As ancient historians expand the field to examine peoples beyond Greece and Rome, a key methodological question arises: how can historians integrate analyses of Graeco-Roman history with the perspectives of those who work on non-Classical cultures? This issue is particularly pressing for scholars of the ancient Near East, as many working on the region have recognised the need to approach it from multiple perspectives.Footnote ¹ When considered together, the two books under review here, Overtoom’s The Parthians at War and Watson’s The Role of the Army in the Government of the Roman Near East , reveal potential ways in which scholars can bridge this disciplinary divide and write accounts that build off of each other to create more inclusive and more complex histories of the ancient Mediterranean.

Overtoom’s book is the latest in a series of exciting new research on the Parthian Empire (cf. pp. 4–5 nn. 7, 8 and 10 for an overview of this scholarship). He emphasises the importance of writing accounts that foreground the agency of the Parthians (Chapter 1), their ability to chart their own course when encountering their western neighbours. He focuses on Parthia’s earliest centuries and their wars with the Seleucid empire and the Roman republic, from the third century bce to the late first century bce (though he touches on later periods).

Initially (Chapter 2), Overtoom presents an overview of how Parthia’s nomadic heritage and approach to warfare fostered political and military methods that proved successful against the Seleucids and Rome. Central to his account is cavalry, as he fleshes out the different types of cavalry that were employed and how this reliance on cavalry compelled Parthia to structure its campaigns in certain ways. He emphasises how the need to supply tens of thousands of horses made it difficult for Parthian armies to stay in one place for too long. Siege warfare, as a result, was not something to which they were well suited. Cavalry gave the Parthians increased speed and manoeuvrability, which impacted the different tactical and strategic approaches that Overtoom outlines in the discussion of several major battles and wars (Chapter 3). Overtoom uses his knowledge of Parthian military tactics to reframe Graeco-Roman accounts of battles with Parthia. For example, he shows how Parthia’s ‘feigned retreat’, far from a sign of innate cowardice, formed part of a tactic to strike a foe and then withdraw to take advantage of their horses’ speed and their special composite bow’s power and accuracy (pp. 43–55). (The other two tactics he discusses are the Massed Assault of heavy cataphract cavalry and Hit-and-Run tactic. Larger strategies that were applied to full campaigns included Overwhelm, Harass and Deceptive Withdraw, cf. pp. 54ff.)

This analysis goes beyond military tactics, and one of Overtoom’s most interesting contributions is his assertation that ‘Ultimately, the Parthians did not view battle in the same terms as the Greeks and Romans’, so that concepts like victory and defeat meant something different to them (p. 55). ‘Retreating’ was not necessarily a source of shame or defeat for Parthia, but a manoeuvre to turn the tide of a battle or war (pp. 106–8).

Overtoom then analyses (Chapter 3) how Greek and Roman literary sources perceived and depicted Parthian warfare and internal politics. He emphasises how the Parthians were ‘a peculiar blend of various barbarous characteristics’ (p. 149). While these authors consistently saw Parthians as eastern in their duplicity and fickle character, their prowess in battle against Roman and Greek forces meant that they did not neatly map onto Roman stereotypes of East and West. This argument makes an important contribution to an often overlooked question, how Rome’s failure to conquer Parthia impacted its ideologies of the eastern other (for my own views on this subject, see Clark, ‘Processing into Dominance: Nero, the Crowning of Tiridates I, and a New Narrative of Rome’s Supremacy in the East’, Journal of Ancient History 9 [2022]). Overtoom details (Chapter 4) the many confrontations between Parthia and the Seleucids over Babylonia and how, by the early first century bce, the area had emerged as a key ‘staging area’ for future Parthian military operations (pp. 183ff.).

