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Jake Nabel, "The Arsacids of Rome: Misunderstanding in Roman-Parthian Relations" (U California Press, 2025)
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Jake Nabel
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Mike Motilla
welcome to the new Books Network. Hello and welcome to New Books in Late Antiquity presented by Ancient Jupe Review. I'm Mike Motilla. Today we're talking with Jake Nabel about the arsacids of misunderstanding in Roman Parthian relations. Let me start with two tangential stories. The first starts in the early 5th century. Theodosius I's daughter Gallicly was taken hostage by the Goths. She was in Rome during the sack in 410 and she was held by the leader Alaric and his successor until 414 when was married to Alaric's successor Atholf. About a year into the marriage, a different Goth assassinated Atholf. And shortly after, when the Goths were running out of food, they came back to Honorius, who's Gallipolicidius brother, and he's now the emperor. And part of their agreement to kind of help the Goths out involved giving back Galla. She was what we would think of as a hostage. There weren't dungeons, but she was clearly there against her will and against her family's will. A second story starts in 461 in what's now Hungary. And by then, Theodoric, he's this young child of a eastern Gothic nobleman named Theodormir, had survived a lot of battles against the Huns and some other non Roman groups who were kind of competing for territory after the collapse of the Hunnic dynasty. And eventually the Romans came to the Ostrogoths defense and they helped them survive those attacks and in exchange. But part of what the Ostrogoths had to do was to provide a hostage. And Theodoric, the son of that king, was that hostage. He was taken to Constantinople. He was given as good an education as one could get in the fifth century. And it was, I don't know, it was more like a forced study abroad program. It was a little bit of propaganda, like, you know, look how great we are, kid. And a little bit of control of like, remember, no matter how well we treat you, all of this power can come down against you. After about a decade in Constantinople, the Romans returned Theodoric and he became, well, he became like Theodoric the Great. He defended and he defeated other Gothic groups. He came to rule much of Italy. He rebuilt part of the Coliseum. The guy was, you know, as Roman as anyone could be because he spent the formative years of his life at the highest levels of the empire. What it means to hold a hostage in Rome could vary really widely. And while those two stories about are about Goths and Romans, the more common hostage taking was between Persians and Romans. And it didn't start in the 5th century. Rome and Persia were the two eyes of the earth, as one person put it. And they were the great superpowers of their day all the way until what James Howard Johnson called the last great war of antiquity. In the seventh century, Romans and Persian leaders, they were sending each other's children to each other's courts. Where the kids would be raised under, I don't know, different degrees of captivity. They were leverage, yes, I'm sure the kids would have liked to be home. But this was also a way that Romans and Persians learned what each other were really like. You know, some scholars even credit Gallipocidia with, with bringing Roman law to Gothic groups. They could influence each other while also learning about each other. Jake Nabel goes back to some early practices of hostage taking. And by now I hope it's clear that the word hostage probably isn't the right word. Not if we're picturing blindfolds and torture. And he shows us how this practice reveals what we might think of as a strategic misunderstanding or a kind of useful lie about what leaders did when they sent their children to their rivals courts. The Romans saw themselves as having a hostage or a bargaining chip, but the Persians or the Parthians, they often saw themselves as forcing an inferior to raise their child for them. So remember, you know, most enslaved work at this time was care work. Or there's this story of Syriac Christians from, from this period around the 6th century that mentions this kind of big shot in the Sasanian Empire who's entrusting his son to these captive Christians. And it's not like any of these Christians were thinking like, ha, we got a hostage, now we, we have something to, to bargain against. The, the, the big shot? No, it's like exactly the opposite. It's like, what else could we do in this situation but raise this guy's child? If we don't, he and his people are going to come get us. It was easy for Persians to think that they were, if not the enslavers, then at least they were the patrons in that patron client relationship between the Persians and the Romans. Nabal calls this a pragmatic misunderstanding where both sides could believe that they were dominating or at least benefiting from the other and believing that believing that they were benefiting was kind of pragmatic too. Like it was practical, it worked, they liked it better. These leaders, they did understand what the other groups thought and they didn't correct it. They kind of played with it. Maintaining a fiction was a way to maintain order. Now what's especially great about this book is that whereas most studies focus on the Roman sources, Nabal has gone into the Iranian and Armenian material too, to see how these Parthians understood the practices. And as well, there's a lot of philological rigor that goes into this and I'm grateful that he's doing it for us. You Know, part of the way these superpowers legitimated themselves is by fighting. And you know, Romans and Persians, they did lots of that. But part of the way they, they legitimate themselves too is by convincing themselves that they're winning. And for a lot of the time that Dr. Naples examines these hostages were a way that both groups saw themselves as in control. And that pragmatic misunderstanding is, it's also part of normalizing relationships. It's kind of foreign policy through strategic self deception. So we are lucky to have Jake Nabel with us today. Jake is the Tombros early career professor of Classical Studies and an assistant professor of Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies at Penn State. Jake, thank you for being here. Can you introduce yourself? Who are you and how'd you come to write this book?
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Jake Nabel
Sure. Thanks so much for having me, Mike. It's really a delight to be with you. So how I came to write the book and my sort of academic background, I would describe myself as a historian of ancient Rome and pre Islamic Iran in equal measure. I teach at Penn State, as you said, in the Department of Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies. That sounds like it should just be Greece and Rome, but it's not. It's Greece, it's Rome, it's North Africa, it's Pharaonic Egypt, it's the world of the Bible and New Testament, it's Mesopotamia, the Levant, and in my case, Iran as well. So our department really is dedicated to uniting these two sometimes distinct disciplines in one department. And I try to represent that priority in my research and in the book. Not least, I came to the topic as a PhD student in Classics at Cornell where I did my PhD and I was interested in ancient interstate relations. And I was, you know, sort of casting around, casting my glance around the Eastern Mediterranean for a place where I could contribute to the scholarly literature as you do when you're looking for a dissertation topic. And I noticed that a lot of Romans of the first century BCE and CE were looking at the Parthian Empire to their east and saying things like this is the one empire on earth which is sort of comparable to Rome in its size, in its power, in its territorial extent, in the number of peoples that it has under its imperial umbrella. And so I said, well, that seems like a sort of interstate relationship where there might be room to say something new. Began to read the history and found these members of the Parthian royal family, the Arsakid dynasty, who went to Rome to live in some cases for years, in some cases for decades, in some cases for their entire lives. And it was Pretty clear that if I was going to seriously write a book length study of them, that I would need to seriously consider how the Parthians understood these exchanges. Unfortunately, I was very poorly positioned to actually do that because I, you know, all my training was in Greek and Latin was in a classics department and I had no serious grounding in Iranian studies. So a lot of the struggle of writing first the dissertation and later the book was just trying to overcome the predominantly Roman sources, as we'll talk about. The Roman sources, especially historiographical texts, are most of the direct evidence for these figures. But in order to figure out how the Parthians saw them, I had to go further afield and gain a much deeper understanding of Iranian languages, history, culture and so on. It took a long time, but I hope I got there in the end and the book hopefully is a result of that.
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Mike Motilla
Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. So, I mean, listeners are going to know what we mean by Rome and more or less the book starts in like the Republican period and it goes through the imperial period. So like 250 BCE to 250 CE, more or less. But can you tell us about the Arcassids in Parthia? Like they rule for like 500 years also. But it's, you know, it's possible to go through a classics program and not know much about them. So tell us about them. This is true.
