EARLY FOREIGN RELATIONS
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overplayed his hand and treated Orobazus with some arrogance; nevertheless a treaty seems to have been concluded, or at any rate some understanding was reached.[1] Orobazus was later executed because he had meekly submitted to the treatment accorded him by Sulla and had thus failed to uphold the dignity of Parthia.[2] This diplomatic blunder on the part of Sulla must have drawn the three great proponents of oriental imperialism closer together than ever before. Mithradates of Parthia took to wife Aryazate,[3] surnamed Automa, the daughter of the Great King
- ↑ Livy Epit. c refers to the treaty with Lucullus; but Ruf. Fest. 15' Florus i. 46. 4, and Orosius vi. 13. 2, all following Livy, seem to indicate some agreement with Sulla. Cf. Dobiáš, op. cit., pp. 219 f.
- ↑ Plut. Sulla 5.
- ↑ Our source, Avroman parchment I, is dated 225 of an unspecified era which, following the arguments of E. H. Minns, "Parchments of the Parthian Period from Avroman in Kurdistan," JHS, XXXV (1915), 22–65, I take to be the Seleucid, making the date 87 b.c. If it were the Arsacid era, the date would be 23 b.c. The question cannot yet be settled with certainty; but the Avroman parchments show undoubted relationships to contemporary Babylonian business documents, which in every known case where single dating is found employ the Seleucid, not the Arsacid, era. The year 87, not 23, is the time when a Parthian king would boastfully place his Armenian wife between his two sister-wives in his titulary. Tigranes II, who cannot have come to the throne much before 20 b.c., likewise bore, however, according to his coins, the title "great king"; see E. T. Newell, Some Unpublished Coins of Eastern Dynasts ("Numismatic Notes and Monographs," No. 30 [New York, 1926]), p. 13. On the arguments for the Arsacid era see Rostovtzeff and Welles, "A Parchment Contract Loan," Yale Classical Studies, II (1931), 41 f. Other articles on the Avroman documents are: Ludwig Mitteis, "Miszellen," Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte, Romanistische Abteilung, XXXVI (1915), 425–29; A. Cowley, "The Pahlavi Document from Avroman," JRAS, 1919, pp. 147–54; P. M. Meyer, Juristische