Overtoom then recontextualises the origins of Roman-Parthian conflict (Chapter 5) within a fundamental tension that all Parthian (and later Sasanian) rulers faced: between the aristocrats of the western empire and those of the eastern Iranian plateau. Mithridates IV and Orodes II vied for the Parthian throne in the 50s bce, which split the aristocracy into opposing camps. One of the most important eastern families, the Suren, sided with Orodes, while Mithridates’ base of power was limited to Babylonia and Media. To acquire additional support, Mithridates secured an alliance with Gabinius, the governor of Syria, in 56/55. This alliance was short-lived, because Gabinius abandoned it to deal with a crisis in Egypt. Gabinius thus made future Roman confrontation with Parthia likely. Mithridates was angry that the Roman had shirked him, while Orodes was upset at Roman hostility toward him in the first place. When Orodes II emerged victorious, Overtoom reveals how this anger toward Gabinius merged with desires to expand Parthian power westward to compel the king of kings to attack Rome (pp. 205–27).

Overtoom corrects Graeco-Roman accounts of Carrhae, which were principally concerned with blackening Crassus’ character, finding an explanation for the Roman defeat in the general’s greed, desire to win glory and lack of leadership. These moral failings became a literary topos well into late antiquity (pp. 235–45). Overtoom sees such explanations as a way for these authors to render Crassus ‘a useful cautionary’ tale and avoid deeper questions about what problems with Rome’s approach to Parthia led to its defeat (p. 247). In focusing on Crassus, ancient authors by extension left no room for the possibility that Parthia’s actions helped win such a decisive victory. Overtoom’s analysis provides a much-needed corrective to a tendency to take these accounts at face value (p. 245 n. 68).

Finally (Chapter 6), Overtoom argues for a broader conception of the relations between Rome and Parthia. He uses International Relations theory’s idea of system overlap, when ‘two contemporary, yet separate interstate systems extend over a similar frontier zone’ (p. 263). The Parthians had created one such system in the second century bce, and the Romans had established their own that stretched into the Near East by the first century bce. After the initial conflicts between the empires, Parthia and Rome fused their systems together to create what Overtoom terms the ‘“Iranian-Mediterranean Interstate System”’ (p. 265). This idea allows Overtoom to conceptualise future Partho-Roman conflicts as connected phases in a wider geopolitical rivalry that extended over a large geographic expanse.

Watson’s book seeks to thread a needle between two opposing views of scholarship on Roman administration: between those like E.N. Luttwak, who claimed Rome created an organised system of defence along its limes, and others, like C.R. Whittaker and G.K. Young, who focus on social and economic factors as the driving forces behind Roman involvement in the provinces (pp. 33–40). Watson offers an effective middle ground, wherein the Roman state functioned ‘as an overarching administrator, albeit limited and ad hoc, but still performing the basic functions of government as part of a military occupation’ (p. 39). This thesis addresses Watson’s key questions: what exactly was provincial administration and what did it look like on a local level?

Watson divides Roman administration in the provinces of Syria, Judaea, Mesopotamia and Osrhoene, and Arabia into a sequence of administrative apparatuses. Networks (Chapter 1), i.e. new and refurbished roads, allowed Roman soldiers to move between major nodes of control. Roman soldiers largely built and used major roads, like the Via Maris along the Mediterranean, or roads whose proximity to major rivers (the Tigris, Euphrates or Khabur) allowed the network to be extended over water. Inscriptions, in particular milestones, are Watson’s main evidence for when these roads were built and by whom.

These networks connected centres (Chapter 2), that is, larger cities, like Bostra or Jerusalem, that often boasted a legionary base, to stations (Chapter 3), smaller military installations that were responsible for administering a catchment area in their immediate vicinity, but who reported to the centre. Through epigraphic and papyrological evidence Watson discusses the process of sending out detachments (vexillations) from legions based in centres to stations. These stations were usually located in places where they could control access into the interior of the province, such as river crossings along the Euphrates or major road junctions. For example, Palmyra served as its own centre to guard the middle Euphrates, with inscriptions attesting to a military presence there by the late second and early third centuries ce. Milestones, a dedicatory altar by a prefect, and grave markers attest to Palmyrene troops being dispatched to stations in the hinterlands around the city (pp. 107–16).

