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Connor O’Neill
Phi Alpha Theta History Conference
Paper Submission
3-6-21
Roman Opinions of the Near East: Roman Opinions of the Parthians and the Black Sea Peoples
during the Late Republican and Early Imperial Periods.
The Roman opinion of the Near East was one of curiosity, disdain, misconceptions, and

animosity, punctuated with periods of Roman control. To the Romans, the "East" was an

amorphous term, at times meaning everything east of Greece, at other times referring to what

we now know as the Middle East, and later during the Imperial period, indicating all the

territory east of the Roman Empire, therefore analyzing Roman Opinion’s of the East varies

greatly depending on the period of Roman history. For the purposes of this analysis, we will

examine Roman opinions of the East during the Late Republican Period and Early Imperial

Periods: a time when Rome had nearly fully subdued the Mediterranean and much of Western

Europe, and now began to look eastward, towards the Parthians, the successors to the Persian

and Seleucid empires, and the Black Sea peoples, including the Dacians and Getae, Scythians,

and the Kingdom of Pontus. In the Late Republic, these people and regions were treated as one

and the same by the Romans; it was not until the Augustan era that a clear distinction became

apparent. The East was simply the East, and was treated with awe and wonder as if it was

straight out of the epic myths of their ancestors. Yet as the Romans grew their empire and

moved ever further eastward, that awe and wonder began to wear off as the Romans came into

contact with the various eastern peoples who were viewed as barbarians, lesser than Rome,

and as tools rather than equals. The Romans slowly turned the East towards Rome: colonizing,

conquering, trading, waging war, and making alliances.

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As the territorial expansion of Rome increased greatly during the late Republic, “The

eastern wing of the Roman eagle… reached but failed to cover Parthia… an opponent who could

be considered a match” (Hitti 152). During arbitration with the Armenians and Cappadocians on

the Parthian border in the mid-90s B.C., the General Sulla became the first Roman to sit down

formally with the Parthians, even though the empires had informally met on their peripheries

through allies and traders. At this point, both empires had minimal interactions and knowledge

of each other, yet eventually came to blows, warring over Syria and Mesopotamia incessantly.

(Duncan 175). In their first meeting, Sulla treated the Parthians as lesser than Rome like any

other eastern kingdom, he “gave the Parthians a taste of Roman manners. He laid out the

chairs with himself in the middle facing the other two, making Parthia the equal not of Rome

but Cappadocia” (Duncan 175). As Sulla's behavior in this meeting demonstrated, Rome’s

opinion of Parthia starts with disdain and a failure to recognize the difference between Parthia

and the other petty kingdoms of the East. This was miscalculation on the part of the Romans, as

the Parthians would become one of their main adversaries over the proceeding centuries.

After this first meeting with the Parthian Empire, the majority of Roman contact with

the Empire was fighting until there was a brief respite under Caesar Augustus, and then a return

to fighting off and on until Parthia’s collapse. During this period, the Romans adopted most

Greek attitudes and opinions towards the East. “The line separating the Orient and the West

was clearly demarcated by the Greeks; Aryan Persia was relegated by them to the East” which

created a preconceived Greco-Roman notion of the East, making it harder to understand the

opinions of the Romans towards the Parthians (Isaac 20). There is also “little found in ancient

literature on the Roman attitude towards the Parthians and Persians,” compounding the
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problem that Roman opinions were colored by the Greek views of the East (Isaac 20). It as if

history was being “seen through the other end of the telescope,” forcing an analysis of Roman

opinions of Parthia to be interpreted “in the light of available information on the actual course

of events” (Isaac 21).

