Beate Dignas & Engelbert Winter - Kaveh Farrokh

110 3 Military confrontations
one may appropriately call the rotten part of human affairs. (5) The Romans and
Persians had sworn to keep peace for fifty years, but this oath was violated and
broken through the great ignorance of the king. And from there the evil course of
Roman misfortunes proceeded. 177 (6) The Romans accused the Parthians 178 and
announced that they were responsible for the war; they claimed that the Persians
had tried to persuade the Homerites (an Indian tribe subject to the Romans) 179 to
revolt and that these had suffered terribly under Persian attacks because they had
not given in to their offers, once the peace between the Persians and the Roman
state had been dissolved. (7) They also complained by saying that the first thing
the Persians did when the Turks had sent envoys to the Romans was to corrupt
the Alans 180 with bribes in order to do away with the envoys as they were passing
through their territory and to prevent their passage; (8) the Romans were looking
for a pretext and welcomed a war, and from small and irrelevant beginnings they
devised for themselves a long path full of harm. 181 For their love of war did not quite
earn them any advantage. (9) The Medes in turn declared that the Romans were the
ones who had started the war and they had the following complaints: the Romans
had approached the Armenians although these had officially been Persian subjects
and had forced them into their own rule, 182 they had also killed Surenes, who had
been appointed climatarchēs 183 of the Armenian state by the Persian king; 184 (10)
moreover, the Romans did not want to pay the customary annual 500 pounds of
gold, 185 which the emperor Justinian had agreed to in the peace treaty, because
they seemed to think it was unworthy to pay tribute to the Persian king. (11) But
this was not the case, rather they had made the payments for the defence of the
fortresses, which served everybody’s protection, so that the tremendous force of
the numerous uncivilised nations would not have the opportunity to attack and
destroy both empires. 186
Surprisingly, Theophylact Simocatta accuses the Roman emperor of having
broken the peace that the two powers had concluded for fifty years. He
interprets the Roman accusations against the Sasanians, namely that their
177 For a survey of Roman–Persian relations between 565 and 572 see Turtledove 1977: 120–47.
178 Cf. above, p. 76 n. 23.
179 The ‘Homerites’ were the ‘Himyarites’ who settled in the Yemen; by mistake the Greek sources
label them an ‘Indian tribe’; on the history of this Arab tribe see Wissmann 1964: 429–99.
180 On the Alans, an Iranian people with homes in the northern parts of the Caucasus, see Bachrach
1973; Bosworth 1977: 218–29.
181 The author, a contemporary observer of Byzantium’s desperate situation at the time of Heraclius’
confrontations with the Sasanians, blames Justin; cf. also Tinnefeld 1971: 49–50.
182 In the autumn of 570 Byzantium concluded a treaty with Armenia which was not official until 572
and which was propagated as the casus belli by the Sasanians.
183 ‘Ruler over the area’.
184 This Sasanian official from the family of the Surēn was assassinated on 2 February 572.
185 It is not clear why Theophylact Simocatta talks about 500 pounds of gold (= 36,000 solidi);
according to Menander Protector, frg. 11 (FHG iv 208) the foedus of 562 (20) stipulated 30,000
solidi; in this context see Güterbock 1906: 63–5.
186 Schreiner 1985: 279 n. 372 talks about Byzantium and Persia as a world police (‘Hüter der
Weltordnung’).