Artaxias II and the Murder of the Romans in Greater Armenia
Abstract
In 30 BC, by the order of the king of Armenia Artaxias II, all Romans in the kingdom were killed. However, this crime had virtually no effect on the reign of the new king of Armenia. A significant Roman presence in Armenia during this period is confirmed neither by material sources nor by numismatic evidence. More rational may be the hypothesis about Roman merchants who fell victim to the Armenian sword, but their presence in Greater Armenia is just an assumption. In our view, there were simply not enough Roman citizens for a massacre in Armenia. Most likely, if there were victims (and this cannot be denied, since it was Artaxias who seized his father's kingdom), then they were Roman soldiers who might not have had time to leave the kingdom to help Antony. Given the means of communication available in this era, this would not be surprising. But the king of Armenia simply did not have the opportunity to carry out a massacre similar to that perpetrated by Mithridates in Asia. In our view, the story of a murder of Roman citizens by the order of Artaxias II, which, for objective reasons, could not have been a mass event, can be attributed to Roman propaganda, which was preparing the ground for a possible forceful removal of the king of Armenia. However, the refusal of Augustus to take active steps in the East in the 20s BC apparently weakened the intensity of the spread of rumors about a massacre of Romans. The method of overthrowing Artaxias II no longer required the popularization of stories about the murder of Roman citizens, which probably did not go beyond Italy and found virtually no reflection in the sources. At the same time, Augustus himself probably believed that propaganda had formed such a negative image of Artaxias II in the Roman eyes that the possibility of turning Greater Armenia into a Roman province could be openly discussed.
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