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Jake Nabel
This is true, Yeah. I mean, they're the longest lasting dynasty in pre Islamic Iranian history, but it's pretty rare to come across an explicit mention of that fact. So, sure they are. The Arsakids is. That's the name of the royal family which rules the Parthian Empire. And the Parthian Empire is one of the, a series of empires in antiquity that centered on the Iranian plateau and then Mesopotamia as well. Those are its sort of core territories. The first one of these in this sequence is the Achaemenid Persian Empire, which is around from about 550 to 330 BCE. Their homeland, the homeland of the dynasty, the Achaemenids, that rules that empire is southwestern Iran, the region called Fars or Pars, which gives us Persians, the name of the ethnic group which was dominant in that empire. The Achaemenid Persian Empire, of course, best known among classicists for its two invasions of mainland Greece in the early 5th century BCE. In 330 or so, Alexander the Great sweeps that entire empire away in a very abrupt and fast campaign of conquest. He dies with no real clear succession plan and his generals immediately start to carve up his empire. The one who gets Iran. And Mesopotamia is named Saloikis, who founds the Saloikid dynasty. So they rule parts of Central Asia, Iran, Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, parts of Asia Minor as well. And in around 248 BCE, the Seleucid Empire has to contend with a local uprising in the region of Parthia. So this is the northeastern Iranian plateau, not the southwestern Iranian plateau. So the name of the ethnic group, although frankly we don't have a good understanding of what Parthian ethnicity entailed, but the name of the ethnic group is Parthian rather than Persian, northeastern Iran rather than southwestern Iran. Roughly speaking, Parthia is modern day Turkmenistan and northeastern Iran on the southeast side of the Caspian sea. So in 248, a local ruler named Arsakis, who's the namesake of the Arsakid dynasty, launches a rebellion against Seleucid rule. We don't actually know very much about him. He may have been a nomadic invader, someone who came from the central, from the Eurasian steppe and swooped down on the province of Parthia and took it over. He may have been a settled Parthian already. Our sources don't agree about this, and we'll probably never know. But what is clear is that he founds a dynasty which will then exert a continuous tradition of rule in Iran and Mesopotamia, parts of Central Asia, and eventually Armenia as well, until 224 CE. And the nature of this empire and the way that we slotted into our grand narratives about the past is very, is really contentious topic. One reason for that is it's very poorly attested. We don't have the same volume of textual sources that we do for the preceding Achaemenid Empire or for the Sasanian Empire that follows afterward. The other sort of riddle is that the Parthians are an Iranian speaking people. Parthian is a Middle Iranian language, and presumably they are using that as their mother tongue from the very beginning. But our earliest and best sources for the way that they styled themselves and the way that the dynasty projected an image of itself really is modeled on Hellenistic kingship. So their early coins are in Greek. They take up a lot of Seleucid numismatic conventions. They preside over very large Greek populations who are living in the polis in the Greek city states that have been founded in the Hellenistic east. Not so much on the Iranian plateau, although there is one Susa in southwestern Iran, which is being run as a Greek polis. The real heartland of Greek political life in the Parthian Empire is Mesopotamia, where you have very big, populous and successful Greek cities on the Tigris foremost among them, which are key centers of political life and which are part of the Parthian Empire until it's taken over by the Sasanians in 224. So whether and to what extent the Parthians are Iranians or Hellenistic kings or whatever, this is really a big point of contention and an open question. And since the empire just hasn't received that much scholarly attention, it's something we're probably going to continue debating for, for a long time. They're eventually taken over by the Sasanians, as I mentioned, in 224ce, and it's only at that point the Sasanians are the first dynasty who start to use the topo name Iran as a reference to the heartland of the empire that they rule. So an Iranian empire, in the strict sense, it's really only proper to talk about under the Sasanian dynasty. But the Parthians already exhibit a lot of the signs of Iranian ness which, which the Sasanians go on to develop. THEY SPEAK IN IRANIAN LANGUAGE they are adherents of some form of Zoroastrianism, which is the, the religion of Sasanian elites. Certainly not the same, the exact same form of the religion the Sasanians practice, but they seem to be worshiping the same set of core divinities which are part of that pantheon. And some of the aristocratic clans, the families which we know from pretty abundant textual evidence in the Sasanian period, were major power holders in late antiquity in Iran. They were already around in the Parthian period. The best known family in this regard is the Surin family. Very well connected, influential, held lots of offices under the Sasanian empire, but they begin under the Parthian Empire and they're best known for defeating the Romans at the Battle of Carrhi in 54 BCE. So I try to, you know, mount an argument in the book for situating the Parthians and the Arsakids in the sweep of Iranian history. But this is Iranian before we get firm textual attestations of, of that as a. As the core identity of an empire and its heartland in late antiquity.
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Mike Motilla
Yeah, that is a really, really helpful overview. Thank you. So the kind of. A lot of the evidence in the book is about hostages, but hostages is probably, like, not the right word here, like, none of the kids are going to get put to death, but, like, what should we be thinking when we hear this word hostage?
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Jake Nabel
It's a fantastic question, and let me start tackling it from the Roman point of view, where it's already complicated enough, but then we get to can't get to the other side. Of course, from the Roman point of view, I think a hostage is best thought of as notionally collateral for a treaty between two peoples. Obses is the Latin word for hostage, and it literally means, its etymology is sort of the one who sits around the one who remains, the one who stays, the one who stays seated at the, at the court of the other power while the rest of their kin go home in Roman imperialism. Hostage taking. And from the Roman side, we really only hear about hostage taking because Rome is such a successful empire and, you know, defeats a succession of Mediterranean peoples. The Romans really view hostage taking as a corollary of conquest. In theory, what hostages are doing is providing collateral for the agreement between the people who surrender them and then the Romans who keep them. But I say notional and theoretical because as you note, being put to death is a vanishingly rare fate for a hostage in the Roman period. Joel Allen, a scholar at cuny, I believe, wrote a great book about Roman hostage taking in 2006 and he surveys. There are literally hundreds of attested cases of hostage taking in the Roman world. Of those hundreds, we hear of five where bodily harm and or death was actually perpetrated on the, the body of the hostage. And even though some of them are set in the quasi mythical past, the days of the early republic or the regal period, so even those, it's really pretty unlikely and certainly debatable whether execution is ever carried out on a hostage. So if execution or punishment is notional rather than actual, what's the value for Rome? And I think the main answer there is it's a token of the submission of the people who gave up the hostage. It's something the Romans can point to and exhibit and flaunt in their city. Because the, the hostages live in the city of Rome. They sometimes have activities throughout Italy, but they are housed in the city of Rome itself. The Romans see this kind of foreign curiosity walking their streets. We know in some cases that triumphing generals exhibited hostages as part of their triumphal processions which they were awarded. And this was kind of one of the high points that a Roman political career could reach if you were granted a triumph. So it's really a sign, a symbol, a token of a foreign people's submission. And when they arrive in Rome, they are seen. The point is domestic audiences will look at them and will conclude, well, if this member, usually in most cases of a foreign dynasty, of a foreign ruling family, if they're here, this is a sign that Rome has mastered, subordinated, conquered the territory that surrendered them. And that's much of the time, not in the Parthian case, as we'll talk about, but much of the time that's a legitimate conclusion and not mistaken in the least. So from the Roman point of view, I think that's a thumbnail sketch. But as you note, these are prisoners in a gilded cage. They're not being kept in a dungeon being fed crusts of bread for sustenance. They are treated well. They are housed in many cases in a fashion that is befitting of their royal station. And yeah, birds in a gilded cage I think is a good way to think of them.
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Mike Motilla
Yeah. So that's the Roman point of view. What about the Parthian point of view?