The process of Roman soldiers building this infrastructure signals for Watson the transition from the provinces as war-zones (Chapter 4), in which Roman soldiers violently repressed revolts, to a military occupation, where troops maintained Rome’s power, such as through tax collection (Chapters 5 and 6; cf. the discussion of the collection of the portoria tax, pp. 211–17). The role of these soldiers was not necessarily to support the interests of the local citizens, but ‘to take action to defend and uphold Roman hegemony and rule, and also [to] take offensive action when’ the emperor asked for it (p. 229). In this model Watson argues for a series of replicated levels of Roman military-administrative authority. At the local level, prefects and other military commanders oversaw a region around a station. These ‘district commanders’ took their authority from the governor, who could send out vexillations from the centres of the province (p. 266). The governor, in turn, took his mandate from the emperor. By the third century troops in the Near Eastern provinces did not constitute a single ‘defensive frontier’, but ‘an expanding occupation, as the empire transitioned from a hegemonic command of nations … to a stretch of directly ruled territory that was widely occupied’ (pp. 270–1). Thus, most provincials saw little distinction between Roman troops and Roman administrators because, often, these were one and the same (p. 272). Watson emphasises how most of these changes can be dated to the Flavians and to the second and third centuries ce, from which he takes much of the evidence.

I see two broad areas where future research would connect these books’ ideas. First, combining these works fleshes out one part of how Overtoom’s interstate geopolitical system operated in practice: how especially from the Flavian period Roman officials took an increased interest in and developed the infrastructure of imperial administration on or near the Parthian frontier. I agree with Watson that these soldiers were not stationed in these areas solely for defence. However, while Watson acknowledges the threat from Parthia (and later the Sasanians), he does not consider the impact of transimperial wars on the eastern Roman provinces, even though he focuses on the second and third centuries ce, when these wars were at their highest frequency. These were moments when divisions within Overtoom’s interstate system were especially fraught, when the two systems were intermixing. As Rome continued to fight beyond the Euphrates, how did the pressures of feeding, arming and informing Roman troops disrupt Watson’s system of replicated authority? How did the networks, centres and stations react to Parthia’s emphasis on quick-moving, mobile cavalry, especially when either state crossed into each other’s territory? How did Parthia adjust its tactics when they encountered a military force that, though not as mobile as them, could move around the region via an extensive road network? How might Watson’s conclusions complicate Overtoom’s Iranian-Mediterranean Interstate System?

Second, and on a related note, both books reveal how different forms of administration led to different ideas of empire. While the Arsacids boasted a capital at Ctesiphon, their emphasis on cavalry-based warfare meant that cities were not as important. Parthian ideas of retreat and victory could be radically different from their western counterparts: what the Romans and Seleucids saw as cowardice was actually smart tactics. Watson shows how Rome, by contrast, centred its administration around centres and stations, linked together by road networks; maintaining Roman administrative power in certain areas was central to how Rome managed its empire and conceived of its imperial project. I think that more work needs to be done to answer two related questions. First, what were the relationships between ideologies of empire and how an empire was administered and fought for? Second, how did these impacts of administrative practices and military strategy on ideology (and vice versa) within either empire impact Roman-Parthian relations with and perceptions of each other? Answering such questions would use the work on both empire’s internal politics to better inform their inter-imperial interactions. Knowing that the Parthians and Romans had very different ideas of what constituted ‘victory’, for example, offers intriguing possibilities to explain why these two states fought so many wars for so long.

In short, I believe that these two books will become important works to refer to, as scholarship seeks new ways to write the history of the ancient Near East. Overtoom provides valuable correctives to Graeco-Roman stereotypes of the Parthians, giving them their own agency within their own histories. Watson shows one way in which Roman administrators balanced ad-hoc, localised governance with broader structures of political power in the Roman east. These books, when combined, offer new possibilities for how a truly multicultural, interdisciplinary history of the ancient Mediterranean can be approached.