In recent years, Nikolaus Overtoom has emerged as one of the most prolific representatives of a new generation of scholarship on the Arsakid (Parthian) Empire. With a focus on warfare in its tactical and strategic aspects and a “revisionist” interest in establishing, as much as the sources allow, a “Parthian Perspective” on the dynastic origins, the establishment of the Empire, and its expansion in the mid-3rd and 2nd century BCE, Overtoom has insistently pleaded for giving the Arsakids back their due as accomplished warriors, shrewd diplomats, and successful Empire-builders, even in the face of Rome’s rising power across what once was the Ancient Near East. Accordingly, his first book was devoted to the ascent of the imperial family within the broader context of the post-Alexandrian Near East and made a convincing case for viewing the Arsakids as a major drive in its restructuring, rather than a reactive force to events taking place primarily further to the West.[1]
The Parthians at War is an ambitious attempt at presenting an exhaustive overview of the Parthian military in order to better understand the structural reasons behind the Empire’s success and longevity (the most enduring of all pre-Islamic Īrānian dynasties). At the same time, the book also seeks to redress what the author claims to be ongoing scholarly biases towards the Classical sources – often, one has to admit, the only available semi-extensive narrative accounts on multiple events across the vast expanse of the Arsakid realm, with indigenous evidence such as the Babylonian diaries covering comparatively shorter geographical ground and further documents in Parthian or Middle Persian being fragmented, fewer in number, and perhaps more limited in their value for the scope of a book such as this (while at the same time irreplaceable on matters such as the imperial economy, at least in localized areas, on which one may drew upon to attempt theoretical modelling on the army’s resources). As part of this project, The Parthians at War also seeks to put forward a new interpretation of the causes behind the first sustained conflict between the expanding Empire and the late Imperial Republic (emblematically represented by, but, as Overtoom argues, by no means recapitulated in, Crassus defeat at Carrhae in 53 BC), fronting dynastic infights and the high-politics of Parthia as one crucial, if not the main, drive behind the conflict, which in Overtoom view brought about the geopolitical framework of the late 1st Millennium BCE Near East (rather than freezing an already established status quo), with significant repercussions over the centuries to come.
As the author himself admits, The Parthians is part of a larger project, begun with Reign of Arrows, and to be further expanded with a forthcoming third monograph (King of Kings, repeatedly quoted in The Parthians and presented as forthcoming in 2026), and, as such, it draws extensively from the findings of the other books. It is divided into six chapters. Following a synthetic general introduction aimed at contextualizing the analysis to follow in the broader historical horizon described in Reign of Arrows, but expanded here to include events down to Augustus’ diplomatic move in 20 BC to retrieve Crassus’ banners and the mission of Gaius Caesar in Mesopotamia of 1/2 CE, the core of the volume comprises an extensive chapter on the tactics and workings of the Parthian military (pp. 24-138: to a considerable extent an expanded presentation of Overtoom’s model of what he calls the Arsakid “asymmetric mode of warfare”, on which he has already extensively written in previous publications). This is followed by a discussion of the extant literary sources on the “reputation” of the Arsakids as warriors – perhaps better: how authors such as Strabo, Dio, Pliny, or Plutarch presented the Arsakids to their public; there is an element of literary construction and intentional “othering” here that may needed to be stressed more in its implications rather than treating it as more or less a layer to be removed, through Quellenforschuung or, sometimes, special pleading of bias to retrieve (much needed) Arsakid agency. Next comes a focus on Babylon and Mesopotamia and its strategic and economic importance for Arsakid Empire building (pp. 183-204): here, the cuneiform evidence, which has been made increasingly available even to non-Assyriologists, could perhaps have been exploited more extensively, particularly considering parallel attempts at leveraging Akkadian evidence from Babylon to understand the working mechanisms of other Īrānian Empires, most obviously the Achaemenids.