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Jake Nabel
Sure. So the core argument of the book is that over the course of the first century BCE and ce, a handful, I mean, there are several repeated instances of the Arsakid, ruling king of kings, sending one or more of his family members. In most cases his sons, the women of the dynasty do go as well, and they go to live at the court of the Roman Emperor. We've moved out of the Republican period and this is really a Roman imperial phenomenon. And what the Roman, mostly historiographical sources that we have at our disposal, who are the main sources of evidence for these figures, what they say is they carry on in the Republican tradition and they say these are hostages, these are tokens of Parthian submission. In the same way that the Saloikid family sent us, members of its family, the Antigonids, lots of other ruling families in, you know, throughout the Republican period did this. This is an extension of that practice. These are obsides in Latin, homeroi in Greek, usually translated as hostages. But what I try to do in the book is to examine the evidence on the Parthian side, textual sources that were not composed in the Roman Empire, and ask what was the operative social institution on the Parthian side, You know, what category would the Arsakids have put these princes and in some cases princesses into? And my conclusion is that on the Iranian plateau, there is a long tradition of political fosterage. And fosterage, rather than hostageship, is my core frame of reference. On the Parthian side, fosterage simply means the rearing of a child by non natal parents, by parents that are not, biologically speaking, the parents of the child. It's a, a common practice in a variety of world cultures. Different cultures do it for different reasons and in different kinds of arrangements. But it's usually a sort of kinship creating or kinship adjacent institution that creates a parent like relationship between a foster family and their foster children. Moreover, the other important part of the argument is that on the Iranian plateau, fosterage was what anthropologists who study this practice across the globe and in different cultures and historical periods. But in pre Islamic Iran, fosterage seems to have been a predominantly clientele institution. And the distinction there is between clientele fosterage, where you have a superior, in this case the king of kings, the person at the very apex of Parthian society sending his children down the social ladder to social inferiors, and a subordinate family is the one that brings up those children. So that's a cliental fosterage arrangement. Superior children go down and they're raised by their social subordinates. The opposite of that is a patronal fosterage arrangement where political subordinates send their children, usually to the court of a king, or in Iran's case, it would be the king of kings, and the superior brings up the children of the subordinate. That's a patronal arrangement in pre Islamic Iran. I argue there's a very long and quite evident tradition in our sources of evidence at our disposal on the other side, which shows that the children of the king of kings are very commonly fostered out to subordinates, people who comprise important actors in the Parthian Empire and then later in the Sasanian Empire as well as, you know, these are important families, I say subordinates, but they were still aristocratic families and very influential in their own right. But still they are the subordinates, they are the retainers of the king of kings. And so what I argue is happening in the case of Arsakids going to Rome, is the Parthian king saying to himself, well, you know, the Roman emperor is bringing up my kids. That's a cliental obligation. Therefore Rome has accepted Parthian superiority. And then of course, meanwhile the Romans over on their side are saying, well, the Parthians are sending hostages to us, as we know from the Republic. That's a sign of their deference and subordination. So Parthia has accepted Roman superiority. And that's what I describe as pragmatic misunderstanding. Each side because they interpret these exchanges through different cultural institutions and social practices. Each side is convinced that the transfer of children from east to west means that they are superior to the other. And so the transaction satisfies the expectations of either side, not just despite, but precisely because they interpret it through different social practices.
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Mike Motilla
Yeah, that's, that's, that's great. And that, that's like a really great, just like overview of the big picture book too. Can I ask it a little differently if they were going to have this strategic misunderstanding, under what conditions are the Parthian kings sending their kids to Rome? If they can plausibly think that they were the winners here, under what conditions are they making these exchanges? It's not gonna be right after you lose a battle. Right. Can you give us an example of how this worked and how both sides would've seen it differently?
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Jake Nabel
Yes, absolutely. Let me give you a couple of examples. Definitely. I have to validate what you say. It doesn't happen after the Parthians lose a dramatic battle. There really are no such Parthian defeats in the first century ce. As long as this practice is going on, there's kind of a rough equilibrium between Rome and Parthia. But actually, if you take everything into account, Parthia actually gets the better of Rome more than the reverse happens. So let's take, for example, the first major transfer of arsacids from Rome to Parthia, which happens at some point between 19 and 10 BCE. We're not entirely sure of the exact date there. The best we can do is identify a kind of range. But, you know, what's going on in Roman Parthian relations to precipitate that transfer? Well, in 53 BCE, the Romans invade the Parthian Empire. But they are dealt one of the most dramatic defeats in all of Roman military history. The Battle of Carrhi in 53 BCE. And something like 10,000 Romans are taken prisoner. That the military standards fall into the hands of the enemy. It's a huge disgraceful event in Roman military history. Not long after that, the Parthians take advantage of Roman civil war and they launch a really massive invasion of the Roman Empire. They briefly take over Jerusalem. They're the masters of Judea for a while. A rogue Roman general who's. Who's an ally of them takes a huge swath of territory in Asia Minor. So for, you know, a good chunk of the late Republican period, Parthia has a really serious presence in Roman territory. The Romans eventually conquer it back, but certainly the sort of the Romans are on the back foot in that period. Mark Antony launches a kind of abortive and not successful invasion of Parthia. Not long after that, he's driven out. And then finally, in 19 BCE, Augustus does, not far. Excuse me, does not fight a war with the Parthians. What he does is he negotiates a treaty with them. He negotiates an agreement of some kind. And as part of these negotiations, he gets back military standards that the Romans have lost, and he gets back the. The POWs from the battle of Carrhi. He Tries as hard as he can to spin this as sort of a, a victory, an amazing coup for a Roman domestic audience. But if you look at the preceding decades of Roman Parthian relations, it was hard to avoid the conclusion that the Parthians have, have been more successful on the battlefield than the Romans have. Some years after that agreement was struck, the first set of major set of Arsacids arrives in Rome. So it is certainly not the case that the Parthians have had a crushing defeat inflicted on them and thus were forced to give up, you know, multiple members of their ruling family as a token of humiliating submission to Rome. What's happened instead is that the empires have finally reached a rough equilibrium along the Euphrates frontier. But after a few decades of Roman Parthian conflict, where the Parthians have given a lot better than they've gotten, they've been the victors more often than not, and they've staged a huge invasion of Roman territory. So in that case, it, it just isn't, I think, a viable reading to conclude that, yeah, these, these are conc. That are beaten out of the Parthians. The Parthians really undertake this on their own initiative and for their own reasons. The other, you know, banner example I would point to is from the other end of the Julio Claudian period. In the 50s BCE, Rome and Parthia start to fight a war over Armenia, which is a kind of bone of contention between Romans and Iranians for many hundreds of years thereafter. But they start to fight a war and then in the first year of the war, in 55 CE, another set of Arsakids go from Parthia to Rome. The war then drags on for almost another decade after that point. And it ultimately ends in, well, it's, it's not a knockout punch or anything, but it ends with the Arsakids supplying the king of Armenia, which is a goal that they had cherished for a long time. And thereafter the king of Armenia well into late antiquity is going to be an Arsakid dynast. So it is really hard to avoid the impression, and most scholars come down in precisely this way that Nero lost, that Nero lost the war for Armenia. And there is a very grandiose procession in after the Treaty of Rondea in 63 BCE where the new Arsakid king of Armenia comes to Rome to quote, unquote, receive his kingdom from Nero, which is, looks like a kind of face saving Roman device to kind of rescue the appearance of success from what even observers at the time concluded was a pretty clear Roman failure to prevent the Arsakids from taking over Armenia. And that, as I try to reconstruct in the book, that event, the so called golden day at the end of that war, is the last major transfer of Arsakids from Parthia to Rome. So there really aren't any clear dramatic knockout punches that either side delivers in this period as long as this, this phenomenon of quote unquote hostage submission goes on. But there's a rough equilibrium along the Euphrates frontier. And exactly as you say. The major instances of Parthian transfer from Parthia to Rome just don't correlate with the kinds of crushing military victories that we would expect to see if this were an obligation imposed upon a client or an inferior or subordinate.
- [34:18]
Mike Motilla
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that's really helpful, thank you. Okay, let me ask one more question on this. This is like the heart of the book, so I'm trying to give us a real feel for it. But like, were the Parthians also taking hostages or foster children? Like, what kind of lived experiences were the Parthians, Parthians having of caring for these foster children? You give the example in the book of Tigrin ii. Can you tell us about him and kind of what that reveals about this arrangement?
