Rome-Persia Treaties Warn of US-Iran Pitfalls
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- Peter Edwell, associate professor of ancient history at Macquarie University, argues that after dozens of wars between Rome and Persia, their peace deals typically failed to resolve disputes and sometimes made conflicts worse.
- The first major Rome-Persia conflict ended with the death of Roman general Crassus and the killing of thousands of Roman soldiers at Carrhae in 53 BCE.
- The Treaty of Rhandeia (63 CE) settled a Rome-Parthia dispute over the kingdom of Armenia by having the Parthian king nominate its ruler and the Roman emperor crown him — but the arrangement later became "unwieldy" and was brushed aside, prompting Trajan's invasion in 114 CE.
- After Roman Emperor Gordian III died invading the Sasanian Empire in 244 CE, a peace deal imposed financial penalties on Rome and banned Roman involvement in Armenia — a clause Rome soon ignored, leading to the Sasanian capture of Emperor Valerian in 260 CE.
- The Treaty of Nisibis (299 CE) extended Roman power further east and gave Rome control of Armenia, but the perceived humiliation drove Sasanian king Shapur II to invade in the 350s specifically to repudiate it.
- The so-called "Eternal Peace" of 532 lasted less than eight years, per Edwell, exemplifying how even the most trumpeted agreements between the two empires failed to hold.
- The Rome-Persia dispute over Armenia took more than 400 years to resolve through partition, despite dozens of treaty attempts — a timeline Edwell implicitly invokes as a caution for modern negotiators.
Why it matters: Edwell documents a pattern in which the most ambitious Rome-Persia treaties (Nisibis, Rhandeia, the "Eternal Peace") collapsed in years or decades, and three of them directly triggered fresh invasions when one side felt humiliated. The Armenia flashpoint, which took 400+ years and dozens of attempts to settle, suggests that any US-Iran deal perceived as one-sided carries the same risk of swift repudiation.