[2] The last two chapters are a sustained attempt to re-read the available evidence for the «truest causes» behind the outbreak of the conflict that culminated (but neither began nor ended) at Carrhae, from the standpoint of the increasingly factional Arsakid family and its tensions with the local aristocracy (particularly in the East). From Overtoom’s account, Rome’s Eastern rivals come out as proactive, assertive, and skilled politicians, whose domestic concerns, at least in the beginning, catalyzed the dynastic attention and energy much more than the growing power in the West – which the author argues remained, until Carrhae, relatively nebulous to the Arsakids, and vice versa. More than individual ambitions and the whole array of «biographical» reasons (centered on the personality of specific individuals, most egregiously Crassus, whose agency in the events behind and during Carrhae Overtoom tries to reassess, and to an extent downplay, in light of broader structural factors), the war between Rome and Parthia was driven, the author argues, by broader geopolitical dynamics, which he subsumes under the sobriquet of a «system merger» (p. 264) between two spheres of influence, one Mediterranean, progressively monopolized by Rome, and the other Īrānian, where the Arsakids took the lead with increasing speed since at least the 170s, which ushered into a «bipolar […] interstate system» (p. 268) the fault line of which was eventually established along the Euphrates. Here, one core tenet of Overtoom scholarship emerges (already amply on display in Reign of Arrows and in the legacy of his mentor, Arthur Eckstein), namely the use of theoretical approaches drawn from International Relations Theory to examine the sociopolitical environment of the Ancient Near East and the broader Mediterranean world. The last chapter (Legacy and Rivalry in the Western Sources, pp. 225-287) offers a long-term perspective on the role that the Arsakids came to play in the Roman imagination, constantly swinging between tongue-in-cheek acknowledgement of their military fearfulness and enduring stereotypes about the “Oriental Other”, behind which steadily lurked Rome’s frustrated ambitions for world hegemony.
The volume is ambitious, and once more showcases Overtoom’s command of the Classical sources as well as his broad view over recent and older scholarship on the topic. Were it only for the amount of loci he collects and discusses, The Parthians would provide a worthwhile contribution as a sourcebook on Arsakid warfare as Greek and Roman authors saw it (though it is evident that the scope of the volume is considerably larger than this). Commendable as the attempt is, some contentious points remain – at least in my view – which are listed below not so much as to raise eyebrows, but as a genuine attempt at fostering further discussion and teasing out possible lines of research on a topic which, and in this respect Overtoom is certainly right, necessitates more work and further sophistication in the way scholars approach it.
Ona may begin with the overwhelming space that Classical literary accounts enjoy in the analysis. While one can do little but acknowledge that often, there is literally nothing else to go by, comparative evidence from earlier and later Empires controlling the same area or larger territories could have been leveraged to tackle critical issues such as the granular working of the army’s logistics (a topic repeatedly mentioned across the book but never discussed in the detail it may have deserved) or – arguably as important – the ideological implications for the spectacle of kingship intrinsic in the Great King’s capacity to summon, if necessary, 50000 cavalrymen in one place and commanding the subservience of lesser kings and aristocrats from Babylonia to the Central Asian steppes.[3]
A second, arguably related, issue pertains to the rather static picture of the Arsakid mode(s) of warfare emerging from The Parthians (and already detailed in Reign of Arrows). Sure enough, attempts at categorization for the sake of commensurability, cross-cultural comparison, or simply narrativity are necessary, hence there may be some who may profit from Overtoom’s classification of Arsakid tactics (“Feign Retreat, Defeat in Detail”, “Massed Assault Tactic”, and its corresponding “Overwhelm Strategy”, and “Harass Strategy” – compounded by the “Hit-and-Run Tactic”). Yet, besides the impression that such a vocabulary may awaken, of a contemporary military academy handbook whose classificatory logics may have been alien to the historical subjects discussed (a comparison with the terminology adopted in actual ancient military treatises, albeit later, from Vegetius to Maourikios’ would have been interesting), what strikes as perhaps not entirely convincing is the enduring sense of eternal return of the same that emerges from the narrative. Is it historically plausible that an enormous