- [34:43]
Jake Nabel
Yeah, sure. So the answer must be yes. I mean, we have to really stress here that our contemporaneous internal Parthian sources are really, really meager. And strictly speaking, in the Parthian period, you know, we'll talk in a minute about the late antique evidence, I'm sure, which fleshes out the contours of these institutions. But strictly speaking, on the basis of internal sources from the territories the Parthians actually ruled that date to the heyday of Arskid reign in the Iranian plateau in Mesopotamia, where, you know, we don't have a whole lot. Tigran II looks like a likely case of hostage taking. You know, the Arsakids were experienced empire builders. There's no reason to think they wouldn't have practiced hostage taking. You know, it's a very common practice in pre modern history across a variety of different empires. Tigran II is the son of an Armenian king. This is before the Arsukid dynasty supplies the kings of Armenia. This is, this is first century bce, so this is before that, that takeover. He's the son of an Armenian king. And what we can say for certain is that he seems to arrive at the Parthian court. He doesn't grow up. His formative years are not spent in Armenia at his father's court. He seems to grow up within the Parthian Empire. We have kind of two sets of sources for his life. One set of sources is internal to the Parthian Empire. And so it's hugely, hugely important because that's very precious. We don't get a whole lot of those. These are the Babylonian astronomical diaries. This is a set of texts in Akkadian. They're really not primarily speaking texts that are concerned with the interpretation of political history. Their primary function is to watch the motions of the celestial bodies and record astronomical observations. But the diarists often append historical notes to these. Now, one of these notes tells us that at a certain point, Tigran is sent back to Armenia to take over his father's throne. And he does, and he goes on to become a very successful king in Armenian history and is well remembered within the Armenian historical tradition. But what those Babylonian sources can't do is tell us, what did the Parthians call him exactly? Did they call him hostage, which in Parthian is Nepak? Did they call him a foster child? What, what is the operative social category on the Parthian side? Babylonian astronomical diaries? Don't say. The sources that do say are Roman sources, Roman historiographical sources who, who say that he's a hostage. They, they use the word obsess and homeros, which are, those are the common words for hostage in Greek and Latin texts. So it's only in the Roman sources where we get a firm attestation that this is how the Parthians think of him and this is how they use him. That's entirely plausible and may very well be right. But I think some care is needed before concluding, well, that's certainly how the Parthians thought of that particular dynast. The other part of the answer to your question is, well, what about fosterage? And what would that have looked like within the Parthian Empire? And there I think we can turn to our evidence, not just from the Parthian period, but from Sasanian late antiquity, which is useful because a lot of the aristocratic families who would have been bringing up these children are still around in the Sasanian period. And so what that would have looked like is the child would have been sent out at a young age. We definitely do not have specifics on this, but probably, you know, five to ten somewhere around there, potentially even younger, but, but, but certainly in their childhood they would have been sent away from the court to the household of another family, and there they would have spent their formative years under the care of a dayag. That's the Middle Iranian word for a fosterer a foster father. Interestingly, in modern Persian, dahya means a nurse and a wet nurse. So this is someone who breastfeeds. But in antiquity, diag is very often used both in Iranian languages and in Armenian as well, where it eventually migrates to refer to male fosterers. So the analogy is this is someone who provides nourishment and care and formative child rearing experiences. And at the court of this. Sorry, not at the court, but rather in the household of this, a subordinate ruler, usually an aristocratic family of some kind. The child grows up. We can get, I think we're going to get later on to the question of at what point do they go back and what's the model, what's the vision like for the return of the child? But in fact they don't always return because dynastic politics are a really brutal, deadly competitive arena. So they don't always return. And in some cases we hear in our sources of relationships developing between a foster child and their foster parent that are more intimate, more familiar, more loving than the child's relationship with his own natal father. So it's a very intense bond, often a very intense emotional bond that really becomes a kinship relation. It's created form of kinship between the foster parents and their foster children.
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Mike Motilla
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Jake Nabel
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Mike Motilla
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that's, that's, that's great. Yeah. And we're going to see too, I think, how that, like the intimacy with that foster family can become a problem later on when they're, when the kids are trying to come back. Like, they're, they're like too close to those, those Romans because people would have a sense of what that, that was, that was like. So, I mean, like you were saying, like, one of the, one of the great things about this book is that it's introducing at least me to a lot of these non Roman sources. Like the Roman side has people like Cassius Dio, Tacitus Strabo who write about these Parthian hostages. But they're, you know, what's great about that is that they're more or less contemporaneous and, you know, like, we should be grateful for any information we get about antiquity, I guess. But these are Roman historians writing about Roman ideas about Roman things. So we learned kind of what the Romans are thinking. But can you tell us about some of these Near Eastern sources? Like what do we actually have from this period that we can reconstruct this period with?
- [42:45]
Jake Nabel
Absolutely. I'll start with the contemporary internal Parthian sources, because that's, of course, the set of sources that has to be given pride of place in a reconstruction of Parthian history. Even though, textually speaking, the Parthian extant Parthian sources at our disposal are just not as numerous, even compared to the Achaemenids who come before them and the Cisanians who come afterward. But for the Parthian period, we're really dealing with inscriptional sources. They're simply not the kind of literary historiographical sources that can be like a direct counterbalance to Tacitus Dio and the other authors whom you just mentioned. So we're dealing with a set of inscriptions from the Parthian period in a few different languages. Different kinds of Aramaic is one. And there we get figures called the Muraviana, a fosterer, a foster father. And we see, especially in the Parthian west, figures who take on this role in the life of a prince, this kind of quasi parental rearer, upbringer in the life of a prince, or in any case, a member of a ruling family. Some of the inscriptions are in Greek as well, and a very important text which I devote some attention to in the first chapter is a Greek inscription from Iberia. So this is roughly modern day Georgia. But what it shows is that the daughter of an Armenian Arsakid king had been fostered out to a dignitary who calls himself her Tropheus in Greek, which means fosterer, that uses the same verb. The kind of linguistic, the logic of the etymology is very similar, as it is for the case of Diag. Diag is someone who rears, who nourishes, who sustains. Trefo in Greek means a nourisher of a child. And so tropheus applies the same kind of linguistic logic that Doyagnosis does. And then in the late Parthian period, we get some Parthian inscriptions as well, but only at the very end. And as we were mentioning before, that's one of the real puzzles of Parthian history, is to what extent was the Parthian language operative as an important court language before the later Arsuqid period? So those are the contemporaneous Arsakid sources. I will be the first to admit, if that's all we had for pre Islamic Iranian fosterage, we wouldn't be playing with a full deck. I mean, it's. It's not enough to independently reconstruct a robust institution that has a big role in Parthian political life. However, we then, from late antiquity have a lot more evidence at our disposal. A key, another key set of sources is historiography written in Armenian in the late antique period. So then we do start to get a real historiographical tradition that stands outside of the Greek and Latin one. It's governed by different conventions, written in a different language. And the late antique Armenian historians that we have left, they are writing just a couple of generations removed from Arsakid rule in Armenia. And so they've grown up in a political milieu where Parthian power and the Arsakid ruling family was preeminent and where the ruling strategies that the Arsakids presumably were using in the earlier age, when they had the Iranian plateau, they're bringing those to bear in Armenia as well. And dyakutiun. So diag turns into diak in Armenian. Dia kutun is the abstract noun fosterage. References to that institution are all over our late antique Armenian historiographical sources. After that, we have Sasanian evidence in Middle Persian and in some cases in Parthian epigraphy. I think we'll talk about one of those inscriptions in a moment. And also late antique and early Islamic literature in Middle Persian from Zoroastrianism where diag we have further attestations of this foster father figure and can say a bit more. And then finally we have some early Islamic evidence and mention has to be made here of the Shahnameh, the Book of Kings of Ferdowsi. It's an epic poem from the 11th century CE. Obviously, that's quite a late source, and if that's all we had, it would be grounds, I think, for concern. But there are lots of references to fosterage between different kinds of kings and aristocratic families in that text as well. Some of those are firmly historical, and they come from the Sasanian period. Some of them are from the legendary and mythical Iranian past. So they're not historical cases. But the fact that later Iranian population populations thought that they were historical cases is in itself quite significant and shows us something about their social world. So, yeah, those are the sources I make use of. It's a very diverse and eclectic corpus of sources, and it is certainly not an exact counterpart to Tacitus, Strabo, Cassius, Dio. But it is an attempt to look at this transaction from an alternate point of view, and to do that, we need to have recourse to different kinds of sources.
- [48:16]
Mike Motilla
Sources. Yeah. And the other kind of like, different kind of source or like, I don't know, like, triangulating force that you have here is just kind of broader comparative history. So, you know, you'll kind of look pretty broadly to say, like, all right, what else is going on in the ancient world that is kind of like this, that can let us know? Like, this isn't a crazy assumption. Like, other people were doing something like this. One of them is this story you tell from Pharaonic times in Egypt, where there's a. A Kassite king who asks the Egyptian king for his daughter's hand in marriage. And then he says, like, well, if not, then just like any woman from the pharaoh's circle is going to be okay, because, like, the Kazite king is like, well, you know, people in my population aren't going to know that it's not actually your daughter. They're just going to assume, like, you know, like, they'll assume that it is because, like, who else would it be? Like, so did I get the story right? But also like, so, like, what does that actually teach us about Parthia and Rome?
