The Battle of Carrhae

Podcast Transcript

In the year 53 BC, Rome suffered one of the greatest military defeats in its history. A Roman army led by Marcus Lucinius Crassus was led into the desert in present-day Southern Turkey and was systematically destroyed by an army from the Parthian Empire.

The defeat itself didn’t radically weaken Rome, but the death of Crassus led to a chain of events that would result in the end of the Roman Republic.

It was also the opening salvo in a centuries-long rivalry between Rome and Parthia that would never be definitively resolved.

Learn more about the Battle of Carrhae and the role it played in the destruction of the Roman Republic on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

In a previous episode, I provided a list of what I thought were the most important battles in history. These were battles such as Yorktown, Yarmouk, Gaugamela, Tours, and Cajamarca where the outcome of the battle had civilizational level implications.

The winners of those battles became ascendant, and the battles were major inflection points in world history.

The Battle of Carrhae was not such a battle. While Rome did suffer a humiliating defeat, the battle didn’t result in the Parthians conquering Rome.

The reason why the Battle of Carrhae is of interest is due to the defeat itself, which was an embarrassing disaster for Rome, and because of the chain of events it put in play which eventually did result in the end of the Republic and the birth of the Roman Empire.

There are two threads of this story that we need the background for before we can tie them together.

The first thread is that of Parthia.

Parthia was the successor state to the Seleucid Empire. which in turn arose from the Macedonian conquest of the Achaemenid Empire. I covered the various Persian Empires that succeded each other in a previous episode.

The Parthian Empire emerged in the mid-3rd century BC, eventually becoming a significant power in the Near East. Rome, after consolidating its power in the Mediterranean, encountered Parthia during its eastern expansions.

By the 1st century BC, Rome had completed their conquest of much of the Middle East on the coast of the Mediterranean, culminating with the capture of Jerusalem in 63 BC.

While Rome had known about the Parthian for about two centuries, it wasn’t until this point that Roman conquests brought the borders of the Roman Republic up to the borders of the Parthian Empire.

Early relations between Parthia and Rome were a mixed bag. Alliances were proposed but fell apart. Around 66 BC, the two realms participated in a joint invasion of Armenia and later argued about their border in the Levant.

The important thing to know is that both Rome and Parthia were expanding towards each other but by 60 BC there hadn’t been any major hostilities between the two countries.

The second thread of this story begins in Rome and centers on the main protagonist of the story, Marcus Licinius Crassus.

If the name Crassus sounds familiar, it is because it has been mentioned in several previous episodes. Crassus was arguably the richest man in the late Roman Republic.

Crassus amassed his fortune through real estate speculation, slave trading, and exploiting the proscriptions from the dictator Sulla.

Crassus used his wealth to gain influence in Rome. It was common at the time for wealthy men to serve as patrons for their clients. They would fund their campaigns for office and pay their debts, and in exchange, they would use their position to enact laws favorable to their sponsors or to provide other favors.

Given his extreme wealth, this made Crassus very powerful.

However, wealth wasn’t everything in Rome. The late republic was a period when great ambition was encouraged amongst the Roman elite. The two things that every upper-class Roman man of this period sought were the twin concepts of Auctoritas and Dignitas.

Dignitas is a hard-to-define concept because it doesn’t translate directly into English, but it is a combination of respect, prestige, and reputation.

One of the most important ways a Roman could accrue Auctoritas and Dignitas was through military glory. As I covered in a previous episode, Crassus’s chief rival was Pompey Magnus, who earned his fame through a series of military victories.

In the year 73 BC, Crassus had an opportunity to achieve military glory. A gladiator named Spartacus led a massive slave uprising and Crassius led an army to put down the revolt.

The problem was even if he was successful and saved Rome, it wouldn’t be considered a great victory because he just beat a bunch of slaves.

Even worse, when the uprising was finally defeated, his rival Pompey showed up to take much of the glory.

After the war, in the year 70 BC, Crassus and Pompey served together as consul, and the two did not get along.

Eventually, in the year 59 BC, one of Crassus’s clients, Julius Caesar, brought Crassus and Pompey together. He proposed that the two put aside their differences and that the three of them rule Rome together.

We call this the First Triumvirate and it was a wholly unofficial and extra-legal arrangement. However, at least from the perspective of the three men involved, it worked extremely well.

They could all get the laws they wanted passed and control the Roman government.

In 59 BC, Caesar became consul and, after his year in office, was appointed proconsul of Gaul. While in Gaul, he won many military victories, expanded Roman territory, and, in the process, became extremely wealthy and incredibly popular.

Caesar’s success as the junior member of the partnership left Crassus with arguably the least amount of Dignitas of the three, having never had any battlefield success.

Crassus knew that if he wanted to truly have the respect of Rome, he needed military glory. His opportunity arrived in the year 53 BC when Caesar’s proconsulship of Gaul was extended by five years, and as part of the deal, Crassus became proconsul of Syria. He was 62 years old, a very advanced age for Ancient Rome.

Syria was one of the richest provinces in Rome, and Crassus wanted the appointment because it was the perfect launching point for an invasion of Parthia.

Parthia not only offered the potential for territorial conquest and military glory but also wealth. The time also seemed to be favorable as the Parthian leadership was in flux.