and sophisticated Empire such as the Arsakids’ retained more or less the same military approach to an evolving world over centuries, without, furthermore, their adversaries ever truly figuring out what they were facing? Even assuming that the “Parthians’ nomadic roots” (p. 41) of their militarism left an overbearing impact on the Arsakids’ mode of warfare (a claim which would need to be argued from a world-historical perspective rather than assumed), scholarship on “nomadic Empires”, including the – comparatively rather infrequent – “equestrian” political formations such as the Comanches or the Xiōngnú, would have provided Overtoom with invaluable comparative evidence to at least ventilate the possibility of change, while also allowing for a deeper dive into the ecological potentials and challenges that such a sophisticated by highly taxing way of life (as equestrianism is much more than just a mode of war) bring with them – something gestured at many times in the book but never fully discussed as it would have deserved.[4]
Finally, it remained to be seen whether International Relations Theory, its “nuanced concepts and terminology” (p. 262), nevertheless affords the best theoretical framework from which to approach the world of the Arsakids and their rivals (or arguably any other imperial reality, ancient and modern). As recent comparative scholarship, and world-historical in its approach (to sum up: the Imperial Turn), has convincingly shown, Empires are not states. The concept of boundaries is entirely foreign to their ruling classes (“borderlands”, as a forthcoming massive volume on the topic will detail, are not the same thing as nation-state borders).[5] Universalism is much more than a rhetorical trope, and mental maps, as well as “inherited geographies,” dramatically shape both political action and the narrative of our sources (such as Plutarch’s claim that Cesar’s Parthian campaign aimed at making the Roman world “bound by the ocean”: Caes. 58.6-7, whose millennia-old Near Eastern background thoroughly escapes Overtoom’s discussion).[6] As the valiant effort, among whose practitioners Overtoom certainly stands out, to bring the Arsakids back into the mainstream of historiographical discussion and teaching, moves ahead, it would be important to substantiate it with the appropriate theoretical toolkit and the long-term, broad ranging perspective which so much is doing in changing our approach to other imperial experiences, not just in the Near East, but the world around.
This having been said, The Parthians at War merits detailed discussion and engagement by specialists of both Rome and Ancient Īrān at large. The further chapter of Overtoom’s project is eagerly awaited to see in which direction his study of one among the Near East’s longest living Empires will move.
Notes
[1] Nikolaus L. Overtoom, Reign of arrows: the rise of the Parthian empire in the Hellenistic Middle East (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2020). Cf. furthermore Marek J. Olbrycht, Early Arsakid Parthia (ca. 250-165 B.C.): at the crossroads of Iranian, Hellenistic, and central Asian history (Leiden, Brill, 2021): the history of the dynastic origins seems to have become a major focus of scholarly research recently. On the need of re-orienting the history of the Hellenistic and post-Hellenistic world cf. also Khodadad Rezakhani, Reorienting the Sasanians: east Iran in late antiquity (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2017).
[2] Sean Manning, Armed force in the Teispid-Achaemenid Empire: past approaches, future prospects (Stuttgart, Steiner, 2021).
[3] In this respect, John Hyland’s recent Persia’s Greek Campaigns: Kingship, War, and Spectacle on the Achaemenid Frontier (Oxford, Oxford University Press) offers a model to be studied closely by anyone attempting a similar undertaking for Empires following the Achaemenids’ across the Ancient Near East and beyond.
[4] See particularly Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire (New Haven (CT), Yale University Press, 2008) and id., Lakota America. A New History of Indigenous Power (New Haven (CT), Yale University Press, 2019), with Bryan K. Miller, Xiongnu. The World’s Fist Nomadic Empire (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2024).
[5] Robert Rollinger and Julian Degen (eds.), Contextualizing Imperial Borderlands (9th c. BC – 9th c. AD, and Beyond), (Wiesbaden, Harrassowitz, 2026)
[6] Julian Degen, “Approaching ‘Inherited Geographies’ in the Ancient Worlds” in Navigating the Worlds of History. Studies in Honor of Robert Rollinger on the Occasion of his 60th Birthday, edited by Kai Ruffing, Brigitte Truschnegg, Andreas Rudigier, Julian Degen, Sebastian Fink, and Kordula Schnegg, 49-84 (Wiesbaden, Harrassowitz, 2024).