oring a demand which he had no intention of
according. It was clearly his design to set up one of the elder brothers
as a rival claimant to Phraataces, or at any rate to alarm him with the
notion that, unless he made concessions, this policy would be adopted.
But Phraataces was not to be frightened by a mere message. He responded
to Augustus after his own fashion, dispatching to him a letter wherein
he took to himself the favorite Parthian title of "king of kings," and
addressed the Roman Emperor simply as "Caesar." The attitude of defiance
would no doubt have been maintained, had Augustus confined himself to
menaces; when, however, it appeared that active measures would be taken,
when Augustus, in B.C. 1, sent his grandson, Caius, to the East with
orders to re-establish the Roman influence in Armenia even at the cost
of a Parthian war, and that prince showed himself in Syria with all the
magnificent surroundings of the Imperial dignity, the Parthian monarch
became alarmed. He had an interview with Caius in the spring of A.D.
1, upon an island in the Euphrates; where the terms of an arrangement
between the two Empires were discussed and settled. The armies of the
two chiefs were drawn up on the opposite banks of the river, facing one
another; and the chiefs themselves, accompanied by an equal number
of attendants, proceeded to deliberate in the sight of both hosts.
Satisfactory pledges having been given by the Parthian monarch, the
prince and king in turn entertained each other on the borders of their
respective dominions; and Caius returned into Syria, having obtained an
engagement from the Parthians to abstain from any further interference
with Armenian affairs. The engagement appears to have been honorably
kept; for when, shortly afterward, fresh complications occurred, and
Caius in endeavoring to settle them received his death-wound before
the walls of an Armenian tower, we do not hear of Parthia as in any way
involved in the unfortunate occurrence. The Romans and their partisans
in the country were left to settle the Armenian succession as they
pleased; and Parthia kept herself wholly aloof from the matters
transacted upon her borders.

One cause--perhaps the main cause of this abstinence, and of the
engagement to abstain entered into by Phraataces, was doubtless the
unsettled state of things in Parthia itself. The circumstances under
which that prince had made himself king, though not unparalleled in the
Parthian