Sapor's Severities.
Siege and Capture of Singara; of Bezabde. Attack on Virtu fails.
Aggressive Movement of Constantius. He attacks Bezabde, but fails
Campaign of A.D. 361. Death of Constantius._

Evenerat . . . quasi fatali constellatione . . . ut Constantium
dimicantem cum Persis fortuna semper sequeretur afflictior.--Amm. Marc.
xx. 9, ad fin.

It seems to have been soon after the close of Sapor's first war with
Constantius that events took place in Armenia which once more replaced
that country under Roman influence. Arsaces, the son of Tiranus, had
been, as we have seen, established as monarch, by Sapor, in the year
A.D. 341, under the notion that, in return for the favor shown him, he
would administer Armenia in the Persian interest. But gratitude is an
unsafe basis for the friendships of monarchs. Arsaces, after a time,
began to chafe against the obligations under which Sapor had laid him,
and to wish, by taking independent action, to show himself a real king,
and not a mere feudatory. He was also, perhaps, tired of aiding Sapor in
his Roman war, and may have found that he suffered more than he gained
by having Rome for an enemy. At any rate, in the interval between A.D.
351 and 359, probably while Sapor was engaged in the far East, Arsaces
sent envoys to Constantinople with a request to Constantius that he
would give him in marriage a member of the Imperial house. Constantius
was charmed with the application made to him, and at once accepted the
proposal. He selected for the proffered honor a certain Olympias, the
daughter of Ablabius, a Praetorian prefect, and lately the betrothed
bride of his own brother, Constans; and sent her to Armenia, where
Arsaces welcomed her, and made her (as it would seem) his chief wife,
provoking thereby the jealousy and aversion of his previous sultana, a
native Armenian, named Pharandzem. The engagement thus entered into led
on, naturally, to the conclusion of a formal alliance between Rome and
Armenia--an alliance which Sapor made fruitless efforts to disturb, and
which continued unimpaired down to the time A.D. 359 when hostilities
once more broke out between Rome and Persia.

Of Sapor's Eastern wars we have no detailed account. They seem to have
occupied him from A.D. 350 to A.D. 357, and to have been, on the whole,
successful. They were certainly terminated by a peace in the last-named
year--a peace of which it must have been a condition that his late
enemies should lend