accept the offer. The vizier received the consular
and his staff with the usual honours, and offered anew to conclude
a compact of friendship; only, with just bitterness recalling the fate
of the agreements concluded with Lucullus and Pompeius respecting
the Euphrates boundary,(9) he demanded that it should be immediately
reduced to writing. A richly adorned horse was produced;
it was a present from the king to the Roman commander-in-chief;
the servants of the vizier crowded round Crassus, zealous to mount him
on the steed. It seemed to the Roman officers as if there was a design
to seize the person of the commander-in-chief; Octavius, unarmed
as he was, pulled the sword of one of the Parthians from its sheath
and stabbed the groom. In the tumult which thereupon arose,
the Roman officers were all put to death; the gray-haired commander-
in-chief also, like his grand-uncle,(10) was unwilling to serve
as a living trophy to the enemy, and sought and found death.
The multitude left behind in the camp without a leader were partly
taken prisoners, partly dispersed. What the day of Carrhae had begun,
the day of Sinnaca completed (June 9, 701); the two took their place
side by side with the days of the Allia, of Cannae, and of Arausio.
The army of the Euphrates was no more. Only the squadron
of Gaius Cassius, which had been broken off from the main army
on the retreat from Carrhae, and some other scattered bands
and isolated fugitives succeeded in escaping from the Parthians
and Bedouins and separately finding their way back to Syria.
Of above 40,000 Roman legionaries, who had crossed the Euphrates,
not a fourth part returned; the half had perished; nearly 10,000
Roman prisoners were settled by the victors in the extreme east
of their kingdom--in the oasis of Merv--as bondsmen compelled
after the Parthian fashion to render military service.
For the first time since the eagles had headed the legions,
they had become in the same year trophies of victory in the hands
of foreign nations, almost contemporaneously of a German tribe
in the west(11) and of the Parthians in the east. As to the impression
which the defeat of the Romans produced in the east, unfortunately
no adequate information has reached us; but it must have been deep
and lasting. King Orodes was just celebrating the marriage of his son
Pacorus with the sister of his new ally, Artavasdes the king of Armenia,
when the announcement of the victory of his vizier a