difficult position. To obtain food he had to send out foraging parties, which, if they were small, were wiped out or, if large enough to defend themselves, so reduced the strength of the besiegers that the people of Praaspa could make successful sorties and destroy the siege works. The legionaries, though protected by slingers, suffered much from the Parthian archers and their run-and-fight cavalry tactics. As Dellius, probably an eyewitness, remarked in his account of a skirmish engaged in by a large foraging party in which the Parthian dead totaled eighty, the Romans thought it a terrible thing that, when they were victorious, they killed so few of the enemy and, when they were vanquished, they were robbed of as many men as they had lost with the baggage wagons.[1] Shortly after this particular party returned, the people of the city made a sally and put to flight the Romans on the mound. To punish the cowardice of these men Antony was reduced to decimation; that is, he put to death every tenth man. To the remainder he gave barley instead of the usual wheat.[2] Since neither side wished to prolong the campaign into the approaching winter, Antony made a last, unsuccessful attempt to
- ↑ Plut. Antony 39.
- ↑ Ibid.; Frontinus Strat. iv. 1. 37. Though Dio Cass. xlix. 27 says that all the army was given barley, the substitution of barley for wheat is ordinarily part of the punishment; cf. Octavian in the Dalmatian War, Suet. Augustus 24; Dio Cass. xlix. 38. 4; H. M. D. Parker, The Roman Legions (Oxford, 1928), pp. 232–34 (a work almost valueless for the eastern campaigns).
