Episode 39. Carrhae and Parthia: Rome Meets Its Match in the East

Sources and Historiography

Plutarch's Life of Crassus is the primary narrative source and the most detailed account of the battle. Plutarch's account has been criticized for placing too much blame on Crassus personally—a tradition the academic literature calls the “anti-Crassus propaganda” tradition, examined at length in a 2017 article in Acta Antiqua. The argument is that Roman writers found it convenient to blame Crassus's greed and incompetence for a defeat that had structural causes: the Roman army was simply not designed for the Mesopotamian plain, and the Parthian combination of horse archers and cataphracts had no effective Roman counter. Most modern military historians give more credit to Surena's tactical genius than Plutarch does.

Cassius Dio's Roman History provides a parallel account and a different version of Crassus's death: Dio suggests he may have been killed by his own men to prevent capture. The two accounts are not reconcilable and both are writing long after the event from lost earlier sources. The molten-gold-in-the-mouth story, which appears in some Roman narratives, is not in Plutarch or Dio and is generally regarded by modern historians as embellishment, probably invented to sharpen the moral point about avarice.

The Dubs hypothesis about Roman prisoners in China is the great historiographical curiosity attached to Carrhae. Homer Dubs published the theory in the mid-twentieth century and it has attracted both popular enthusiasm and scholarly skepticism ever since. The evidence—a Chinese reference to a “fish-scale formation” at a Central Asian battle, a town name that may derive from the Chinese word for Rome, some Caucasian genetic material in a Gansu village—is circumstantial and has not been confirmed by any artifacts. The majority of historians regard it as unproven; a minority find it plausible. It is included here as what it is: an intriguing unprovable hypothesis that captures something true about the human cost of Carrhae—ten thousand men marched to the edge of the known world, and we have no idea what became of them.

Works CitedPrimary Sources

• Cassius Dio. Roman History. Parallel account, often more precise on numbers and the circumstances of Crassus's death.
• Plutarch. “Life of Crassus.” The essential text; the battle narrative is in the second half of the Life.
• Res Gestae Divi Augusti. Augustus on recovering the eagles; important for the propaganda dimension.

Secondary Sources

• Farrokh, Kaveh. Shadows in the Desert: Ancient Persia at War. 2007. Excellent on the Parthian military system.
• Goldsworthy, Adrian. Caesar. 2006. Good context on the Triumvirate's collapse after Carrhae.
• Holland, Tom. Rubicon. 2003. The political consequences of the defeat for Rome.
• Sampson, Gareth. The Defeat of Rome: Crassus, Carrhae and the Invasion of the East. 2008. The best dedicated modern treatment.

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