Antony's Revenge

A History of Mankind (216)

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Roman attentions didn’t allow Parthian rulers to enjoy the relative peace along their eastern borders brought by the rise of nomad-led polities, acting as buffer zones.

Sulla’s early contacts with the Parthians were ominous as they signaled that there was a new power in the west, the Romans, that was more powerful than any Hellenistic kingdom, and even more arrogant if that was even conceivable; and these contacts were followed by three decades of internal strife in the Parthian court, and Armenian encroachments under Tigranes II during his alliance with Mithridates VI of Pontus. Such developments led some in Rome to assess that the Parthian Empire was ripe for the taking.