r, he awoke to a sense of the actual fact, and mourned
the death of his favorite with tears. After a while this extreme grief
wore itself out, and the aged king began to direct his attention once
more to public affairs. He grew anxious about the succession. Of the
thirty sons who still remained to him there was not one who had made
himself a name, or was in any way distinguished above the remainder. In
the absence of any personal ground of preference, Orodes--who seems
to have regarded himself as possessing a right to nominate the son who
should succeed him--thought the claims of primogeniture deserved to be
considered, and selected as his successor, Phraa-tes, the eldest of the
thirty. Not content with nominating him, or perhaps doubtful whether the
nomination would be accepted by the Megistanes, he proceeded further to
abdicate in his favor, whereupon Phraates became king. The transaction
proved a most unhappy one. Phraates, jealous of some of his brothers,
who were the sons of a princess married to Orodes, whereas his own
mother was only a concubine, removed them by assassination, and when the
ex-monarch ventured to express disapproval of the act added the crime
of parricide to fratricide by putting to death his aged father. Thus
perished Orodes, after a reign of eighteen years--the most memorable in
the Parthian annals.

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 dispositio