04 February 2007
The Parthian Shot
Let us acknowledge, this chilly Washington morning, the deaths of 130 and wounding of hundreds of others in the crowded Sarriya market in Baghdad. They died for the crime of shopping for dinner, and some religious schism a thousand years old. It was about a ton of explosives, the biggest vehicle-borne explosive device detonated since the invasion, and represents the apex of the trend in madness.
The targets are unarmed civilians, wherever they congregate.
I leafed through the Times article about rising tensions in the Muslim communities of America. Once there were so few mosques that every believer had to get along. That is no longer the case, and the Sunni-Shia schism is radiated fault lines here, too.
I have long passed the state of disbelief that such religious matters should trouble a determinedly secular society. After all, continental Europe has already surrendered to the new sensibility. Still, I am troubled that my dreams now include the 12th Imam of the Persians, and note on my calendar the symbolic date of the victory of the Islamic Revolution on the 11th of this month.
Our latest nemesis, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, announced that something was going to mark the day and demonstrate “ Iran's inalienable right to access nuclear energy.”
I hope it is a light-bulb, or something, but I have my doubts.
Most of my working life has had a little compartment for the Iranians. The Shah had dozens of young officers at the Naval Air Station at Pensacola to learn how to fly the then-new F-14 Tomcat fighter jet, which against all odds is still serving the Islamic Republic. I will never forget the female visitors to my door in the Bachelor Officer's Quarters who would knock, asking softly “Is Mohammed there?”
“No,” I would reply, “He has moved on and doesn't lie here anymore.”
The young officers in the sky-blue uniforms and swooping combination caps cut quite a swath through the town. Military men, overseas, have a certain way about them.
One way or another, Tehran has always had some sort of impact in what I was doing. But thus was it ever so.
You might have noted that there has been a flurry of interest in a Roman General of antique times. Marcus Crassus may have been a better man than he is remembered, history being written by the victors. Taken at face value, he was an arrogant and incompetent poltroon, but there was more to him.
Marcus Licinius Crassus lived in the last days of the Roman Republic, and helped to usher in the Empire. He was nick-named “Dives,” meaning “Rich,” not because of his military success, but because of his successful commercial activities. He owned silver mines and was know as the wealthiest man in Rome, but should be enshrined as a patron of the commercial real estate market. His business model was to use a network of informants to arrive at the scene of a fire, and secure the property and adjacent buildings for a song.
It may be the origin of the term “fire sale,” since he would then employ his private army of five hundred to put out the fire and turn a tidy profit on what was saved.
He ingratiated himself with the electorate as a man who could do what needed to be done. He rose in stature through the suppression of the slave revolt of Spartacus. The six thousand captured slaves who had rebelled were crucified along the Appian Way, and their bodies were left to rot on his orders.
In 60BC, he joined Pompey and Julius Gaeus Caesar in the coalition known as the First Triumvirate. In the maneuvering to divide the spoils of the last days of republican government, he was awarded the province of Syria, which would provide the means to tap into the riches of the Silk Road, and trade with the East.
It might have worked out that way, but Crassus was unwise in his choices, or at least in his intelligence advisors. In order to expand Roman presence, and enhance his glory against those of his fellow triumvers, he decided to cross the Euphrates River to conquer the Parthians to the east.
It is not correct to call the Parthians Persians, though they ruled the land that is now Iran for hundreds of years. It is acceptable to link them to the traditions of Persia, though strictly speaking they were nomadic warriors from the east of what is now Iran. Their heavy cavalry, excellent skills with the bow, and shrewd administrative skills enabled them to spread quickly and maintain their empire. They were consummate horsemen, and their innovative tactic in battle became known at the “Parthian Shot,” a technique by which the horseman turned backwards on his mount at full speed to deliver an accurate arrow against his enemy.
Crassus was sixty-two and not at his best on the day of his last battle. It was in a place called Carrhae, near the modern Turkish city of Harran. The year was 52BC. He must have been nervous. He had dropped the slippery entrails of the goat sacrificed to augur the future. He wore black as he emerged from his tent, only to be reminded that successful Roman generals wore purple. He hurriedly changed his attire, but it was to no avail.
