Missiles fell on the capital city of Iraq. The invaders were speedy and destructive. Eventually they compelled surrender, and a Western army occupied much of the country.

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The scene might be drawn from recent headlines, but it comes instead from the history of ancient Rome. When their empire stretched from Syria to Britain, only one power could challenge Roman arms on anything approaching an equal footing: the Persian rulers of the land that now comprises Iraq. This area, the location of numerous ancient civilizations, was the heart of a Persian empire that stretched from modern Pakistan to the Syrian border. The empire’s proud horsemen had ridden out from their ancestral Iranian homeland during the second century B.C. and established the capital city of Ctesiphon thirty-five miles from the site of modern Baghdad. During the following centuries, as they became great empires, Rome and Persia fought many wars. The Romans, for example, attacked Ctesiphon more than a half-dozen times, and on five occasions in the second and third centuries A.D., they took the city by storm.

Roman victories in Iraq were transitory and self-defeating. Moreover, they were part of a conflict that lasted not for months or years or even for decades but for more than six centuries. The quarrel began during the late Roman Republic (133-27 B.C.) and was handed down from the early Roman Empire (27 B.C.-A.D. 283) to the late Roman Empire (A.D. 280-476) to the Eastern Roman, or Byzantine, Empire. Two dynasties, meanwhile, ruled the Persian Empire, the Parthians (238 B.C.-A.D. 227) and then the Sassanids (A.D. 227-651), without any diminution in the conflict. On the contrary, the Sassanids were far more aggressive than their predecessors.

During the centuries-long struggle, border towns and provinces in the Near East passed back and forth like Alsace-Lorraine or the Polish Corridor would in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe. Unable to hold on to their gains, conquerors returned home and then had monuments to their victories carved in bold relief on the sides of cliffs. For the civilians whose lands the contending armies passed through, peace was fleeting–sieges, sackings, and deportations were common. Rarely in the history of human conflict has a feud such as the one between the empires of Rome and Persia lasted so long and accomplished so little. The Hundred Years’ War and even Rome’s long and epic struggle with Carthage were brief compared to Rome and Persia’s Near Eastern struggle.

Not surprisingly, the names of the Roman commanders involved in the conflict read like a roll call of the great commanders of ancient history. Julius Caesar’s planned invasion of Iran through Armenia was cut short by his assassination on the Ides of March in 44 B.C. Caesar had intended to avenge Marcus Licinius Crassus’ disastrous defeat by Persia near Carrhae (Harran) in 53 B.C. Mark Antony carried out Caesar’s invasion plan in 36 B.C. but without the great military leader’s tactical skill–he lost half his men in the mountains of northwest Iran and on the harsh winter march home through Armenia. Trajan wept when his armies reached the Persian Gulf in A.D. 115 because the great soldier and emperor was too old to continue on to India. Julian the Apostate was killed in an inglorious rear-guard action in A.D. 363 during a difficult retreat north after his army had failed to take Ctesiphon. And Justinian was forced to spend a fortune on border fortresses and bribes to protect his rear in Persia while his main armies were conquering Italy, North Africa, and Spain.

The names on the Persian side are far more obscure, but then Iranian history is little studied in the West, and the sources of evidence are not nearly as good as for the Romans. One has merely to glance at Iranian history, nevertheless, to see that the Persians too had their Caesars and Trajans. Shapur I ‘King of Kings,’ for example, plundered Antioch and captured Roman Emperor Valerian after crushing his army in A.D. 260, and Khusro II in 611 penetrated to the Bosporus, in sight of Constantinople, before a Byzantine counterattack drove him and his men back to Iraq. The blow and counterblow of Persian and Roman armies showed no sign of abating until both Rome and Persia were driven from the Fertile Crescent by a new power–the Arabs. The Sassanid state collapsed not long after the Arab victory at the Battle of Qadesiya in Iraq in 637. Byzantium survived but only after losing Syria, Egypt, Palestine, and northern Africa to the Arabs. The net result of the age-old Romano-Persian conflict was the Pax Arabica.

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