It was only when Augustus went in person to Syria in the year 734 {20 B.C.}, and showed himself in earnest, that the Orientals submitted. In Armenia, where a powerful party had risen against king Artaxes, the insurgents threw themselves into the arms of the Romans and sought imperial investiture for Artaxes’s younger brother Tigranes, brought up at the imperial court and living in Rome. When the emperor’s stepson Tiberius Claudius Nero, then a youth of twenty-two years, advanced with a military force into Armenia, king Artaxes was put to death by his own relatives, and Tigranes received the imperial tiara from the hand of the emperor’s representative, as fifty years earlier his grandfather of the same name had received it from Pompeius (iv. 127). Atropatene was again separated from Armenia and passed under the sway of a ruler likewise brought up in Rome, Ariobarzanes, son of the already-mentioned Artavazdes; yet the latter appears to have obtained the land not as a Roman but as a Parthian dependency. Concerning the organisation of matters in the principalities on the Caucasus we learn nothing; but as they are subsequently reckoned among the Roman client-states, probably at that time the Roman influence prevailed here also. Even king Phraates, now put to the choice of redeeming his word or fighting, resolved with a heavy heart on the surrender--keenly as it did violence to the national feelings of his people--of the few Roman prisoners of war still living and the standards won. [Sidenote: Mission of Gaius Caesar to the East.]