Throughout the rest of the Republican period, there were no major attacks on Roman

territory by the Parthians, only the occasional raid intended to remind the Romans of Parthian

strength and to seize materials. The Romans responded to these raids with expeditions which

would become a major point of contention during the Augustan era, as he reclaimed the lost

eagles of the failed Parthian campaigns. The Roman campaigns were advertised as punitive

actions against the Parthians but, in reality, were intended to expand the borders of Rome and

win its leaders wealth and glory. “Hence the relationship between Rome and Iran was a

continuous struggle for control of the left bank of the Euphrates” as the Romans sought to

expand and conquer, and the Parthians sought to repulse their advances (Isaac 28). This

defined the two nations’ opinions of each other as adversarial in nature, since neither could

fully attain their goals. The first major Roman loss against the Parthians occurred at Carrhae in

53 B.C., where the legions under Marcus Licinius Crassus were utterly defeated and the army

was killed or captured. After two more failed campaigns in 40 and 36 B.C. cemented them as a

tenacious enemy in the eyes of the Romans, the “cries for revenge against the Parthians grew

increasingly louder in the works of Roman authors,” yet during this time, there was a distinctive

shift in Roman opinions of them (Rose 22). They were begrudgingly seen as military equals and

“presented as contributors to peace rather than opponents;” they also became associated with

the ancient Trojans, from whom Rome was descended (Rose 21).
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This change in opinions of the Parthians–from raiding and war-loving barbarians to a

barbaric civilization which had Rome’s respect–came during the early reign of Caesar Augustus.

Faced with the fact that the Parthians were a match for Rome at the time, Augustus took a

more diplomatic approach to help soften relations between the two empires. This can be

visually seen in contemporary art which shows the Parthians as humbled and lesser than Rome,

but not in chains and defeated as per the usual style of barbarians as subjugated by Rome;

“fleeing the Roman army, in the process of dying, or chained to a trophy” (Rose 33). This

distinction is directly seen on the Parthian Arch which was dedicated after Augustus’ treaties

with Parthia, where “the earlier iconography of the vanquished foe has been altered in favor of

a more positive portrayal… Although the Parthians’ lower position and small size vis-à-vis

Augustus would have made their subordinate status clear, there is nothing inherently negative

about their imagery” (Rose 33). Parthia remained an enemy, but not a subject, to some extent

equal with the power of Rome. The change immediately followed Augustus reclamation of the

lost Eagles in 19 B.C. and nearly all the Roman prisoners of the failed campaigns in Parthia,

which he was able to do purely through diplomacy. He succeeded in largely cooling relations

with a hated enemy, as he was able to declare victory over the Parthians without actually

fighting. This “announced that foreigners had entered a hierarchical but benevolent

relationship with Rome” where Rome could have an adversary worthy of respect (Rose 36). The

subjugated style of enemies in Roman art “implied potential future resistance to Roman rule;

the new conception suggested, in effect, that the East had finally been domesticated” (Rose

36). Augustus sought to engineer this new opinion of Parthia as he worked to consolidate the

new Roman Empire and eliminate potential external threats. By acting in a diplomatic and
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conciliatory manner towards the Parthians, he was able to temporarily pacify one of the largest

threats to the empire. Even with all of his efforts and successes in this, in the border provinces

“the closer proximity of the enemy…spurred a consistently stronger proclamation of Roman

domination in triumphal commemoration, and foreigners continued to be shown bound and

shackled to the trunks of trophies” (Rose 54).

Alongside Caesar Augustus’s concerted effort to change opinions of the Parthians,

Roman reconnection with their mythological Eastern roots, through the Trojan hero Aeneas,

caused a slow change in opinion. Aeneas’ Trojan origins in coastal Anatolia inspired a "manifest

destiny" approach to Roman conquests of the East as they felt that they were returning to an

ancestral and mythological land, and that descent from Aeneas, gave them a claim to the lands

of the East. Augustus’s diplomatic victory and return to Rome “coincided with the publication of

the Aeneid, which diagrammed the origins of Rome in the East, the rise of a new Troy in the

West…The message conveyed by all of this activity was that Rome’s destiny involved

domination of the East, from which it had originally come” (Rose 23). This approach to the East

and Parthia itself conveyed a change in Roman attitudes and opinions: while they did seek

eventual conquest of the land that they saw was rightfully theirs, they also sought to preserve it

and maintain peace in the region.

