Antony's Disastrous Parthian Campaign
Mark Antony invaded Parthia in 36 BC with the largest army Rome had sent east and came back having lost a third of it. The campaign was meant to answer Crassus's disaster at Carrhae seventeen years earlier and to give Antony the military standing that Octavian, who was winning wars in Italy through Agrippa, did not have. He had some 100,000 men including sixteen legions and Armenian cavalry, which is an enormous force for the period. The plan was to enter through Armenia and strike at Media rather than cross the desert where Crassus had died. It failed on logistics. Antony pushed ahead with the legions to besiege Phraaspa and left the siege train — 300 wagons including an eighty-foot ram — behind under a small escort, and the Parthians destroyed it. Without engines he could not take a walled city, and without a city he could not winter. The retreat took twenty-seven days through mountains in October and November, under constant harassment by horse archers who would not close, with dysentery from bad water and troops eating roots. He lost perhaps 24,000 men on the way out, and thousands more before the army reached Syria. The Armenian king had withdrawn his cavalry, and Antony punished him two years later by taking him prisoner and parading him in Alexandria. The failure mattered politically more than militarily. It left Antony dependent on Cleopatra's money and gave Octavian an argument he used for the following five years. Parthia was never conquered by anyone from the west. Trajan reached the Persian Gulf in 116 and the gains were abandoned by his successor within two years, and the frontier settled roughly where Pompey had left it.
- Year: 36 BCE
- Category: Military
