ill, he resolved to continue the struggle; he was on friendly terms
with Rome, and might count on an imperial contingent; he had some hope
that the Bactrian Arsacidae would join him; at the worst, he regarded
his own power as firmly fixed and as sufficient to enable him to
maintain an equal contest with the new monarchy. Accordingly he took the
Parthian Arsacids under his protection, and gave them a refuge in the
Armenian territory. At the same time he negotiated with both Balkh and
Rome, made arrangements with the barbarians upon his northern frontier
to lend him aid, and, having collected a large army, invaded the new
kingdom on the north-west, and gained certain not unimportant successes.
According to the Armenian historians, Artaxerxes lost Assyria and the
adjacent regions; Bactria wavered; and, after the struggle had continued
for a year or two, the founder of the second Persian empire was obliged
to fly ignominiously to India! But this entire narrative seems to be
deeply tinged with the vitiating stain of intense national vanity, a
fault which markedly characterizes the Armenian writers, and renders
them, when unconfirmed by other authorities, almost worthless. The
general course of events, and the position which Artaxerxes takes in
his dealings with Rome (A.D. 229-230), sufficiently indicate that any
reverses which he sustained at this time in his struggle with Chosroes
and the unsubmitted Arsacidae must have been trivial, and that they
certainly had no greater result than to establish the independence
of Armenia, which, by dint of leaning upon Rome, was able to maintain
itself against the Persian monarch and to check the advance of the
Persians in North-Western Asia.

Artaxerxes, however, resisted in this quarter, and unable to overcome
the resistance, which he may have regarded as deriving its effectiveness
(in part at least) from the support lent it by Rome, determined (ab.
A.D. 229) to challenge the empire to an encounter. Aware that Artabanus,
his late rival, against whom he had measured himself, and whose power he
had completely overthrown, had been successful in his war with Macrinus,
had gained the great battle of Nisibis, and forced the Imperial State to
purchase an ignominious peace by a payment equal to nearly two millions
of our money, he may naturally have thought that a facile triumph was
open to his arms in this direction. Alexander Severus, the occupant of
the imperial throne, was a young man of a