Four Roman Emperors Who Lost to Persia — and Why It Matters Now
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- Marcus Licinius Crassus ignored his Armenian ally King Artavasdes' advice to invade Parthia via a northern mountain route, marched directly across the North Syrian plains, and lost seven Roman legions to Parthian mounted archers at Carrhae in 53 BCE; Plutarch records that his severed head was used as a prop in a performance of Euripides' The Bacchae.
- Marc Antony led a 36 BCE expedition against Parthia that lost its baggage train to attacks, failed to take Praaspa, and retreated disastrously through the mountains of Azerbaijan and Armenia in winter, costing about 30,000 Roman lives.
- Sassanian Shahpur I captured Emperor Valerian at the Battle of Edessa in 260 CE and commemorated the humiliation in rock reliefs at Naqsh-e-Rostam showing him mounted over two defeated Roman emperors.
- During recent fighting in Iran, the Islamic Republic revived the Shahpur rock carvings to celebrate its "victories" over the US and Israel — an irony the source flags, since a theocratic state built on opposition to monarchy and nationalism had to mine its pre-Islamic past for a hero of Iranian resistance.
- Emperor Julian invaded Persia in 363 CE backing exiled Sassanian prince Hormozd on the promise that Persian nobles would rise against Shahpur II; the cities stayed loyal, Julian was mortally wounded near Samarra, and his successor Jovian ceded Armenia, five provinces, and the strategic fortress of Nisibis.
- The article concludes that Donald Trump and an unnamed Israeli leader have repeated the Roman playbook — ignoring allies (Crassus), underestimating the enemy (Marc Antony, Valerian), and believing regime-change rhetoric (Julian) — with what the author calls "the same disastrous results."
Why it matters: The article frames the current US-Iran confrontation as the latest entry in a 2,000-year pattern of foreign powers overreaching militarily against Persia, with each Roman failure mapped to a specific contemporary sin: ignoring allied counsel, underestimating Iranian resilience, and trusting exiled claimants promising regime change. For policymakers, the piece argues that the Roman precedent is not flattery — each campaign ended not in stalemate but in decisive Roman loss of territory, lives, and captured emperors.
