When the Romans in the last age of the republic came into immediate contact with Iran as a consequence of the occupation of Syria, they found in existence the Persian empire regenerated by the Parthians. We have formerly had to make mention of this state on several occasions; this is the place to gather together the little that can be ascertained regarding the peculiar character of the empire, which so often exercised a decisive influence on the destinies of the neighbouring state. Certainly to most questions, which the historical inquirer has here to put, tradition has no answer. The Occidentals give but occasional notices, which may in their isolation easily mislead us, concerning the internal condition of their Parthian neighbours and foes; and, if the Orientals in general have hardly understood how to fix and to preserve historical tradition, this holds doubly true of the period of the Arsacids, seeing that it was by the later Iranians regarded, together with the preceding foreign rule of the Seleucids, as an unwarranted usurpation between the periods of the old and the new Persian rule--the Achaemenids and the Sassanids; this period of five hundred years is, so to speak, eliminated by way of correction[2] from the history of Iran, and is as if nonexistent. [Sidenote: The Parthians Scythian.] The standpoint, thus occupied by the court-historiographers of the Sassanid dynasty, is more the legitimist-dynastic one of the Persian nobility than that of Iranian nationality. No doubt the authors of the first imperial epoch describe the language of the Parthians, whose home corresponds nearly to the modern Chorasan, as intermediate between the Median and the Scythian, that is, as an impure Iranian dialect; accordingly they were regarded as immigrants from the land of the Scythians, and in this sense their name is interpreted as “fugitive people,” while the founder of the dynasty, Arsaces, is declared by some indeed to have been a Bactrian, but by others a Scythian from the Maeotis. The fact that their princes did not take up their residence in Seleucia on the Tigris, but pitched their winter quarters in the immediate neighbourhood at Ctesiphon, is traced to their wish not to quarter Scythian troops in the rich mercantile city. Much in the manners and arrangements of the Parthians is alien from Iranian habits, and reminds us of the customs of nomadic life; they transact business and eat on horseback, and the free man never goes on foot. It cannot well be doubted that the Parthians, whose name alone of all the tribes of this region is not named in the sacred books of the Persians, stand aloof from Iran proper, in which the Achaemenids and the Magians are at home. The antagonism of this Iran to the ruling family springing from an uncivilised and half foreign district, and to its immediate followers--this antagonism, which the Roman authors not unwillingly took over from their Persian neighbours--certainly subsisted and