Remembering Intervention: Parthia in Rome’s Civil Wars

Abstract

The Arsacid rulers of the Parthian empire intervened repeatedly in the civil wars of the late Republic. Previous analyses of these interventions have been misled by post-Republican ideas about the Roman-Parthian relationship or confined to discussions of individual episodes. This article comprehensively surveys Parthian intervention and traces divergent Roman attitudes towards it over time. It is argued that Roman observers sometimes perceived Parthia’s involvement as a singular external intrusion on the circumscribed domain of civil war - but only in the early imperial period, when the Arsacid kingdom’s status as an imperial arch-rival forced a reconsideration of the Republican past.