The portrayal of the Trojans in the same costume of the Parthians in contemporary

Roman art also changed how the Romans saw the Parthians, as “the status inherent in Eastern

costume could be either high or low, since it signified the Trojan foundations of Rome as well as

its fiercest foe, the Parthians” (Rose 21). Before this point in Roman history, there had been no

need to depict the Parthians in art as contact had been minimal or ended in Roman defeat, but
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now Roman artists created new depictions of the Parthians along the lines of other Eastern

cultures. They almost specifically conflated the iconography of Trojans and Parthians, depicting

both as bearded men, “wearing trousers and, occasionally, a Phrygian cap;” one of the only

signifiers of difference was that “Parthians were consistently associated with archery in Roman

art and literature” (Rose 23, 33). This allowed the Romans both to gain a claim over the

Parthians and connect them culturally with Rome. As they could not beat the Parthians

outright, they needed to subsume them into their culture and Romanize them so they could

eventually be brought into the Empire. The fact that “Eastern costume- headgear, tunic, and

pants- had a predominately positive value within the city of Rome, in that it was used primarily

for images of the Trojans” shows the subtle ways that the Romans were fashioning the East for

their own purposes (Rose 34). The use of the Parthian-Trojan style costume on the Parthian

Arch, “one of the first instances in the commemorative monuments of Rome in which Eastern

costume was associated with an enemy” further bound the two adversaries together in the

eyes of the Roman public (Rose 34). The East, specifically Parthia, took on a new meaning as

exotic yet connected to Rome through its ancestry, and the outfit, while Parthian, came to

denote Trojan origin. This distinction is necessary, as the same outfit is used for both enemies

and ancestors, but provided a reference point for Roman attitudes and opinions of the

Parthians. Yet even with the efforts of Augustus in the early Empire, the East remained an

amorphous place to the Roman public.

Moving northwest from the Parthian Empire, another part of the Near East sitting at the

border of Europe engrossed the Romans for centuries: the Black Sea. This region of the Near

East was home to a variety of peoples and cultures, all deemed barbarians by the Romans: the
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Getic and Dacian peoples in what is now Bulgaria and Romania, and the Scythian peoples in the

Ukraine and parts of the Caucasus, and the Greco-Persian Pontic Kingdom ruling territories in

Anatolia and the eastern Black Sea. Although Pontus proved to be a tenacious enemy during

Late Republic, all of these peoples eventually fell to the Rome’s expansion further into the Black

Sea. These peoples were viewed as barbarians by the Romans regardless of culture, starting

during the Late Republic continuing into the Imperial period with conquest of the region.

In 85 B.C. the Roman general Sulla and the King of Pontus, Mithridates, sat down on an

island in the Aegean to discuss peace terms after a long war. “The meeting began with battle of

wills over who would speak first. Sulla finally broke the silence to say, ‘It is the part of the

supplicants to speak first, while the victors need only be silent’” (Duncan 219). This statement

encapsulates much of the Roman opinion towards the Black Sea region: they knew they would

eventually win and take the territory from the native peoples and so need not discuss that fact

with them, only the terms of their surrender. The Romans maintained this air of superiority

throughout their interactions with the people surrounding the Black Sea. While in exile in the

Greco-Roman colony in the city of Tomis, on the Moesian coast, the poet Ovid writes “here

among inhumanely grunted place-names are (would you believe?) Greek cities,” thumbing his

nose at the supposedly Greek Dacians of the colony (Ovid/Slavitt 59). He further declares that

even Rome cannot tame the land around the Black Sea, describing Tomis as “civilization’s last

outpost’s suburb, where even Rome’s might gives way to barbarism and empty space”

(Ovid/Slavitt 180). In Ovid’s eyes, the Black Sea is simply too barbaric to be Romanized–even if

