THE HISTORY OF OLD ROME

V. The Establishment of the Military Monarchy

From: The History of Rome, by Theodor Mommsen
Translated with the sanction of the author by William Purdie Dickson

Chapter IV - Pompeius and the East

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Page 48

The remarkable intercourse between the Roman commander-in-chief and the Parthian satraps of the region of Media and even of the distant province Elymais (between Susiana, Media, and Persia, in the modern Luristan) seemed a commentary on this speech.(20)

20. This view rests on the narrative of Plutarch (Pomp. 36) which is supported by Strabo's (xvi. 744) description of the position of the satrap of Elymais. It is an embellishment of the matter, when in the lists of the countries and kings conquered by Pompeius Media and its king Darius are enumerated (Diodorus, Fr, Vat. p. 140; Appian, Mithr. 117); and from this there has been further concocted the war of Pompeius with the Medes (Veil. ii. 40; Appian, Mithr. 106, 114) and then even his expedition to Ecbatana (Oros. vi. 5). A confusion with the fabulous town of the same name on Carmel has hardly taken place here; it is simply that intolerable exaggeration--apparently originating in the grandiloquent and designedly ambiguous bulletins of Pompeius--which has converted his razzia against the Gaetulians (p. 94) into a march to the west coast of Africa (Plut. Pomp. 38), his abortive expedition against the Nabataeans into a conquest of the city of Petra, and his award as to the boundaries of Armenia into a fixing of the boundary of the Roman empire beyond Nisibis.

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