Cut Off His Ears
- sulla80
- 5 hours ago
- 9 min read
Meherdates grew up a hostage in Rome. Tacitus, our primary source, does not say when Meherdates arrived in Rome or how long he had lived there however, by 49 AD, but he had evidently grown to adulthood away from the Parthian court.
Meherdates was the son of Vonones I (king of Parthia, reign 8 to 12 AD), grandson of Phraates IV (reign 37 to 2 BC), great-grandson of Orodes II (reign 57 to 37 BC), and great-great-grandson of Phraates III (reign c. 70 to 57 BC). That lineage carried a family habit of exile in Rome.
Father of Meherdates
In 10 or 9 BC, Phraates IV sent several of his sons, including the future Vonones I, to Rome as a pledge of peace with Augustus. Augustus later cited the arrangement in his own account of his reign, the Res Gestae Divi Augusti, as proof of Parthian submission.
Vonones grew up at Rome and was recalled to the Parthian throne in 8 AD after a succession crisis, but Parthian nobles found him too Roman in his manners and turned against him within four years. Artabanus II, from a rival branch of the family, drove him out. Vonones fled first to Armenia, then into Roman territory, where he lived under guard until his death in 19 AD while trying to escape.
The Coin
A silver drachm struck at Ecbatana, the old Median capital that is modern Hamedan, Iran, shows the facing head of a young king. He is beardless except for a mustache.
This same coin has been attributed over many years to multiple kings:
Meherdates per Visconti (1811), Lindsay (1852) and Assar (2011);
Vardanes II per Gardner (1877) and Wroth (1903);
Vonones II per Sellwood (1971) and Shore (1993).
AR drachm (3.82g, 20mm), dated AD 49/50.
Obv: no legend, facing bust wearing tiara and diadem, beardless but for a mustache, wart on the temple, flanked by two stars.
Rev: debased and illegible Greek legend, Arsakes I seated right on throne, holding bow.
Ref: Sellwood 67.1; Shore 368; Sunrise Collection 417; BMC Parthia p. 190, 1 (as Vardanes II); Gardner pl. VI, 3; Visconti, Iconographie grecque III, §15, pl. no. 7.
David Sellwood's 1971 die study remains the standard reference frame for Parthian coinage. He catalogued this drachm as his Type 67. Parthian coins of this period carry no legend naming the ruler by his personal name, so identifying the face has always depended on combining the coin's style and die links with the literary record, chiefly the Roman historian Tacitus.
A Petition to Rome
After Artabanus II's death around 40 AD, his soon's Gotarzes II and Vardanes spent several years in intermittent rivalry with one another, before the reaching an accommodation. Around 46 or 47 AD, ancient and modern sources disagree on the exact year, Vardanes was murdered. Tacitus records the confusion that followed:
"By the murder of Vardanes Parthian affairs were thrown into confusion, as there was no unanimity with regard to his successor. Many leaned to Gotarzes; some to Phraates' descendant Meherdates, who had been given in hostage to the Romans. Then Gotarzes carried the day, made himself master of the palace, and by dint of cruelty and debauchery drove the Parthians to send a secret petition to the Roman emperor, pleading that Meherdates might be set free to ascend the throne of his fathers."
-Tacitus, Annals 11.10Tacitus does not name the petitioners, and no other surviving source confirms how widely the discontent with Gotarzes actually ran. His account of Gotarzes's misrule is the only testimony that survives, so the scale of opposition to Gotarzes is uncertain.
The March to the Corma
The Parthian embassy reached Rome in early 49 AD. After a debate in the Senate, the emperor Claudius agreed to release Meherdates and ordered Gaius Cassius Longinus, the governor of Roman Syria, to escort him to the Euphrates. There Meherdates was joined by Akbaros, king of Osroene in northern Mesopotamia, and by a group of Parthian nobles including Karenes, usually identified as the governor of Media Magna, the region around Ecbatana, though Tacitus nowhere states his office outright.
Cassius warned Meherdates that his newly gathered escort of eastern allies was unlikely to hold together, and Karenes separately urged him to take the short route into Mesopotamia while Gotarzes's forces were still unprepared. Meherdates ignored both warnings.
He was delayed at Edessa and then chose a longer march through Armenia, arriving in Adiabene, a kingdom east of the upper Tigris in what is now northern Iraq, only in early winter. Its king, Izates, received him outwardly but was secretly in contact with Gotarzes. By the time the two armies faced each other, Gotarzes had bribed both Izates and Akbaros into deserting Meherdates.