Rome physically conquers the territory, it will still be inhabited by barbarian savages.
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The prevailing Roman opinion of the Black Sea was that the inhabitants of the region

were simply barbarians, not even as civilized as the Parthians. Ovid elaborates further in his

writings from exile, saying “Around me cruel Sauromatians vie with Bessi and Getae: the three

tribes that have to share the woeful distinction of being the worst on earth” (Slavitt 60). He

describes the Scythians, who would raid the region around Tomis, as

“The predatory tribes from the northern wastes, scarecrows on gaunt horses who cross
the empty landscape with empty bellies and quivers full, and their eyes full of envy and
hate. Careless of their own worthless lives… pitiless, savage, more like beasts than men,
and awesome fighters” (Ovid/Slavitt 61).
To the Romans, the barbarians of the Black Sea were savage, murderous raiders, akin to beasts

rather than men, not fit to be civilized, only conquered. Ovid matches the people of the Black

Sea, with the local landscape, painting them “As rugged and coarse as their physical

environment, the Getae are said to be crudi, duri, feri, and saevi. Their crude appearance

further corresponds to their crudeness of character” (Williams 16).

The Roman understanding of the environment of the lands around the Black Sea which

was portrayed as a “uniformly frozen desert” further contributed to their opinion of its peoples

as barbarians (Williams 10). This portrayal provided “the model for Ovid’s depiction of Pontus…

despite Ovid’s insistence that his narrative is based on personal observation” (Williams 10).

Even though Ovid lived in Moesia on the border of Scythia during his exile, he did not travel far,

instead he conflated the geography of the entire Black Sea with his experiences in Tomis and

based further descriptions of the region on the writings of other Roman authors. Ovid's

descriptions of the Black Sea region depict it “as if it were the underworld,” where cold death

reigned, and violence prevailed, and the people of this region were similarly thought of as

violent barbarians who acted on their primal impulses (Williams 12).

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Although the Romans had many preconceived notions about the Black Sea peoples, the

actions of these various tribes and kingdoms did nothing to engender the positive opinion of

the Roman people. In reference to frequent Scythian and Getic attacks on Tomis, Ovid writes

“There’s nothing at all amusing about those enemy raids. They gallop back and forth along the

walls inside which we crouch for cover and cower… outside the walls… One’s throat is cut or

one is shackled and led away as a captive” (Slavitt 72). Raiding and war were regular

occurrences in this region, inhabited by nomadic tribes which needed to plunder to survive.

This made a poor impression on the Romans, who viewed this practice as barbaric and

uncivilized: raids for the sake of raiding did not fit into the Roman mindset as raiding should be

done in order to weaken an enemy for conquest. Ovid further describes the peoples of the area

surrounding Tomis, saying the “black-hearted savage tribes… who live here have no idea of

civilization, but love cruelty, violence, gore” (Slavitt 80). Raiding and war have a place in the

Roman idea of civilization but are not seen as the sole focus of a society, as both war and peace

are needed for civilization to thrive. Since the Black Sea peoples were believed to focus

exclusively on violent pursuits, the Romans held a low view of them as they “think it unmanly to

support themselves by working, preferring to raid and plunder” (Ovid/Slavitt 109).

Consistent violent actions, such as those committed against the Romans and their allies,

soured the Black Sea region for the Romans. The epitome of this perceived savagery of the

Black Sea region came with the massacre of thousands of Romans in Anatolia by the kingdom of

Pontus in 88 B.C. The Pontic Black Sea kingdom had been fighting a proxy war with the allies of

Rome in the region which spilled over into the Roman province of Asia in Anatolia, causing a

direct confrontation with Rome. The armies of Pontus crushed the resistance of Rome and her
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allies in Anatolia, due to internal strife in the Late Republic, and the Pontic king, Mithridates VI,

occupied the entire province. This region was populated by a variety of Greeks, Persians, and

Romans, who were not highly fond of the Black Sea empire, yet the Greek and Persian elements

had not been keen on Roman control either. In order to solidify his control and “be united in

opposition to Rome, the Pontic king ordered a blood pact” that the cities in Asia “apprehend

and murder every Italian in their jurisdiction --- including women and children” (Duncan 202).