Certainly his officers were shaken. But they had not liked his choice of route to the Parthian capital, and distrusted his choice of allies, the Anatolian tribesman Arimanes and his six thousand horsemen.
The Anatolians betrayed their erstwhile friends and fled the field as the battle was about to be joined. The numerically inferior Parthians used their famous arrow shot, with the compound reflex bows that doubled the effective distance of their volleys. Crassus attempted to employ his legions in the classic Roman testudo, or “shield turtle” formation. In that configuration, the cohorts cluster close together and use their shields to form a shell above, and to the sides. It is an impregnable array, but ponderous and unsuitable to a battle of manuever.
The Parthians ran circles around the slow-moving Legionnaires. Crassus' son Publius was on the field, at the head of the cavalry auxiliary composed of Gauls. He attempted to close the mounted bowmen with a thousand horsemen, but the Parthians were able to kill from a distance. Half of Publius' force was killed outright, and the other five hundred captured.
Publius was decapitated, and his head placed on a pike for a mocking display to his father.
The rest of the day went badly for Crassus and ended worse. The Parthians continued to prick the skin of the Roman turtle, and with the loss of the cavalry, they could not flee the battlefield. As dusk came on, Crassus turned to negotiations to extricate himself from an untenable situation. In the process, he was again betrayed and taken prisoner along with his Legions by the Parthian general Surena.
The Parthian knew that Crassus was reputed to be the richest man in Rome. In fact, his name has come down to us as the synonym for the crude display of wealth.
According to legend, gold confiscated from the Roman baggage train was melted over the campfire, and then poured down Crassus's throat. The head of the hapless general was then removed, and sent as a trophy to Orodes II, emperor of all the Parthians.
The captured legionnaires numbered 10,000. Twice that number were dead on the field. They were marched into captivity, and according to Parthian custom, they would have been moved as far to the east as possible to ensure that there was not chance for escape. It could have been almost all the way to China.
The eastward march of the Roman Empire was over. Marcus Antonius attempted to deal with the consequences a few years later, and eventually a diplomatic settlement was reached by Caesar Augustus in 20BC. It was agreed that the eagles and banners of the seven lost legions would be returned. When negotiators sought the return of the POWs, they were told, just as the North Vietnamese did a few millennia later, that there were no such prisoners to repatriate.
That would be the end of a cautionary tale about imperial hubris long ago. But the reason that Crassus is once more in the news is the possible resolution of the fate of the lost legions. An American sinologist named Homer Dubs utilized records of the Han Dynasty to identify the conquest of a city defended in a manner that seemed distinctly Roman in 36BC, in a region now known as Uzbekistan, in the east of Parthia.
Dubs presented a paper in London in 1955, announcing that he had identified the whereabouts of the POWs. He said the biography of Chen Tang, one of the victorious Chinese generals, revealed that he had been impressed by the military skills of those warriors. Thee survivors had been enlisted in his service, and moved east once more.
The place they settled was named, by imperial decree, Li-Jien. Some say it sounds like “Legion.”
Naturally, the ascent of the Communists had rendered much of China off-limits to research for many years, and the notion of a European settlement near the Gobi Desert was problematic in terms of the dialectic. But times change.
Archeological excavations in 1993 revealed the foundations of palisades around the ancient town, similar to those used in Roman defensive works. The residents of the remote area still display some of the genetic characteristics of Europeans.
They are doing genetic testing to see. There is great excitement, since the presence of the descendents of the lost legions could mean a tourist boom in the area. A museum has already been established in anticipation.
It is a curiosity, to be sure, and possibly true. This anomalous genetic deposit has a certain universality. It is said the Chinese once sent a delegation across the county of the of the Parthians to open relations directly with the Romans, who they knew as “Li-Jien.” Upon reaching the waters of the Black Sea, they were informed by their hosts that it would require a further journey of two years by boat to reach the Eternal City.
Sadly, the Chinese could not afford the time, and returned home. The middle-men preserved the exclusivity of their relations with the mysterious east. Thus has it ever been there, the judicious shading of the fact.
Which makes me wonder what President Ahmadinejad is going to show us next week. You should always be on the look-out for the Parthian Shot, you know?
Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com