The problem raised by the Eastern frontier was essentially different from the rest, for here alone Augustus had to deal not with barbarians or semi-barbarians, but with an organized empire — a power with which he could treat according to the usages of diplomacy. That power was Parthia. By the treaties of peace with Parthia made by Gnaeus Pompeius, the Euphrates had been fixed as the boundary of Syria as far north as Edessa, and the river, with the Mesopotamian deserts on the eastern bank, formed a natural frontier. But coterminous with the vassal principalities of Commagene, Cappadocia, Lesser Armenia, and Pontus, which stretched from that point to the Euxine, lay Armenia, and here was the standing cause of quarrel between Rome and Parthia. Nominally, Armenia was an independent kingdom, with a royal house of its own, but Parthian influence had long been supreme within its borders. Owing to its strategical position, which was exactly similar to that of Afghanistan at the present day in relation to Russian Asia and British India, the policy of Rome was directed towards making Armenia its ally, so that, in the eventuality of a war with Parthia, the legions might not have to fight their way through the Armenian passes. Roman interests in the country were almost wholly military and strategic, and the Senate had sedulously fostered the formation of a pro-Roman party in Armenia, though it is abundantly clear that the general sympathies of the people favored the old Parthian alliance. Armenia thus became Roman and Parthian in turn, according as the throne was filled by a Roman or a Parthian nominee.
We have narrated in an earlier chapter the campaigns of Antonius in this region, and have seen how he placed one of his own children by Cleopatra on the Armenian throne. But after the Battle of Actium, Armenia rose and thrust out the intruder, and the new monarch signalized his accession by a general massacre of the Romans throughout his country, in revenge for the cruel murder of his father by Antonius. It was doubtless expected by public opinion at Rome that Augustus would lose no time in avenging this massacre by leading his legions, fresh from the conquest of Egypt, into Armenia and restoring the Roman ascendency. But he did nothing of the kind. If there was one clear lesson taught by the repeated Eastern campaigns of recent years, it was that they pointed straight to disaster. Augustus declined to regard the anti-Parthian policy of Julius and Antonius as an integral part of his inheritance, and he accepted the position as he found it. It was not an heroic policy — Julius would probably have made the loss of Armenia an immediate casus belli with Parthia — but its wisdom was justified by the event. Augustus had the entire Roman world to set in order and was willing to wait until a more convenient season. Yet, though he refrained from war, he came to no definite accommodation with the Parthian King. The loss of the eagles of Crassus at Carrhae and the two subsequent defeats which had befallen Antonius' lieutenants, Decidius Saxa and Statianus, were blots upon the Roman military honor which had to be wiped out, sooner or later. Public opinion might acquiesce in a temporary, it would not have acquiesced in a permanent, abandonment of Armenia. Augustus, therefore, merely postponed the struggle and remained on the watch for a moment when his hands should be free and Parthia should be weak.
It came at length. There were always Parthian, Armenian, and Median kings in exile, and to these Augustus gave asylum and helped them to foster dissension across the borders. He installed the dispossessed King of the Medes in Lesser Armenia, and lent arms and money to the Parthian pretender, Tiridates. Phraates, anxious for his throne, opened communications with Augustus, who, in turn, pressed for the restoration of the standards of Crassus, but there was no good faith on either side and the negotiations came to nought. However, in 20 B.C. a powerful faction arose in Armenia against the reigning king and sent a deputation to Augustus, begging him to place on the throne Tigranes, the King's brother, who had been brought up in the palace at Rome. Augustus was then at Samos and acceded to their wishes. He sent a powerful army into Armenia, under the command of his stepson, Tiberius, then twenty-two years of age, and a bloodless victory was obtained. The King of Armenia was murdered by his own relatives. Tigranes received his crown, as a vassal of Rome, from the hands of Tiberius, and the throne of Armenia was once more filled by a Roman feudatory. In the neighboring country of Media, Atropatene, another prince, equally friendly to Rome, was installed, and the King of Parthia, alarmed at the presence of the legions upon the Araxes, hastened to make his peace with Augustus. He restored the long-lost standards of Crassus and the remnant of the Roman prisoners who had survived their thirty years captivity, and the delight of Augustus at having thus rehabilitated the Roman prestige, without risking the desperate uncertainties of war, knew no bounds. The court poets sang their paeans of victory in unmeasured strains, and Augustus sent valuable gifts to the Parthian King. Among his presents was a beautiful Italian woman named Thermusa, who became the favorite mistress of the king and played the part of Roman ambassadress so well that she induced Phraates to send his children as hostages to Rome. In the Monumentum Ancyranum Augustus declares that Phraates sought his alliance, not after suffering defeat in war, but of his own free will, by sending the royal children as pledges of his sincerity. It is more probable that the conciliatory attitude of the Parthian was due to the troubled state of his kingdom, and the fact that the mysterious ambassadors from King Pandion, of Scythia, and King Porus, of India, were seeking alliance with Rome may also have influenced his action.