Meherdates fought anyway. The armies met at the river Corma, a location not otherwise identified in the surviving sources, with what Tacitus describes as great slaughter and an uncertain outcome, until Karenes pressed his own advance too far and was cut off and destroyed. With his position lost, Meherdates trusted the promises of Parraces, a vassal of his own father, and was betrayed into Gotarzes's hands.
Tacitus gives the outcome in full:
"Gotarzes, emboldened by the depletion of the enemy, did not decline an engagement, and the armies met, with great slaughter and dubious success; until Carenes, who had broken the forces opposed to him, carried his advance too far and was cut off by fresh troops in his rear. With all hope lost, Meherdates now listened to the promises of his father's vassal Parraces, and, by an act of perfidy on his part, was thrown into chains and surrendered to the victor; who, upbraiding him as no relative of his, nor a member of the Arsacian house, but an alien and a Roman, struck off his ears and commanded him to live, an advertisement of his own mercy and of our dishonour."
-Tacitus, Annals 12.14Gotarzes's insult, that Meherdates was "an alien and a Roman" echoed the same charge that had driven his father from the throne a generation earlier. He cut off Meherdates's ears let Gotarzes spare his rival's life while permanently ending his claim to rule. The surrender is usually placed in 50 AD. Gotarzes himself died in June of 51 AD, of illness according to Tacitus and by murder according to the Jewish historian Josephus, and was briefly succeeded by his uncle Vonones II and then by Vonones's son Vologases I.
Gotarzes may have commemorated the campaign in stone. On the cliff at Bisotun in western Iran, below the great inscription of Darius I, a weathered Parthian relief shows a horseman charging with lowered lance while a winged Victory hovers above him with a diadem. A roughly cut Greek inscription names the rider ΓΩΤΑΡΖΗΣ ΓΕΟΠΟΘΡΟΣ, "Gotarzes son of Gev." A second, damaged name on the relief was read by nineteenth-century editors as a debased form of Mithrates.
Many Attributions
Ennio Quirino Visconti (Paris, 1811) devoted section 15 of the third volume of his Iconographie grecque to "Méherdate" and connected this coin type. The plate captioned "Meerdate" and "Meherdate" in the Milan reprint of 1826.
John Lindsay's A View of the History and Coinage of the Parthians (1852) kept the attribution but was candid about his reservation. Under the heading "Meherdates, 49 or 50, A.D." he wrote:
"The drachmas assigned to this young prince, present a full face with a large rose or star at each side, and their attribution to Meherdates seems to have been adopted rather from their youthful portrait and the letters of their legends corresponding with this era of Parthian history, than from any evidence of a more decisive character.
-Lindsay, A View of the History and Coinage of the Parthians, p. 154Lindsay nonetheless accepted the attribution and offered a supporting argument of his own from the small bronze coins that share the same facing portrait.
Percy Gardner moved the coin to a different king. In The Parthian Coinage (London, 1877) he catalogued the drachm under Vardanes II as "Head of Vardanes facing in tiara, on either side, star". His Vardanes II is a historically attested figure: Tacitus, Annals 13.7, records that a son of Vologases I named Vardanes rose in rivalry against his father, and a group of dated tetradrachms of 55 to 58 AD was already assigned to that revolt.
Warwick Wroth, cataloguing the British Museum's Parthian coins in 1903, kept Gardner's heading but doubted it in print. In his introduction he noted that "several numismatists have assigned coins to Vardanes struck during the time of his supposed rival kingship," and then objected:
"It seems a fair criticism of these attributions to say that they furnish Vardanes with an extremely heterogeneous currency. For while the tetradrachms (no. i.) show a bearded head of the ordinary diademed type, the drachms (no. ii.) have a full-face helmeted head which is beardless; and the combination of bearded and beardless heads is the more remarkable because Vardanes (assuming, for the moment, the tetradrachms (no. i.) to be his) can only have reigned for about three years."
-Wroth, Catalogue of the Coins of Parthia pp. l-liWroth resolved the difficulty by giving the bearded tetradrachms elsewhere and leaving the facing-head drachms as, in his words, "the only coins to which Vardanes II may lay claim." In the catalogue proper, the entry for the drachm (p. 190, no. 1) describes the bust as "beardless, facing; wart on temple" and carries the note: "The attribution of coins to Vardanes II is somewhat doubtful".
