than a few years.  It was most likely while Artaxerxes still ruled Persia, that the rupture described by Faustus occurred.  A certain Meroujan, an Armenian, noble, jealous of the power and prosperity of Manuel, persuaded him that the Persian commandant in Armenia was about to seize his person, and either to send him a prisoner to Artaxerxes, or else to put him to death.  Manuel, who was so credulous as to believe the information, thought it necessary for his own safety to anticipate the designs of his enemies, and, falling upon the ten thousand Persians with the whole of the Armenian army, succeeded in putting them all to the sword, except their commander, whom he allowed to escape.  War followed between Persia and Armenia with varied success, but on the whole Manuel had the advantage; he repulsed several Persian invasions, and maintained the independence and integrity of Armenia till his death, without calling in the aid of Rome.  When, however, Manuel died, about A.D. 383, Armenian affairs fell into confusion; the Romans were summoned to give help to one party, the Persians to render assistance to the other; Armenia became once more the battle-ground between the two great powers, and it seemed as if the old contest, fraught with so many calamities, was to be at once renewed.  But the circumstances of the time were such that neither Rome nor Persia now desired to reopen the contest.  Persia was in the hands of weak and unwarlike sovereigns, and was perhaps already threatened by Scythic hordes upon the east.  Rome was in the agonies of a struggle with the ever-increasing power of the Goths; and though, in the course of the years A.D. 379-382, the Great Theodosius had established peace in the tract under his rule, and delivered the central provinces of Macedonia and Thrace from the intolerable ravages of the barbaric invaders, yet the deliverance had been effected at the cost of introducing large bodies of Goths into the heart of the empire, while still along the northern frontier lay a threatening cloud, from which devastation and ruin might at any time burst forth and overspread the provinces upon the Lower Danube.  Thus both the Roman emperor and the Persian king were well disposed towards peace.  An arrangement was consequently made, and in A.D. 384, five years after he had ascended the throne, Theodosius gave audience in Constantinople to envoys from the court of Persepolis, and concluded with them a treaty whereby matters in Armenia were placed on a footing which fairly satisfied both sides, and the tranquillity of the East was assured.  The high contracting powers agreed that Armenia should be partitioned between them.  After detaching from the kingdom various outlying districts, which could be conveniently absorbed into their own territories, they divided the rest of the country into two unequal portions.  The smaller of these, which comprised the more western districts, was placed under the protection of Rome, and was committed by Theodosius to the Arsaces