reject them. Mithridates
I. had attained a position which entitled and enabled him to settle
the Parthian constitution as he thought best; and, if he maintained an
earlier arrangement, which is uncertain, he must have done so of his
own free will, simply because he preferred the existing Parthian
institutions to any other. Thus the institutions may be regarded as
starting from him, since he approved them, and made them those of the
Parthian EMPIRE.

Like most sovereignties which have arisen out of an association of
chiefs banding themselves together for warlike purposes under a single
head, the Parthian monarchy was limited. The king was permanently
advised by two councils, consisting of persons not of his own
nomination, whom rights, conferred by birth or office, entitled to their
seats. One of these was a family conclave (concilium domesticum), or
assembly of the full-grown males of the Royal House; the other was a
Senate comprising both the spiritual and the temporal chiefs of the
nation, the Sophi, or "Wise Men," and the Magi, or "Priests." Together
these two bodies constituted the Megistanes, the "Nobles" or "Great
Men"--the privileged class which to a considerable extent checked and
controlled the monarch. The monarchy was elective, but only in the house
of the Arsacidae; and the concurrent vote of both councils was necessary
in the appointment of a new king. Practically, the ordinary law of
hereditary descent appears to have been followed, unless in the case
where a king left no son of sufficient age to exercise the royal office.
Under such circumstances, the Megistanes usually nominated the late
king's next brother to succeed him, or, if he had left behind him no
brother, went back to an uncle. When the line of succession had once
been changed, the right of the elder branch was lost, and did not revive
unless the branch preferred died out or possessed no member qualified to
rule. When a king had been duly nominated by the two councils, the
right of placing the diadem upon his head belonged to the Surena, the
"Field-Marshal," or "Commander in Chief of the Parthian armies." The
Megistanes further claimed and sometimes exercised the right of deposing
a monarch whose conduct displeased them; but an attempt to exercise this
privilege was sure to be followed by a civil war, no monarch accepting
his deposition without a struggle; and force, not right, practically
determining whether he should remain king or no.

Aft