In 57 BC, King Phraates III was killed by his two sons, Orodes II and Mithridates IV. They then fought for the throne between themselves, with Orodes emerging victorious.

Crassus’s predecessor in Syria attempted to align Rome with Mithridates to put him on the throne as a puppet ruler, but the effort was abandoned. Mithridates tried to invade Mesopotamia on his own but was thwarted by a Parthian commander by the name of Surena.

Crassus assembled an army of approximately 43,000 men, including 35,000 heavy infantry, 4,000 cavalry, and 4,000 light infantry.

The plan was to advance into the heart of Parthia.

Historians have debated how well-prepared and equipped the army of Crassus was. On the one hand, all Roman legions were usually well-trained. On the other hand, they were not prepared for the harsh desert climate they would be going into, and they weren’t accustomed to fighting light cavalry in the form of mounted archers, which made up the majority of the Parthian army.

Perhaps the biggest mistake that Crassus made was that he just assumed that the conquest would be easy. Part of his arrogance was rejecting the offer of 40,000 troops and a route into Parthia that avoided the desert by the Armenian King Artavasdes.

Crassus marched his legions right into the desert, a place where Romans weren’t accustomed to fighting and a place where they weren’t logistically prepared to enter.

The Parthian commander Surena heard of the Romans’ entering Parthia, and he went to confront them with his army of approximately 10,000, mostly cavalry.

Surena didn’t engage the Romans immediately. He kept retreating, lengthening Roman supply lines, and getting the Romans into position on the plans outside the town of Carrhae.

On the day the battle took place, the Romans went into battle immediately rather than setting up camp and resting. The Parthians did what they could to intimidate the Romans by banging drums and hiding their armor under cloth.

Crassus set up his men in a hollow square formation, which was unusual for the Romans. It greatly decreased their mobility.

This was the first time that the Romans fought the Parthians in a major battle. The Romans were not accustomed to the Parthian style of fighting, which was almost entirely with cavalry.

The Parthian light cavalry would advance and then feign retreat, tricking the Romans into pursuing the false retreat. As the Parthians feigned retreat, they would shoot their bow backward in what became known as the Parthian shot.

The immobile Roman infantry couldn’t fight back against the Parthian mounted archers, and the Roman cavalry was no match for the Parthians.

Eventually, the Parthian cataphracts, their heavy cavalry, attacked and broke the Roman lines, causing the Roman positions to fall apart. Crassus’s son was killed in an attempted counterattack, which only demoralized the Romans even further.

The Romans had never seen anything like this before. The Parthians were mowing them down, yet the Romans could barely touch them.

This went on all day, and eventually, Crassus ordered a general retreat to Carrhae. Crassus had proven himself to be a terrible field commander.

The next morning Surena offered a parlay with Crassus and offered to allow the surviving Romans to leave on the condition that they give up all lands east of the Euphrates.

Crassus initially refused to meet, but his troops threatened to mutiny if he didn’t. He went to the meeting where he and all of his officers were killed.

The Parthians had minimal casualties. The Romans suffered 20,000 dead, 10,000 captures, and another 10,000 managed to flee.

It was one of Rome’s worst defeats at the time, perhaps second only to the Battle of Canne in the Second Punic War.

It wasn’t just the loss of soldiers. The Parthians captured several Legionary Eagles, which were the golden standards that each legion carried into battle. Losing them was considered one of the greatest dishonors possible.

The biggest fallout from the battle was Crassus’s death. With Crassus gone, the Triumvirate fell apart. Without its third member, no one could be checked by the other two.

Caesar and Pompey eventually began to feud, which resulted in a civil war, which resulted in Pompey’s death and Caesar’s establishment as dictator for life, which was the effectual end of the Republic.

If Crassus had never gone to war, he might have survived long enough to have intervened in the attempts to bring Caesar to trial, which was the cause of the Civil War. Without the civil war, the Republic would have survived in some form, and the Roman Empire would never have arisen.

The Battle of Carrhae also began centuries of conflict between Rome and Parthia.

Before Caesar was assassinated, he was preparing to go to Parthia to restore Roman honor and retrieve the lost legionary standards.

While that never happened, Parthia remained the foil to Rome for years. Rome was never able to decisively defeat them, and the Parthian Empire served as the limit of Roman influence in the east.

In a generation after Carrhae, Parthia tried unsuccessfully to invade Rome in 40 BC, and Mark Antony tried unsuccessfully to invade Parthia in 36 BC.

Before I end, I should address one legend about this battle. Later on, a story began to spread that Crassus had been captured. Mocking his greed and his thirst for wealth, the Parthians supposedly executed him by pouring molten gold down his throat.

There is no record of this in any of the recorded histories of the battle, and it appears to have been made up well after the battle took place.

That being said, the story was the basis for the death of Viserys Targaryen in season one of Game of Thrones.

The Battle of Carrhae was a major humiliating defeat for the Romans. They had never experienced a fighting force like the Parthians, who extensively used mounted archers. The battle was foreshadowing what other European armies would experience at the hands of the Mongols over twelve centuries later.

Most importantly, it began a series of events that changed the history of Rome and, as a result, the entire Western world.