Phraates IV of Parthia

Phraates IV ruled Parthia from about 37 to 2 BC and returned the standards lost at Carrhae to Rome. He came to the throne by murdering his father Orodes II — who had already been broken by the death of his favourite son Pacorus — and then killed around thirty of his own brothers to eliminate rivals, along with his eldest son when he became a threat. The purge drove much of the nobility into exile, several of whom went to Rome, which shaped the diplomacy that followed. Mark Antony invaded in 36 BC with about a hundred thousand men, aiming at Media Atropatene. Phraates avoided a general engagement, destroyed Antony's siege train and its escort, and harassed the retreat through Armenia in winter. Antony lost perhaps a third of his force. It is the reason the Roman east was left without an offensive capability for a generation and contributed directly to Antony's defeat by Octavian. He was briefly driven out by a usurper, Tiridates, and restored with Scythian help. The standards taken from Crassus in 53 BC and from Antony's lieutenants remained the great Roman grievance. In 20 BC, faced with Augustus stationing Tiberius and an army in Armenia, and with a hostage son held in Rome, Phraates returned them along with surviving prisoners. Augustus treated it as a conquest, celebrating it on coinage, on the Prima Porta breastplate and in the Res Gestae, though nothing had been fought. Augustus sent him an Italian slave girl, Musa, who became his queen. She persuaded him to send his four legitimate sons to Rome as hostages, and then, with her own son Phraates V, poisoned him in 2 BC.

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