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It was the Paththeians who destroyed a 40,000 strong Roman army at Curry and killed Marcus Cassus, a co-ruler of Rome alongside Caesar and Pompy. Yet Iran's greatest epic, the Shaame, which retells the story of the country in such detail that it took decades of work, gives the Paththean Empire just 27 lines. And these were the people who for five centuries held the border along the Euphrates, the line where legion after legion was shattered, and Rome could never break them. How did an empire that Rome itself feared end up erased from memory? almost without a trace. And who erased it, its enemies or its own people? To understand where Paththeia even came from, we have to go back to the day Alexander the Great died and his
enormous empire burst apart at the seams. The east fell to the Greeks, to the Seucid dynasty, the heirs of Alexander's generals. But holding a realm that stretched from the Mediterranean to India was impossible. And by the middle of the 3rd century BC, the Seucids began losing their grip on the far northeast, bogged down in endless wars against tomeg Egypt in the west. And at exactly this moment, out of the step came the Pani, a nomadic tribe, distant relatives of the Cythians. This was not a civilization or a kingdom, but a free people of the grasslands with almost nobility. Archaeologists dig up their graves and cannot tell a chieftain from an ordinary warrior because they were buried exactly alike. Every man was a warrior and other social
classes barely existed at all. It was this very trait that made them both dangerous and utterly unexpected contenders for an empire. Their leaders, the brothers Asases and Tyridates, invaded a region called Paththeia, a narrow strip of land in the northeast of modern Iran and killed Andragaras, the Seucid governor who had risen in revolt. In the year 247 BC, they founded a dynasty. From then on, every Paththean king took the name Assassis when he came to the throne. Just as every Roman emperor would later take the name Caesar. That is why we know many of the early kings only by this throne name while their own names are lost. The forgetting of Paththeia in a sense began with the Paththeians themselves. But to the
people of these lands, the Parni were outsiders. The local population, descendants of the Persians, were Zoroastrians. They worshiped fire, kept alive the memory of the great Akeid Empire, and saw the step to Ran as a land of darkness, the source of all evil. And the pani came from exactly that step and they worshiped many gods which to Azoroastrian made them little better than pagans. The settled Iranians met their new masters with hostility. And the sources mention uprisings and clashes between the newcomers and the conquered population. Remember this crack between the step kings and the Persians they ruled because 500 years later it is what will erase the paththeians from the memory of their own heirs. The Seucids
of course tried to crush these upstarts. And here the Pney showed for the first time the move that would define them for the next five centuries. Instead of standing and dying against a powerful army, they would abandon their own land, fall back into the step to their allied nomads, lure the enemy deep, and then come crashing down on a foe who was stretched thin and bled dry. The Seucid King Salucas II marched east, certain of an easy victory, and was utterly defeated. Hints in the sources suggest he was even taken prisoner. So this handful of step people did not just defend their right to exist. They grasped the key insight. A vast regular army can be destroyed without ever meeting it in a head-on fight.
The nomads had carved out a kingdom. But a kingdom is not yet an empire. To become a power that would make Rome itself shudder, the Paththeians were missing two things. A weapon the civilized world had never seen. and a man with the nerve to use it. This man was named Mithridatis I and his very name given by Mithra, the god who grants royal power, seemed to promise greatness. He inherited a small kingdom on the edge of the ancient world and left behind a world empire. He conquered Media, then invaded Mesopotamia and took ancient Babylon and Seucia on the Tigris, one of the largest cities in the entire Hellenistic world, a rival to Alexandria itself. He captured the Seucid King Demetrius, and treated him with an almost mocking kindness. He married his
prisoner to his own daughter, caught him twice trying to escape, and finally, as a joke, gave him golden dice, a child's toy, to scold him for his childish recklessness. And so, a state that had recently been nothing more than a step raid now spoke to the heirs of Alexander as an equal, and over their heads. The weapon the Pani had been missing was their army, and it was like nothing else in the world of its time. It had no infantry at all, only cavalry of two kinds. Most were light horse archers, masters of the bow, who on principle refused to be drawn into close combat where the Roman infantry was strong. And the core, the fist of the army, were the catifacts, riders in which both man and
horse were sheathed in armor from head to hoof in scale plate, a living iron battering ram. There were few of them, and they were kept in reserve. The combination of the archers elusive speed and the crushing charge of the catifacts. Against this a world of heavy infantry and Greek fallances simply had no ready answer. It is striking that the armor for the finest cavalry of antiquity was according to recent excavations forged in the workshops of the MV oasis in the very heart of Paththeia and the money came from geography.
