vince, but invested him with an extraordinary command over all the
Roman dominions to the east of the Hellespont, thus rendering him a sort
of monarch of Roman Asia. Full powers were granted him for making peace
or war, for levying troops, annexing provinces, appointing subject
kings, and performing other sovereign acts, without referring back to
Rome for instructions. A train of unusual magnificence accompanied him
to his charge, calculated to impress the Orientals with the conviction
that this was no common negotiator. Germanicus arrived in Asia early in
A.D. 18, and applied himself at once to his task. Entering Armenia at
the head of his troops, he proceeded to the capital, Artaxata, and,
having ascertained the wishes of the Armenians themselves, determined
on his course of conduct. To have insisted on the restoration of Vonones
would have been grievously to offend the Armenians who had expelled
him, and at the same time to provoke the Parthians, who could not have
tolerated a pretender in a position of power upon their borders; to
have allowed the pretensions of the Parthian monarch, and accepted the
candidature of his son, Orodes, would have lowered Rome in the opinion
of all the surrounding nations, and been equivalent to an abdication of
all influence in the affairs of Western Asia. Germanicus avoided either
extreme, and found happily a middle course. It happened that there was
a foreign prince settled in Armenia, who having grown up there had
assimilated himself in all respects to the Armenian ideas and habits,
and had thereby won golden opinions from both the nobles and the people.
This was Zeno, the son of Polemo, once king of the curtailed Pontus,
and afterwards of the Lesser Armenia, an outlying Roman dependency. The
Armenians themselves suggested that Zeno should be their monarch; and
Germanicus saw a way out of his difficulties in the suggestion. At the
seat of government, Artaxata, in the presence of a vast multitude of the
people, with the consent and approval of the principal nobles, he placed
with his own hand the diadem on the brow of the favored prince, and
saluted him as king under the new name of "Artaxias." He then returned
into Syria, where he was shortly afterwards visited by ambassadors from
the Parthian monarch. Artabanus reminded him of the peace concluded
between Rome and Parthia in the reign of Augustus, and assumed that
the circumstances of his own appointment to the throne had in no way
int