- [49:11]
Jake Nabel
Yeah, so that, that's definitely, you know, a comparative source. I, I use it just to think through a bit further what these exchanges might have looked like. What did it look like when a Roman emperor wrote A letter to the Arsakid king or vice versa. We don't have that kind of evidence for Roman Parthian relations or even for Roman Sasanian relations. We hear of these letters going back and forth, but we only get accounts of them in Roman historiographical sources. And, you know, say what you will about that, those authors, whatever else we know about them, they were not literal copyists and transmitters of documents. So, you know, we should be very suspicious of the accounts of those letters that we get in an author like Tacitus, for instance. So, you know, if we want to think through a bit more intelligently and comparatively about what those communications might have looked like. Well, one historical setting where we do have that kind of evidence is the late Bronze Age, where we have a, you know, from the 14th century BCE, we have a cache of letters called the Amarna letters, which are correspondence between the Egyptian pharaoh and in some cases, the other great powers of the Eastern Mediterranean, the Hittites, the Kassites, et cetera. And in the letter you mentioned. That's right, the, the letter is from the Kassite king to the Egyptian pharaoh, saying, look, there's an expectation here that I would take an Egyptian bride. You're not sending me one. I'm not, you know, why not? I don't really understand. Look, I get it. You don't. You're not very enthusiastic about that. But here's what we can do. Just send me any Egyptian woman and I'll pretend she's your daughter. Who's going to say any differently? So I'll satisfy the people at my court and, you know, we can, we can deceive our internal audiences and, and maintain healthy relations between us. And I just find it such a fascinating comparative piece of evidence for thinking about whether and to what extent Roman emperors and Parthian kings, did they understand how the other side saw the transaction? And did they try to leverage misunderstanding? Did they try to take advantage of it, perhaps as a kind of secret, coordinated cabal like strategy for satisfying the domestic expectations of their subjects while keeping some kind of equilibrium or harmony in Roman Parthian relations. And I think letters like that must at least force us to consider the possibility that that kind of strategy was going on. And it's not such an unreasonable thing. I mean, if the thesis at the heart of my book has any purchase, you know, is it really very likely that someone, you know, a historian in the 21st century, could spot this kind of arrangement? But it would have been entirely unknown to everybody in Rome and Parthia at the time. You Know that that seems rather unlikely. So I think that that's a useful piece of comparative evidence for trying to model what these exchanges might have looked like. But even. And now I have to add one additional point on the misunderstanding side. Even in that letter where the king is broaching the prospect of secret coordination between the kings. Right. We'll foist a lie on the public so that we can each get our way. Even there, misunderstanding is at play, because what the Cite king doesn't understand is that the Egyptian pharaoh views it as humiliating to send one of his daughters to the Cite king. That's clearly not an expectation at play on the cite side, but it is on the Egyptian side. So for the Egyptian pharaoh to send a daughter to the Cassides, or even a woman who's supposed to be his daughter or is going to be passed off as his daughter, the appearance of submission is just as bad as actual submission. Right. If. If the idea is I'm going to put the story out that you sent me a daughter, well, that carries the same kind of opprobrium and disgrace that sending a real daughter would have provided. So even there, even when there's this prospect of secret coordination among rulers, misunderstanding is at play. And so I think sometimes it could have been strategic and intentional, but in general, there is ample, ample scope for genuine incomprehension between different political actors to prevail.
- [53:37]
Mike Motilla
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it's a great story and is to kind of work out this. This question of like, you know, strategic lies or strategic misunderstanding. Yeah. So let me go back to hostage foster situations. There's this giant relief of Shapur I built probably in his lifetime, like around 260 that has this big, long inscription of it. And it's basically just like a bunch of names. It's kind of like those begot passages in the Bible where you want to skip over it until some expert tells you, like, no, no, this person is related to this person. And here's the big story we can see from it. And one of those things in the Shapur relief is about fosterage. So can you tell us about that? There's these kind of two princesses who are being raised by some lesser noble in the relief. So can you tell us about this relief and kind of what we learned from it?
- [54:30]
Jake Nabel
Yeah, and I was smiling because just this past semester I was doing an independent study with a student when we were reading that inscription. And exactly as you say, we got to that passage where it's just a long list of names and titles and, yeah, it's not the most rewarding kind of passage to read when you're trying to learn another language, because it's just. It's just a list. But for reconstructing the hierarchy of the Sasanian court, it's very important. It's really a key piece of evidence. So what's going on in that passage is Shapura simply rehearsing a long list of dignitaries, people who held various kinds of titles and ranks and offices at his court. And at a certain point, he says there were two princes, both named Shapur, who were being brought up by other noble families. And thanks to the evidence of Shapur's inscription, dates through about 260, and it's a trilingual text in Parthian, Middle Persian and Greek. It's a. It's a Sasanian royal inscription, and it's the. The longest and most detailed one. Thanks to the evidence of inscriptions like that, we can actually reconstruct a pretty clear hierarchy of the Sasanian ruling classes which went, you know, from most important to least important, the kings at the top. So the king of kings and then his immediate family, who ruled subject territories in the empire under them. The princes, members of the Sasanian family, who were a little more peripheral, and then in positions three and four, the great ones and the free ones. So these are greater and lesser tiers of the. The aristocracy and the nobility. And the passage in the Shapur inscription that you mention, this shows quite clearly people from tier 2, from the ranks of the princes, being fostered out to aristocratic families that are from either tier three or tier four. So it's about as crisp and clear a case of cliental fosterage as you could hope to see. And it's in a key piece of evidence which is just a couple of decades removed from Arsakid rule in Iran. It's Sassanian, not Arsakid. But as. As we've already talked about, a lot of the practices and indeed, the aristocratic families that were influential in the Parthian period continue into the Sasanian one. So it's really a key piece of evidence for Iranian clientele. Vostridge.
- [56:52]
Mike Motilla
Yeah. Yeah, thanks. So, like, you know, one of the ways a kind of comparison book of, like, you know, Romans thought this, you know, Parthians thought this can. Can go wrong. Like, especially on a podcast where I'm asking you to do all this quickly is, is to kind of essentialize them that, you know, like, both sides are. They're lying to themselves a little bit, but they, you know, they. Everybody lies to themselves in a Lot of different ways, not just one. And so it's not like all Romans think that a toss is shaken. All Iranians are part of the. Think that it's like fosterage. Like today, foreign policy can be a bit of domestic policy and kind of how you project your ideas onto the other group. It has as much to do with the small movements that you're trying to make inside baseball, like inside your own kind of domestic situation, as it does with anything that's actually going on in the other part of the world. So if I'm reading you right, you've got this situation where you have all these kind of royal families who are constantly, like, wavering in their support for the Shah. And these elites, they're also, like, often in contact with Rome. I mean, some of them are speaking Greek. They're probably trading with them. And so they have, like, some sense of what's going on and how they could actually manipulate that hostage, foster children situation to help themselves. So, like, what kind of evidence do we have for a diversity of views among the Parthians about what was going on with these kids? Like, what internal problems in the Parthian Empire were these kids gonna help them solve?
