Mithridates I of Parthia
Mithridates I took a kingdom that was a province of the Iranian plateau and in forty years made it an empire from the Indus to the Euphrates, taking Media, Babylonia and the Seleucid capital on the Tigris, capturing a Seleucid king and marrying him to his daughter, and putting on his coins the Achaemenid title of king of kings and the Greek one of philhellene, which is what the Parthian state would be: an Iranian dynasty ruling Greek cities through Greek forms. He was a great-nephew of the founder Arsaces and succeeded his brother Phraates I about 171 BC, at a moment when the Seleucid Antiochus IV was occupied with Egypt and the Jews. He took the eastern provinces of Bactria from its Greek kings first, then in 148 Media with Ecbatana, and in 141 marched down into Mesopotamia, where Seleucia on the Tigris, the largest Greek city in Asia, opened its gates in July and Babylon followed. He was recognised as king in the Babylonian temples, whose astronomical diaries record his arrival, and he built his own capital across the river from Seleucia at Ctesiphon, where Parthian and Persian kings would sit for the next eight hundred years. The Seleucids tried once to come back. Demetrius II marched east in 139 with the support of the Greek cities and was captured. Mithridates kept him at court in Hyrcania for ten years, gave him a daughter, Rhodogune, and sent him home at a moment when his return would divide the Seleucid house, which it did. He fought the Sacae nomads on the eastern frontier, whom his successors would spend a generation containing, and died about 132, leaving the kingdom to a son under a regency. The empire he made was a federation of vassal kingdoms and Greek cities held together by the cavalry of the Iranian nobility, which is how it fought Crassus at Carrhae seventy-nine years later. The title philhellene on the coins lasted as long as the Greek cities did.
- Lived: 195 BCE – 132 BCE
- Nationality: Parthian
- Roles: king, monarch