Paththeia lay straight across the great silk road, the main trade artery between Europe and Asia. Through it, from west to east and back flowed silk, incense and jewels. The tolls filled the royal treasury, and along the roots, cities grew and grew rich. Teson, Hatra, MV, Dura, Europos, Pathia became a living bridge between the two halves of the known world, and that wealth fed its armies. And here lies a paradox that matters for our whole story. In public, the Paththean king and his nobles played the part of stern eastern rulers. In Persian robes, following the ancient ceremony of the Akeminids, but behind palace doors, everything was different. The nobility spoke Greek, changed into Greek clothing, dined reclining in the helenic
style, and ordered statues of the gods from the finest workshops of hostile Antioch and neutral Alexandria. In the treasury of their capital, Nissa, archaeologists found Greek wine retons and heads of Aphroditi indistinguishable from those of the Mediterranean. The Paththean king himself by tradition spent his leisure hours watching the tragedies of Uripides. These people left their mark everywhere. It was the Paththeians who introduced into architecture the vaulted hall, the Ewan and the dome. The very silhouette recognized today in any Iranian mosque. Their traces are everywhere. Their name is forgotten.
Under the next great king, Mithrredates II, Paththeia stretched wider still, and for the first time in history, its border met the border of a new power rising in the west, Rome. At first, their interests even aligned, and the Paththeians sent envoys to the Romans. But the Roman commander Sullah received them with contempt as something lesser, unworthy of being spoken to as equals. Rome did not yet understand who it was dealing with. Before long, a Roman historian would admit with bitterness that the Paththeians had all but split the world in half with Rome and held the entire East. Rome had never yet met a power that looked it
straight in the eye. Their first clash would become the most shameful defeat Rome had suffered in a generation. And it would all begin with the vanity of one very rich old man. His name was Marcus Lascinius Cassus and he was the richest man in Rome. He was part of the triumvirate. He ruled the republic together with Julius Caesar and Pompy. But he was the only one of the three without any great military glory of his own. Caesar was conquering Gaul. Pompy had conquered the east and Cassus was simply very rich and it burned him. Starving for a general's fame in the year 54 BC. No longer a young man, he invaded Paththeia against the will of
the Senate. Dreaming of repeating the campaign of Alexander. With him, he led about 40,000 men, 4,000 of them cavalry. In the spring of 53 BC, the Romans reached the city of Curry in the southeast of modern Turkey, an open sunscched plane that might have been made for cavalry. Against them stood a Paththean general from the noble house of Surin with a mere handful of riders, about 10,000 horse archers and roughly 1,000 catifacts, less than a quarter of the Roman army. The legions locked into their famous tortoise, a wall of shields on every side, and the Paththean archers circled around them and began to rain down arrows without coming a single step closer. The Romans waited for the step warriors to run out of arrows so they
could force a close fight, but Serena had thought of everything. An endless line of camels kept the archers supplied with fresh quivers. The arrows never ran out, and whenever the Romans charged, the Paththeians would wheel their horses and break into a figned retreat, and at a full gallop, twisting back over the horses hunches. They kept striking their pursuers without missing. This move would enter history forever under the name the Paththeon Shot. Craus' son, Publius, was lured forward with a separate detachment, cut off from his own, surrounded, and killed, and his saved head was raised on a spear and carried before the ranks to break his father in front of the whole army. About half of the Roman army was
left lying on that plane. Craus himself was killed during negotiations for a truce. And what came next is something the Romans would retell with a shudder for centuries. By tradition, the Paththeians, mocking his legendary greed, poured molten gold down the dead Cassus' throat with the words, "All your life you thirsted for gold. So now drink your fill." But the most horrifying humiliation was still to come. And it was not bloody, but symbolic. Craus' severed head was brought to the court of the Paththean king. And at that very hour, the king was watching a Greek tragedy, the Bakay of Uripides. At one point in the play, a prop head of the torn apart King Penthus is carried onto
the stage, and in its place, the actor lifted the real still fresh head of the Roman tri. The hall burst into applause. the head of the richest and one of the three most powerful men of Rome used as a stage prop on a stage at the court of yesterday's step nomads set to a Greek tragedy. Think about what this was. A complete mirror image inversion of every story the West is used to telling about itself. The invincible Roman legion, the pride of the art of war, crushed completely by a people from the step whom the history books would later simply erase from memory. Rome had never been so humiliated. You might think the road
west was now open, that Paththeia was about to pour into Roman Syria and beyond. But instead, something far stranger than any victory began. a war 500 years long in which no one was destined to win. Curry did not break Rome. Rome does not break that way. In Rome, the defeat was seen not as proof of Paththean superiority, but as the result of Cassus' stupidity in underestimating the enemy. They learned their lessons from the disaster. They began to pay more attention to cavalry and they came back. And so began what would repeat for centuries, swinging back and forth like a pendulum. Mark Anthony, that same Anthony, comrade of Caesar and lover of