- [58:24]
Jake Nabel
Yes, great question. Again, in terms of contemporaneous internal sources, not much. And so a lot of what we. The best we can do, I think, is to try to reconstruct the range of possibilities on the Parthian side. One thing that can help us do that is to look at the diversity of views on the Roman side, where, yes, hostageship is the dominant framework, but you get, you know, preponderance of the authors of our, you know, historiographical sources, you know, who say things like, well, the Parthians have submitted their kowtowing to the emperor, and that's why these kids are arriving. But then you get, I think, very shrewd and complex, nuanced, sophisticated commentators on foreign politics, like Tacitus, for instance, who says, you know, in a couple of places, something like, well, the Parthians gave up their children through a nominal hostage submission on the appearance of giving hostages. But really they were up to something else. And. And lots of people in Rome satisfied themselves. They patted themselves on the back and said, good job. We've. We've reduced that empire to a state of subjection. But actually they had their own motives. They understood this in a different way. And so clearly on the Roman side, some of our observers who, who produce the sources that we have to go by, some of them give indications that there's a little more going on on the Parthian side than most Romans would think. So it's reasonable to assume that on the Parthian side there must have been a similar range of commentators. I think probably many people who lived in the Parthian Empire didn't know that the Roman Empire even existed at all. That's a very, very likely possibility. And then there was almost certainly a very large set of people whose experience of Rome and their knowledge of Rome was mediated through the kinds of messages that the king of kings projected through through various forms of propaganda. And coins could have been stories told for public consumption, works of art, whatever. So certainly there, there must have been a large segment of the Parthian public who were probably satisfied with this framing of clientele, fosterage and consumed the message that Parthia had reduced the Roman emperor to some kind of state of clientage or subjection, and we're happy with that. And then almost certainly there were additional commentators, the leaders of aristocratic families who in some cases send their own ambassadors to Rome and, and go and talk to the emperor in their own capacity. Surely they knew a bit more about how the Romans were thinking about these exchanges, what the Romans did with these princes and princesses in the city of Rome itself, which was to sort of parade them very often in triumph, like, like processions, clear spectacles of domination. The reports of those sorts of spectacles must have filtered back to Parthia eventually. And in fact, we do have a late antique Armenian source who says something very similar to this. He says the Germanicus paraded the sons of the Armenian and Parthian kings in a triumph in subjection, and then they got really mad because they had just defeated the. The Parthians and the Armenians had just defeated the Romans in a war. So this is not what they signed up for. So. So, you know, clearly led to discrepancy and disharmony in views there. And then, of course, at the very apex of the period, there's the Arsicate king himself who must have been maximally well informed about Rome simply by virtue of his position. So we don't really have contemporaneous sources which allow us to flesh out this spectrum of possibilities. But that a spectrum existed seems like a warranted assumption, I think.
- [62:27]
Mike Motilla
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- [63:57]
Mike Motilla
Yeah, yeah. So we gotta figure out like what, what happens when the kids go back? Or, you know, they're probably not kids anymore. But, but I guess, you know, some of this comes from, from Tacitus and from other people. But, but before we, we get there, you have this really great discussion about how these foster situations, they, they end up kind of melding some, like more elite Parthian families more into the, like, they. There's a lot more people learning a lot more about Rome because of these situations. And they start seeing, you know, Roman elites, maybe even the Roman emperor, not just as like a, I don't know, a foreign military leader like a billion miles away, but like another person who is potentially in their sphere of influence. You know, like someone like the Shah, whom they could petition. Right. So can you tell us about these families and how they were actually involved in the return of the hostages or foster kids and what that teaches us about this, you know, Roman Parthian relationship at the time?
- [64:59]
Jake Nabel
Absolutely. It's really important in reconstructing when and under what circumstances Arsacids go back to Parthia, who asks for them. And it's basically never the reigning Arsakid king, because for him there are a lot of complications involved with the return of these figures. And in a lot of ways it's better for them to stay in Rome under the fosterage of the emperor than it is for them to come back. So when they do return, it is Always at the request of members of the Parthian ruling classes who send their own ambassadors, who petition Rome on their own initiative. A lot of what I try to do is to figure out what exactly who exactly is sending these embassies and which people line up behind the Arsakids of Rome when they return to Parthia and try to install them in the position of king of kings. And a big part of the answer is it's these aristocratic families like the Surein. Another really important one, which almost certainly was already operative and quite powerful in the first century cell, is the Carine family. They persist into the Sasanian period, and most of our evidence for them is Sasanian, but Tacitus mentions them as well. So these are the kinds of political actors in Parthia that want the Arsacids of Rome to come back to Parthia and try to ask the question, when they sent their embassies to the Roman Emperor, what's their perspective and how are they thinking about this kind of thing? Well, I think their perspective and the thing that kind of allies them and binds them with the Roman Emperor is that they are both families that sometimes are in the position to perform clientele fosterage for the Arsakid family. Now, that's a clientele obligation, but it's a reciprocal one as well, because if you're a Parthian aristocrat and you're bringing up an Arsakid king, part of what you're doing is managing the Arsakid ruling family. You are nourishing and sustaining and connecting with an Arsakid dynast who may become the king of kings one day. And that's a really important obligation. And if you play your cards right, it's one that can make you quite powerful if your foster son then becomes king, and then you've got a direct line to the most powerful person in the empire. So I think when these Parthian aristocrats petition the Emperor for the release of an Arsakid of Rome, what they're thinking is, hey, look, we are all involved in the business of managing the Arsakid family. We do clientele fosterage. And yes, that's a clientele obligation, but we have a vested interest in making sure the best possible candidate is on the throne and in maximizing our political interests through our maintenance and collective care of a foster child. So, hey, fellow fosterer, send us one of your foster children. We'll do all the work of putting him on the throne, but then we will all benefit. And this is a really different kind of point of view than the One that you encounter in most scholarship on these episodes, which is typically from the Roman point of view and it usually uses the language of sort of infiltration and espionage. The Romans want to release a hostage because they want to sort of break into the supposedly pristine realm of Parthian domestic politics. Well, no, the Emperor in a meaningful way is a participant in Parthian domestic politics by virtue of his custody of these Arsakid children. And I think that's the basis on which these Parthian aristocrats approach him and that's why they send him ambassadors.
- [68:34]
Mike Motilla
Yeah, there, there's like a like Manchurian Candidate version of this of like, like we've like programmed the guy that we're going to put on the throne. And then there's the like, I don't know, more basic, like political operatives are constantly hunting for the next great candidate because if they're the advisor during the campaign then they could become, I don't know, Chief of Staff or Secretary of State or something. I don't know. It's more boring than conspiracy minded, but it is. I mean that's how power politics works, right? I guess. And so, yeah, no, that's just a really helpful way to remember how this all goes. You know, you write that when the Arcassids of Rome actually become kings, it does actually force the Parthian population to reckon more with the Roman hostage view of this. It's possible to maintain this strategic misunderstanding. But the kids were there, they understood that they were not making the Romans subservient, at least not most of the time. When they were in Rome they were enslaved. It was a gilded cage, but it was a cage. And that's part of how this pragmatic misunderstanding starts to break down. Can you tell us, you tell the story about Venonis, can you tell us about him and kind of how that gets at that dynamic?
- [69:52]
Jake Nabel
Sure. Venones is a fascinating case. He's the best attested example of any Arsicate of Rome period, but certainly of the ones who goes back to Parthia. And he's the only one who becomes the Arsicid king of kings in his own right and holds that position for long enough, you know, to, to, to mint coins that we have and, and actually reigns for about four years. He's sent to Rome at some point between 19 and 10 B.C. in the episode we talked about before, he goes back to Parthia in 8 CE and then from 8 to 12 he's the arsakid king of kings. He subsequently loses a war, is driven back into Roman territory. First he's well, but by way of entering the Roman Empire, first he sees Armenia for a little while, then he's driven out of there. Then he's in Roman Syria for a while. But the king who has driven him out of Iran, the Arskid king of kings, Arvan, he doesn't like the fact that Venonis is sort of waiting in the wings in Syria. Maybe he will try to come back. So he petitions to have him removed to Asia Minor. So he's relocated to Asia Minor. And then finally, in a very suspicious episode, supposedly he tried to escape his Roman captivity in Asia Minor. And he, he attempts to run away. And Tacitus says he bribed his Roman guards to attempt to get out of captivity. And when he was chased down, one of those Romans who had taken a bribe kills him so that the, the story of their collusion doesn't come out. So there's a lot going on there, right? It's, it's just such a fascinating case of, of he goes from Parthia to Rome, then many years later he goes from Rome to Parthia, and then he's driven back again in the opposite direction. So it's really a long and storied and fascinating career. Why did he fail in Parthia? I mean, what was it about his kingship which led to his, you know, his, his downfall? Really difficult to say because basically our only sources that talk about these cases of remission, when narcicists go back from Rome to Parthia, Tacitus and Josephus, and the story that they tell in these kinds of cases is the kind of enslavement narrative that you mentioned a moment ago. They go back to Parthia and the Parthians have a case of buyer's remorse. They say to themselves, it doesn't feel great to have a creature of the Romans, someone who's acculturated to the ways of a fool, foreign overlord, someone who during their time in Rome has learned a host of corrupt, debaucherous, decadent cultural practices. This guy is no true Parthian. This guy is no true Arsakid. We have to get rid of him. That's the story that Tacitus and Josephus tell. Now, there are major, major reasons to be suspicious of that story. Somebody like Tacitus didn't have an especially positive view of the Julio Claudian emperors, was kind of always looking for a stick to beat those emperors with. And there are lots of foreign princes who spend time at Rome where Tacitus says things like, these people learned how to be absolute monsters during their time in Rome because they sat at the feet of Gaius Caligula or Claudius or Nero, and, you know, what a horrible kind of moral influence to be around. So any sort of internal royal kingly virtue that they may have had was totally corrupted by the Julio Claudian emperors and the decadent Roman imperial culture that. That they were at the head of. That's just pure Roman discourse. You know, Tacitus is writing that kind of thing because he wants to criticize Rome, not because he is very well informed about what happened in Parthia. It seems quite clear that Tacitus was not well informed about what Parthian internal rhetoric and political discourse look like. There's just no reason to think that. So we have to be really skeptical and suspicious in giving credence to those narratives. They still could be. Right, right. I mean, if we look comparatively across different kinds of cultural settings where royal families hold power dynast especially young, impressionable princes and princesses who go abroad and spend years at a foreign court, we hear of lots of cases throughout history where they go home. And of course, they don't quite fit in. They've spent decades and in many cases formative years abroad. They're much more creatures of the foreign environment than the one into which they were born. So it's a very plausible story, right? It could be true, but it isn't true simply because Tacitus and Josephus say it's true. And that. That may seem like, you know, too fine a distinction, but I do think it is an important one to keep in mind, and that's what I mean by Tacitus and Josephus. They may be telling basically the right story, that they, the Archids of Rome, were rejected by the Parthians as, you know, creatures of a foreign power and as no true arsakid. But they tell it for the wrong reasons. They're telling it because these are part of Roman literary discourses, not because they had good information that this is how it actually went down.