This settlement of the Eastern Question lasted for about fourteen years. Then the King of Armenia died, and, acting upon the instigation of Parthia, his son assumed the crown without consulting the Roman overlord. Augustus again ordered Tiberius to lead an expedition thither, but he declined the commission and Varus, who took his place, set Artavasdes on the throne. Artavasdes, however, proved an intractable vassal, and in the year 1 B.C., Augustus despatched the young Gaius Caesar, his eldest grandson by the marriage of Julia and Agrippa, at the head of an important mission to the East. There is a mystery attaching to this mission which has never been cleared up. No expedition which Augustus sanctioned was ever so magniloquently "written up" by the court poets at Rome. They set forth, in the most extravagant vein, the vastness of its scope. Gaius — so the world was told — was commissioned not only to set the affairs of Armenia in order, but to lead the Roman armies into Parthia, destroy that empire, penetrate down the valley of the Euphrates to the Persian Gulf, and then conquer and annex Arabia. The campaign, in other words, was to be ordered on such a scale as that on which Alexander or Julius would have conceived it. There is something suspicious in all this bombast, when one remembers the character of Augustus and the extreme youth of Gaius. It was not the wont of the Emperor to trumpet forth his intentions and disclose his plans of campaign. May we not surmise that he was playing a great game at bluff with Parthia? It is difficult on any other theory to explain why two years were thrown away by Gaius in Syria, while his tutor, Lollius, intrigued with and received bribes from the Parthian. The young commander-in-chief, who was to emulate the exploits of Alexander, showed himself much more anxious to negotiate than to fight, and we can hardly doubt that his line of policy was dictated from Rome. A meeting was eventually arranged to take place upon an island in the Euphrates and a treaty was drawn up whereby Phraates pledged himself to interfere no more in the affairs of Armenia, where the timely death of Artavasdes prepared the way for the accession of Tigranes, a prince of the old royal house. War with Parthia, therefore, was again averted by diplomacy, and it is hard to resist the suspicion that this was as agreeable to Augustus as it was to Phraates. All the projects, real or pretended, for a great campaign of conquest in the East fell to the ground, and were heard of no more, and the net result of Gaius' mission was the restoration of Armenia to the sphere of Roman influence and a renewed understanding with Parthia which remained unbroken throughout the remainder of Augustus' reign. The Emperor's supreme gratification at this success was tempered only by his grief at the death of Gaius, who succumbed after a long illness to the effects of a wound which he had received from a treacherous Parthian officer before the Armenian stronghold of Artageira.