After the slaughter was finished; “the dead numbered as many as eighty thousand people”

(Duncan 202). This calculated act of murder and genocide bound the Anatolian Black Sea region

together against Rome, but incensed the fury of Rome against the Pontic East, creating a

distinct anti-Eastern sentiment among the Roman population, who demanded vengeance. The

Romans fought back, destroying the power of the upstart Pontic Kingdom and exacting revenge

for massacre of Roman citizens. Once the legions entered Anatolia, they went “on a campaign

of punitive plundering…meant to punish the Asian cities for turning against Rome” (Duncan

218). This fueled further hatred of the Black Sea region as a whole, as the Eastern Greeks and

the peoples of the region were complicit in the murder of Italians. When a peace with relatively

lenient terms was brokered by Sulla, the Roman population and Roman soldiers in Anatolia

were enraged, as they saw nothing less than total destruction as the proper punishment for the

crimes of Mithridates. The actions of Pontus illustrate why the Romans held a low view of the

Black Sea region. To the Romans, the massacres and the subsequent war solidified the opinion

that “the sinister bank of the Black Sea” was a place of “stupid semihumans” full of savagery,

violence, and death (Ovid/Slavitt 109, 110).

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While the Romans characterize the Parthians and the Black Sea region rather differently,

both regions remained part of the amorphous East in the Roman psyche. These two regions of

the Near East were home to distinctly different cultures and peoples, yet were viewed in a

similar fashion by the Roman public. In true Roman fashion, the Romans thought themselves to

be superior to all those they came across and the only truly civilized nation. Ovid paints this

theme vividly throughout his writings from exile, lamenting the absence of civilization on the

barbarian frontier. The Romans viewed both Parthia and the Black Sea with disdain and

contempt, as regions merely to be conquered and ruled by Rome; nevertheless, there are

important distinctions between the Roman view of these two areas. Over time, the Romans

came to view the Parthians with a begrudging respect, as they were a near-equal to the legions

in the field, withstanding Roman incursion. This adversarial respect shaped how the Parthians

were seen by the wider Roman population: although they were enemies, they were worthy

enemies. The peoples of the Black Sea, on the other hand, were not. The various tribes, nations,

and kingdoms which inhabited the region around the Black Sea were treated with contempt by

the Romans, viewed as complete barbarians with no redeeming qualities, who only lived to spill

the blood of others. Ovid states the Roman opinion perfectly with the line “Death in silly

costumes and funny hats, teasing and jeering” (Slavitt 84). The major differences in the Roman

experience of these two regions are essential to understanding how Roman opinions diverged

in the Late Republican and Early Imperial eras. Parthia became a place which was viewed in a

semi-favorable manner due to a mutual respect, while the Black Sea was viewed with

contempt, fear, and anger. While these two regions remained part of the larger Near East, each

was distinctive in the opinions of Rome during the Late Republic and Early Empire.
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Works Cited

Duncan, Mike. The Storm Before the Storm- The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic.

New York City: Hachette Book Group, 2017. Book.

Hitti, Philip K. The Near East in History. Princeton: D. Van Nostrand Company, Inc. , 1961. Book.

Isaac, Benjamin. The Limits of Empire- The Roman Army in the East. New York City: Oford

University Press Inc. and Clarendon Press, 1990. Book.

Publius Ovidius Naso, Translated by David R. Slavitt. Ovid's Poetry of Exile. Baltimore: The John

Hopkins University Press, 1990. Book.

Rose, Charles Brian. "The Parthians in Augustan Rome." American Journal of Archaeology

(2005): 21-75. Article.

Williams, Gareth D. Banished Voices. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Book.