- [75:23]
Mike Motilla
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that's great. So eventually this arrangement stops. And like, why, like you, you float a couple of possibilities. One has to do with the end of the Julio Claudian dynasty. Like, why. Why would that have mattered in making these stops?
- [75:39]
Jake Nabel
Well, it matters because this is a form of networking between different kinship groups. The Julio Claudians are a dynasty, right? It's a. It's a succession of rulers and power. Power transfers from one generation to another on the basis of kinship and lines of descent. I think the Ars kids looked at that kind of ruling family and said, that's the kind of family we recognize from our own internal arrangement. That's somebody we can do business with and that's somebody we implicate through the business of phosphoridge. They probably tried to intermarry with the Julio Claudians because they did this with other dynasties. But there I think we have to point the finger at Roman elite marital practices which were really endogamous and didn't allow foreigners a seat at this table. So I think the Romans, probably that was a no starter with the Romans because of the sort of hang ups they had about, about how marriage was to be used as a tool of politics. But fosterage they could do. Right. That that was the kind of relationship you could open with this foreign ruling family. Then the Julio Claudian line comes to an end. Right. We, we have contemporaneous, well, not contemporaneous, but, you know, a couple generations removed. Roman literary sources who say the Julian line came to an end. There was the year of the four emperors and then the Vespasian, excuse me, the, the Flavians come along and that's a different ruling family. And I think that must have looked like a really important transition from the Parthian point of view because, oh, the family we've been trying to kinship network with for almost 100 years now, they're out of power. Maybe this institution isn't the kind of basis for engagement that we thought it was. And I think that is one contributing factor in the termination of the practice.
- [77:29]
Mike Motilla
This. Yeah. And the other is just like the Roman military gets much more aggressive and maybe dominant. Right. Like, can you remind us like what's happening in the first second century with kind of these military, these battles and like how that would affect it.
- [77:46]
Jake Nabel
Yeah, the first century, you know, from a 10,000 foot view is a relatively peaceful time. There are repeated skirmishes over Armenia, but that notwithstanding, there's a roughly agreed upon demarcation of territory along the Euphrates river, more or less. Of course, lots of people died in skirmishes over the finer points of that arrangement, but it broadly holds for the first century ce. The second century CE is a much more violent time and we see full on Roman invasions of Parthia under Trajan and under Lucius Varus later in the second century ce. So there, I think it's probably not a coincidence that fosterage, or at least the transfer of arsacids in intentional coordinated movements from Parthia to Rome that that may stop also in the second century CE because the political lay of the land is just different. It's, it's less of a viable argument for a Parthian ruler to make to say, I'm sending my children to the Roman emperor because I've turned him into a client and I've subordinated him to the rule of the Parthians. It might be a lot harder to make that argument if the Romans are, you know, besieging Ctesiphon and marching throughout southern Mesopotamia. So that may be another contributing factor in the breakdown of the arrangement. The only one, probably not, but a contributing factor for sure.
- [79:17]
Mike Motilla
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, I mean, I don't know we're running long here, but can you take us into late Antiquity? Like, I know this is kind of past the timeline of the book, but how does the Foster hostage taking change with the Sasanians? You mentioned the kind of Armenian world would translate kind of hostage changes from the first century to the fourth century, which suggests, like, something conceptual has changed, but, like, you know, like, hostage taking keeps going, but these things are changing in late Antiquity. Can you just tell us about that?
- [79:50]
Jake Nabel
That's right. Yeah. A couple things there. So the Arsuqid dynasty, even after it loses its Iranian empire to the Sasanians in 224, it sticks around in Armenia for another couple of centuries. So that's why the Armenian sources are so useful on Arsukid rules, because they were still around in late antiquity, and our Armenian historiographical sources are only a couple of generations removed. Removed from Arsicid domination of Armenia. So the argument there is that, yes, at a certain point in late antiquity, the Armenian Arsakids do start sending hostages to the Roman emperor. And by the way, to the science as well. I mean, the transfers are going both ways. In that case, obviously Arsakid Armenia is a much less powerful kind of state than the Arsukid empire in its heyday. Now, we. We know the word, the Armenian word patand. That's the word that the Armenians of late antiquity applied to the Arsakids who went to the Byzantine court or to the Sasanian court. However, that's not the Parthian word for hostage, which is mipak. And that's significant. That fact is significant because otherwise there are a lot of loan words in Armenian that come from Parthian because of Arsakid domination. Diac is one that we've already talked about. The word for foster father comes from Parthian, but the word for hostage that they used is not the same as the Parthian one. So I think in that later period, if the Arsakids of late antique Armenia viewed this as one continuous Kind of phenomenon. Right. If the Arsakids of late antiquity who entered the Byzantine court were basically the same kind of thing as the Arsacids of the Parthian Empire who went to the Roman court. Sorry, to the court of the Julio Claudians in Rome, if that were one continuous transaction, I think we would expect nipak, the Parthian word for hostage, to have become the term of art. But it wasn't. And that sort of suggests that the hostage submissions of the late antique period, the late antique arsa kids, are not one kind of continuous phenomenon that goes back hundreds of. Of years. It's a relatively new late antique development which grows out of the. The much reduced status of the Arsuka dynasty as basically, you know, the rump state of Armenia in late antiquity.
- [82:13]
Mike Motilla
Yeah, yeah, it's helpful, thank you. I. I don't know, I wonder if we can back up a little bit and think about some of the, the big themes like, and, you know, like, I don't want to be like a real downer here, but like a. I don't like. A lot of history, writing and education is built on the idea that if we understand each other better, we're going to get along better. And it seems like actually in this
- [82:33]
Jake Nabel
book,
- [82:35]
Mike Motilla
when the Persians and the Romans, the Parthians and the Romans actually understood each other better, they killed each other more. There was a way that this strategic misunderstanding, maybe it didn't bring about eternal bliss, but it did allow for some kind of stability. And I just wonder, how does writing a book like this make you think about, like, misunderstanding as a social, political force? Can you talk about that kind of, just more broadly?