David Sellwood's An Introduction to the Coinage of Parthia (London: Spink, 1971; 2nd ed. 1980) reorganized the Parthian series by die links and introduced the type numbering that numismatists still use. Sellwood catalogued the coin as Type 67 and moved it again, this time to Vonones II, the uncle of Gotarzes whom Tacitus places on the throne for a few months in 51 AD. Fred B. Shore's Parthian Coins & History: Ten Dragons Against Rome (Quarryville, Pennsylvania, 1993) followed Sellwood, listing the drachms as nos. 368 and 369 and the bronze as nos. 594 and 595, all under Vonones II.
The most recent reattribution from G.R.F. Assar, in Numismatic Art of Persia: The Sunrise Collection, goes back to Meherdates and the type is numbered 417 to 418.
Assar's argument rests on four points.
Literary and numismatic evidence rules out Vonones II as the issuer, since Vonones II's reign of a few months in 51 AD was too brief and too troubled to account for a coinage of this size.
Apart from a single unique specimen, the Type 67 drachms were struck from a large number of different obverse and reverse dies, implying a substantial output, more consistent with financing a war than with a short accession.
The facing bust wears a tiara of the type that Phraates III had introduced on his first coinage, Sellwood Type 37.1, and retains the forehead wart of that family; Assar reads the revived tiara as a deliberate visual claim of descent from Phraates III through Orodes II and Phraates IV, the very line that ran to Meherdates.
Karenes, Meherdates's ally in Tacitus and probably the governor of Media Magna, would have had access to the Arsacid mint at Ecbatana and its silver, and Assar proposes that Karenes diverted some of that capacity to strike coins for Meherdates's campaign.
The third point is Visconti's argument in a new key. Visconti read the stars as borrowed from the drachms of Phraates IV, Orodes and Phraates III; Assar reads the tiara as borrowed from Phraates III. Both scholars conclude that the coin advertises descent from the line of Phraates rather than from the line of Artabanus, and both use that conclusion to exclude the kings of Artabanus's line.
None of the four points is independently certain: the die count is a matter of record, but the meaning of the tiara and Karenes's control of the mint are interpretations of indirect evidence.
Parthian Attributions
Almost every Arsacid king struck his coins under the dynastic throne name Arsakes rather than his own personal name, a practice that goes back to the founder in the third century BC, so identifying which historical king lies behind an unlabeled facing bust has always required an argument, weighed against the literary sources and against the coin's own die links, rather than a plain reading of an inscription. Meherdates is the best-supported name at present, and it is also the oldest. It should be read as the strongest current case rather than as a settled fact closed to future revision.
Chris Hopkins had a concordance for all Parthia coins at Parthia.com.
Bibliography
Ancient sources
Tacitus. Annals: Books IV-VI, XI-XII. Translated by John Jackson. Loeb Classical Library 312. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1937. Book 11. Book 12.
Tacitus. Annals: Books XIII-XVI. Translated by John Jackson. Loeb Classical Library 322. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1937. Book 13.7.
Modern sources
Assar, G. R. F. Historical and numismatic commentary on the Parthian coins. In Numismatic Art of Persia: The Sunrise Collection, Part I: Ancient, 650 BC to AD 650, edited by Bradley R. Nelson. Lancaster, PA: Classical Numismatic Group, 2011.
Boyce, Mary, A. D. H. Bivar, and A. Shapur Shahbazi. "Gōdarz." Encyclopaedia Iranica, vol. XI, fasc. 1 (2001), pp. 31-39; online edition.
Foy-Vaillant, Jean. Arsacidarum imperium, sive, Regum Parthorum historia, ad fidem numismatum accommodata. Paris: Charles Moette, 1725.
Gardner, Percy. The Parthian Coinage. International Numismata Orientalia. London, 1877.
Lindsay, John. A View of the History and Coinage of the Parthians, with Descriptive Catalogues and Tables. London: John Crowe, 1852.
Sellwood, David. An Introduction to the Coinage of Parthia. 2nd ed. London: Spink, 1980.
Shore, Fred B. Parthian Coins & History: Ten Dragons Against Rome. Quarryville, PA, 1993.
Visconti, Ennio Quirino. Iconographie grecque. Vol. 3. Paris: P. Didot l'aîné, 1811. §15, "Méherdate," pp. 119-121. Milan reprint of 1826.
Wroth, Warwick. Catalogue of the Coins of Parthia. British Museum Catalogue. London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1903. Pl. XXIX 15 & 16.
An interesting coin & article 😊. I like the front-facing portraits on Parthian coins, they often look intimidating.