It is clear, therefore, that the guiding principle of Augustus' Eastern policy was the avoidance of a serious war on any terms short of national dishonor. He rightly judged that the problems of the Danube and the Rhine were of much more vital importance to the Empire than the problems arising out of the Eastern frontier, and that Parthia was only dangerous to an invader and was herself in process of rapid decay. He adopted a strictly conservative attitude and did not seek to extend his boundaries. He might have made Armenia a province. He preferred, as he says in the Monumentum Ancyranum, to hand it over to Tigranes. And he was wise, for he had no spare legions to act as its garrison. While, therefore, it cannot be said that Augustus secured a scientific frontier in the East — for the disadvantages of the buffer state and vassal kingdom policy are obvious — it was none the less tolerably secure on account of the internal weakness of Parthia. And the rich province of Syria, which, after all, was the Emperor's principal care in this region, was absolutely safeguarded by the Euphrates and the four legions of the Syrian command. Its capital, Antioch, was the third city of the Empire in point of population and almost surpassed Rome itself in its luxury and devotion to pleasure. Syria was a great manufacturing center. It was the emporium through which passed most of the overland traffic with the Far East, and the Phoenician harbors were busy hives of industry. Poor and desolate though it now is, in the time of Augustus it was a land overflowing with corn, wine, and oil, and one of the wealthiest provinces of the Empire.
We have already alluded to the vassal kingdoms of the interior of Asia Minor. With the exception of Galatia, which was incorporated in 25 B.C., on the death of King Amyntas, these remained untouched by Augustus. Galatia itself was probably annexed on account of the turbulent condition of Isauria and Pisidia, where the Emperor planted a few small colonies of veterans. The others retained their semi-independence. The remainder of Asia Minor had fallen to the Senate in the great division of the provinces. Cilicia, from its proximity to Syria, was afterwards transferred to the Emperor, but the authority of the Senate was supreme in Asia and Bithynia, in the flourishing Greek cities which fringed the whole coastline, and in the islands of Cyprus and Crete.
The state of Greece calls for a passing word. Hellas had fallen into a most deplorable and desolate condition and the whole of Greece, south of Thessaly, was now known to the Romans by the name of Achaia. Athens, still the home of philosophy and rhetoric, was merely a small university city, a pleasant place of resort and retreat. Her commerce had dwindled to the vanishing point. Her harbors at Phalerum were empty of ships. Her temples were falling into decay. And her case was typical of the rest. Corinth was in ruins and had never risen from the ashes in which Memmius had laid her. The Peloponnese was a howling wilderness. "Magnarum rerum magna sepulchra vides" — that mournful line, which conjures up before the imagination the graves of dead cities, tells its own tale of silent oracles and vanished polities. Greece had been on the side of Pompeius in the war with Julius. She had been on the side of Antonius in the war with Augustus. She had been stripped bare to furnish supplies for the hosts which had fought out their quarrels in Thessaly, Macedonia, and at Actium, and was now prostrate. To infuse new life into so exhausted a frame was almost hopeless, but Augustus attempted even this. Athens was punished for the favor she had shown to Antonius and Cleopatra by being deprived of Aegina and Megara, but an additional batch of colonists was sent to Corinth, and new colonies were founded at Patrae and at Buthrotum in Epirus. Augustus had already laid the foundations of a great city at Nicopolis to celebrate his supreme victory, and with that spirit of conservatism which marked all his acts, he reestablished the Amphictyonic Council for Greece, Macedonia, and Thessaly. To this Council, however, Nicopolis alone sent six deputies, as many as either Macedonia, or Thessaly. Boeotia, Phocis, and Delphi sent two each. Doris, Athens, Euboea, Opuntian Locris, and Ozolian Locris had one representative each, while Argos, Sicyon, Corinth, and Megara had to combine to supply a single deputy. There could be no more startling proof of the utter degradation into which the cities of Greece had fallen. The province of Achaia, which at the redistribution of the provinces had been given to the Senate, was, twelve years later, combined with the imperial province of Macedonia, but was again restored to the Senate by Claudius. Greece had ceased to count, and, alone of all the many provinces of the Roman Empire, she continued to decay. Her sun had set.
Thessaly and Macedonia fared better than the southern portion of the peninsula, and received new colonies of veterans. Thrace, throughout the reign of Augustus, was ruled by native chiefs friendly to Rome and steadily grew more civilized, as the formation of the province of Moesia and the legions on the Danube protected it from the incursions of the wild tribes of Dacia. The trading cities on the Thracian coast of the Euxine, in the Crimea, and in Colchis maintained a more or less precarious existence in the midst of barbarism and can have contributed little to the revenues of the Empire.