Bedouins of Syria levy the _kubba_ from the farmers there. The Parthian government thus, at least in the earlier imperial period, was as little able as the Turkish government of the present day to secure here to the peaceful subject the fruits of his toil, and to establish a durable state of peace on the frontier. Even for the imperial power itself these border-troubles remained an open sore; often they exercised an influence on the wars of succession of the Arsacids as well as on their disputes with Rome. [Sidenote: The Romano-Parthian frontier regions.] We have set forth in its due place how the attitude of the Parthians to the Romans came to be shaped and the boundaries of the two great powers to be established. While the Armenians had been rivals of the Parthians, and the kingdom on the Araxes set itself to play the part of great-king in anterior Asia, the Parthians had in general maintained friendly relations with the Romans as the foes of their foes. But, after the overthrow of Mithradates and Tigranes, the Romans had, particularly through the arrangements made by Pompeius, taken up a position which was hardly compatible with serious and lasting peace between the two states. In the south Syria was now under direct Roman rule, and the Roman legions kept guard on the margin of the great desert which separates the lands of the coast from the valley of the Euphrates. In the north Cappadocia and Armenia were vassal-principalities of Rome. The tribes bordering on Armenia to the northward, the Colchians, Iberians, Albanians, were thereby necessarily withdrawn from Parthian influence, and were, at least according to the Roman way of apprehending the matter, likewise Roman dependencies. The lesser Media or Atropatene (Aderbijân), adjoining Armenia to the south-east, and separated from it by the Araxes, had maintained, despite the Seleucidae, its ancient native dynasty reaching back to the time of the Achaemenids, and had even asserted its independence; under the Arsacids the king of this region appears, according to circumstances, as a vassal of the Parthians or as independent of these by leaning on the Romans. The determining influence of Rome consequently reached as far as the Caucasus and the western shore of the Caspian Sea. This involved an overlapping of the limits indicated by the national relations. The Hellenic nationality had doubtless so far gained a footing on the south coast of the Black Sea and in the interior of Cappadocia and Commagene, that here the Roman ascendency found in it a base of support; but Armenia, even under the long years of Roman rule, remained always a non-Greek land, knit to the Parthian state with indestructible ties, by community of language and of faith, the numerous intermarriages of people of rank, and similarity of dress and of armour.[21] The Roman levy and the Roman taxation were never extended to Armenia; at most the land defrayed the raising and the