- [83:03]
Jake Nabel
Very gladly. I love this question and so many thoughts come to mind. The first thing I want to say by way of preface is just that it's a descriptive work of academic history, not a prescriptive one. Yeah. The conclusions may be a little grim and not especially encouraging and not sunny and optimistic for the nature of interstate life or intercultural contact. That may be the case, and so be it. You know, if that's where it ends up, that's my best reading of how it went down. But that said, I think there are some reasons not to be totally cynical and pessimistic about the prospect here. A lot comes down to whether pragmatic misunderstanding was something that certain Romans and Parthians may have been keyed in on and may have tried to take advantage of by maintaining a mutually harmonious arrangement, by not pressing the point too hard. Right. Not forcing the other side to accept your own point of view so that everybody could kind of get what they wanted and all parties could walk away from the negotiating table satisfied with the exchange? So was this sort of by design with. With certain probably politically influential people in either empire utilizing it and making maximal. Taking maximal political advantage from it? Or was it just purely accidental and. And fortuitous, but not the product of design and just a kind of random transaction? I think if you're a statesperson, if you're the kind of person involved in the crafting of foreign policy, there is some scope to look at this kind of exchange and to ask yourself in whatever historical context you find yourself in, you know, are there certain congruities between our two cultures that we can leverage? Are there transactions where maybe it's possible by way of deception, by way of, you know, interpreting these things in a way that redounds to our mutual satisfaction? Is there scope for us to both win in a way by leveraging misunderstanding, by leveraging incomprehension? It's a dangerous game to play because, as we know, misunderstanding certainly doesn't only lead to harmonious arrangements. Very often precisely the opposite. But I think if you are a statesperson who thinks hard about how the other side is viewing the transaction and. And what the domestic audience on the other side is taking away, what kinds of messages the regime is sending to its domestic audience, I think there is scope there for judicious management of an interstate relationship to avoid warfare and conflict and people dying in contests for reputation and prestige and honor, which is a thing that people are willing to die for in interstate politics, or at least elites are willing to send other people to die for it. And so avoiding that, if you can, by taking advantage of misunderstanding, great, go for it. You know, the other prospect is, what if it was just purely accidental? And there, you know, that that's a. A kind of grim conclusion to come to in a way, because misunderstanding obviously can cut in the other direction. And certainly, as a policymaker, that tells you nothing, right? It doesn't really give you anything to do. There's no way to capitalize on this. There's no way to gain from it, because it is necessarily a blind spot in the way you see the world. And interstate affairs can just take on a logic which transcends the immediate understanding of any of the actors who are involved in it. So there's not a particularly sunny conclusion that comes out of that. But I will say it should teach foreign policymakers to have a sense of epistemic humility and to have a sense of the limitations of their own power and understanding. And I think a lot of the ills that we see in the realm of foreign policy do not come from statespeople having a very clear sense of just how easily interstate affairs can spiral out of their control, just how limited their power is, and just how unpredictable interactions can become between different kinds of states. You know, two or three or even more so the lesson of caution, prudence, epistemic humility. This is not the only kind of study of interstate affairs which enjoins that kind of conclusion. That's an old story, as old as Thucydides, you might say. But that is a lesson one may take away from this is things are going to take on a trajectory, go on a path which is beyond your immediate control and beyond your immediate understanding. Proceed with caution.
- [88:08]
Mike Motilla
Yeah, the other big conclusion comes in the shift you describe with kind of understanding ancient foreign policy, from a kind of neorealist understanding of foreign policy to social, cultural, ancient foreign policy. Can you explain that, that shift just as a way to kind of wrap up, you know, some of the big ideas here?
- [88:29]
Jake Nabel
Absolutely. Neorealism, I would say now, is sort of the dominant theoretical perspective in the literature on ancient interstate relations, certainly on Roman interstate relations. It's a theory of foreign politics and it has a couple core assumptions. One is that the state is the basic actor in world politics and really in the final analysis, the only kind of actor that really matters. And second, states interact in a condition of anarchy, unlike within a society where we have all kinds of mechanisms that mediate our relationships with another. The law, kinship, a shared culture, a shared code of morality. Realists and neorealists say none of that stuff exists in the interstate arena. So everybody's on their own, and states can only count on themselves when they're negotiating with one another. And this leads to a lot of war and chaos because it's a dog eat dog world out there. It's a useful perspective. It's certainly enriched the literature on ancient interstate relations. I think it has some important shortcomings for studying Roman Parthian relations and other periods of ancient history as well. You know, one is that yes, states are important in foreign politics, but it's not the only kind of actor that's out there. You know, that the kind of political unit at the center of my book is not the state really so much, it's the dynasty. Dynasties are ruling families that, yes, they are intimately bound up with state power and they usually supply the head of a state, but they're not the only game in town within their state. And they also transcend the borders of their state in all kinds of ways. Right. Dynast can spill out beyond the territorial borders of the. The state where they happen to be kings and queens. And that's a really important mediating force in foreign policy as well. Certainly in Roman Parthian relations, where the Arsakid dynasty and the Julio Claudians are undergoing. They undertake this kind of kinship networking. And that's the main story for about a century. And that. That really matters. That's really important. Even more important than that, though, I would say, is this realist assumption that anarchy. Right. The lack of order is the key fundamental feature of interstate life. What I think pragmatic misunderstanding is, is a kind of order that emerges in foreign politics between Rome and Parthia. Now, order doesn't necessarily mean complete harmony, and they never fight wars over anything. You can imagine lots of forms of order where wars continue over certain territories. But although competition may persist, it is sort of circumscribed by a certain cultural logic that emerges by virtue of the interaction of the one state with the other. So I think when Arsacids go from Rome to Parthia, sorry, from Parthia to Rome and then back again, this kind of exchange creates a sort of order. But it's an order that doesn't have an architect. Nobody has planned this out from the beginning. It's what a natural scientist or a mathematician would call emergent order. It's an order that emerges organically from the interaction of the different units that make up the system. And it's not by design, it's not intentional, it's not hierarchy. Right. Because what I'm saying is both Romans and Parthians are convinced that they're number one. But misunderstanding provides a kind of fulcrum, a kind of balance, which allows them to. To. To balance out one another, to establish a rough sphere of influence with one another, and to both be satisfied with their relations with one another. But of course, this isn't centrally planned. There's no architect.
- [92:30]
Mike Motilla
It's.
- [92:30]
Jake Nabel
It's an arrangement without an arranger. And that I think is really, really different from the anarchic world that neorealists tell us to expect.
- [92:41]
Mike Motilla
Yeah, great. All right, last question. What are you working on next?
- [92:46]
Jake Nabel
So next I'm going to work on freedom in late antique Iran. How people of the Sasanian Empire and also Iranians writing under early Islam, how they envisioned the political value of freedom, which is azadi in. In Middle Persian. What I think is at stake there is that freedom as a political value, which is usually in the sort of broader political science and world historical literature. This is typically said to be kind of an alpha value in the west, quote, unquote, the West. And of course the west has an origin story in Greece and Rome. And so the lion's share of attention to the concept of freedom in ancient cultures has been how did the ancient Greeks conceive of it, how did the Romans conceive of it? But actually Azadi, freedom is very clearly a very important value to late antique Iranians. It's all over Middle Persian inscriptions, it's all over Middle Persian literature. It is taken up as a social status in Bactrian and Sogdian. It enters Armenian as well. There's a really vital and important political tradition there that I want to try to uncover. It's not purely of Iranian manufacture. Because what I think I'm going to argue is that this idea of freedom actually emerges and certainly one important contributor to it is the legacy of Hellenistic rule in Iran when the Greek polis and its discourses of civic freedom are imposed on Iran and Mesopotamia. And that's the world the Parthians conquer and that's the imperial culture that they take over, that is elite culture at the time of the advent of the Parthians. So I, I think Greek and Hellenistic freedom end up intertwined with and influencing the Iranian view of freedom. But in any event, there is a really important political tradition to be reconstructed there and that's what I'll try to do.
- [94:49]
Mike Motilla
Yeah, I mean like all the way up until the present, right? Like the women, life, freedom. It's the same same word, right?
- [94:54]
Jake Nabel
It's exactly the same word. Azadi in modern Persian is the exact same word as it is in middle Persian. So 100% absolutely.
- [95:02]
Mike Motilla
Great. Well I look forward to that. Jake, thanks for talking. This is so informative and just really, really wonderful. Thanks.
- [95:09]
Jake Nabel
Thanks so much. This was a blast. Really appreciate you having me on again.
- [95:13]
Mike Motilla
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Jake Nabel
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Mike Motilla
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Jake Nabel
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Mike Motilla
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