaving garrisons in Armenia, carried off Artavasdes and a rich booty into Egypt.