Boundless joy saluted this bloodless victory achieved by this prince of peace. After it there subsisted for a considerable time a friendly relation with the king of the Parthians, as indeed the immediate interests of the two great states came little into contact. In Armenia, on the other hand, the Roman vassal-rule, which rested only on its own basis, had a difficulty in confronting the national opposition. After the early death of king Tigranes his children, or the leaders of the state governing under their name, joined this opposition. Against them another ruler Artavazdes was set up by the friends of the Romans; but he was unable to prevail against the stronger opposing party. These Armenian troubles disturbed also the relation to the Parthians; it was natural that the Armenians antagonistic to Rome should seek to lean on these, and the Arsacids could not forget that Armenia had been formerly a Parthian appanage for the second son. Bloodless victories are often feeble and dangerous. Matters went so far that the Roman government, in the year 748 {6 B.C.}, commissioned the same Tiberius, who, fourteen years before had installed Tigranes as vassal-king of Armenia, to enter it once more with a military force and to regulate the state of matters in case of need by arms. But the quarrels in the imperial family, which had interrupted the subjugation of the Germans (I. 35), interfered also here and had the same bad effect. Tiberius declined his stepfather’s commission, and in the absence of a suitable princely general the Roman government for some years looked on, inactive for good or evil, at the doings of the anti-Roman party in Armenia under Parthian protection. At length, in the year 753 {1 B.C.}, not merely was the same commission given to the elder adopted son of the emperor, Gaius Caesar, at the age of twenty, but the subjugation of Armenia was to be, as the father hoped, the beginning of greater things; the Oriental campaign of the crown-prince of twenty was, we might almost say, to continue the expedition of Alexander. Literati commissioned by the emperor or in close relations to the court, the geographer Isidorus, himself at home at the mouth of the Euphrates, and king Juba of Mauretania, the representative of Greek learning among the princely personages of the Augustan circle, dedicated--the former his information personally acquired in the East, the latter his literary collections on Arabia--to the young prince, who appeared to burn with the desire of achieving the conquest of that land--over which Alexander had met his death--as a brilliant compensation for a miscarriage of the Augustan government which a considerable time ago had there occurred. In the first instance for Armenia this mission was just as successful as that of Tiberius. The Roman crown-prince and the Parthian great-king Phraataces met personally on an island of the Euphrates; the Parthians once more gave up Armenia, the imminent danger of a Parthian war was