Cleopatra, led 100,000 men east through Armenia. He let himself drift too far from his supply train and the Paththeians destroyed his siege engines, then chased his retreating army, raining arrows on it at every stage of the march. Antony left more than 35,000 soldiers behind in those sands. What the generals could not achieve by force, Augustus later won through patience and diplomacy. He negotiated the return of the standards captured from Cassus to Rome. The battle eagles were sacred and their return was celebrated as a great victory, a victory that had never happened on a battlefield. From there, this war stretched on for centuries. The emperor Trajan at the peak of Roman power fought his way all
the way to the Persian Gulf took the Paththean capital of Cesifon and declared Mesopotamia a Roman province. At that moment the empire reached the largest size in its entire history. And immediately the instant he turned back a revolt blazed up behind him. The defiant fortress of Hatra held out against him and Trejan himself fell ill and died on the way home, never securing what he had conquered. Half a century later, under Marcus Orurelius, the legions took Cesifon again, and a plague drove them out of the captured city. A plague the retreating soldiers then spread across the whole empire. Another generation later, Septimius Sephus took Cessifon a third time. And in this lies the whole
pattern of this strange war. Rome captured the Paththean capital again and again three times. And not once could it hold it because both empires were simply too vast and too strong for one to swallow the other. Rome could not occupy and hold the boundless east beyond the Euphrates. Paththeia could not drive Rome out of the Mediterranean. And every time one side seemed to be winning, the other found the strength to strike back. And the border, like a string pulled tort and released, snapped back to the river Euphrates. Five centuries of unbroken hostility, and the front line had barely moved at all. But no one bleeds for 500 years without consequences. And when
Paththeia finally fell, the last blow was struck not by Rome, but by its own house. By the end of its history, Paththeia was worn down from two sides at once by endless wars with Rome on the outside and by the chronic non-stop infighting of the Arsid heirs on the inside. Kings replaced one another, sometimes at war with each other all at the same time. While the empire, meanwhile, was crumbling into a patchwork of semi-independent principalities whose rulers obeyed the king of kings in word only. That same loose, decentralized order, which had once let the Paththeians rule a realm of many peoples with a light hand, in the end turned against them. In the year 216 AD, the Roman Emperor Caracala, insulted by a refusal to give him the king's
daughter in marriage, invaded Pathia, ravaged its lands, and desecrated the tombs of the Paththean kings at Arbala. Fate, however, mocked him too. Caracala would be killed near that very Karhe, the city of Rome's greatest disgrace. His successor McCrinus lost the last great battle to the Paththeians at Niss in the year 217. Three days of slaughter with the victory going to Pathia and bought his way out with gold. And so Paththeia won its very last war with Rome. It went on beating Rome right to the end. And barely 10 years later, the empire fell. But not under the assault of Rome which had failed to defeat it in five centuries. It fell from within. From the region of Ps in southern Iran, from the
very land from which Cyrus and Darius had once come. There rose a man named Ardashir, a Persian. He overthrew the last Arsid. And in the year 224 AD, the Paththean Empire was no more. And here is the answer to the forgetting. Adashier and his dynasty. The Cissanians were Persians to the marrow of their bones. And they despised the Paththeians as step impostors, outsiders who had sat for almost five centuries on the throne of true Persia. The Cissanians did something quite deliberate. They rewrote the past itself. In their official version of history, Iran jumped straight from the ancient Aemonids from Cyrus and Darius directly to them, the Cissanians, as if the five centuries of
Paththeia between them had simply never existed. The Paththeians were not defeated in memory. They were wiped out of it. That is why Iran's greatest epic, the Shaame, gave an empire almost five centuries long, exactly 27 contemptuous lines about anarchy and lawlessness. The erasia worked so cleanly that it holds to this day. And yet, wiping them out completely did not work. The very Persian word Palavan, a champion, a knight, a hero, is an echo of the Paththeon's own name for themselves. Palav, the Ewans and the domes, the silhouette of every Iranian mosque. That is their architecture. The Paththeon shot lives on in the languages of the very peoples they fought. They lost their own name, but they survived in the very bones of the culture that
erased them. And in this lies the bitterest irony of Paththeia's fate. The empire that the mightiest power of the west could not conquer in 500 years of war was in the end wiped off the face of the earth not by an enemy. It was wiped out by its own heirs. And these heirs would not just inherit from the Paththeians. They would surpass them. They would take the Paththean cavalry, the Paththean tactics, the very same capital at Cesifon, and bring it all crashing down on Rome with a fury the Paththeians themselves never dared. Where Paththeia held Rome to a draw for five centuries, the Cissanians would go allin. They would bring one Roman emperor to his knees and take another alive as a prisoner. The only time in all of Rome's
history, the forgotten empire would give birth to the one Rome would never forget. But that is a different story altogether.
