Severed Heads and Parallel Lives
It is probably folly to comment on a peace deal that has yet to be announced, especially when one of the sources for its imminent conclusion is that fountainhead of bluster and bragging, and most often, simple lies, that is D. T***p.
If the Islamic Republic of Iran agrees to give up its stock of highly enriched uranium, that would seem to be quite the concession; but even so, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the US-Israel (and UAE etc.) alliance has basically lost the war. ‘Targeted’ Israeli strikes were supposed to ‘decapitate’ the ‘regime’ and lead Iranians, despite being brutally intimidated by the government’s murderous crackdown on demonstrators in January, into the streets to bring about the famous ‘regime change’ long beloved of Washington DC think-tank types and more recently of that portion of the Iranian diaspora whose notion of democratic politics seems to extend no further than a desire to support whoever manufactures the Israeli flags they like to wave at demonstrations and to hope that a delusional ‘king’ Reza Pahlavi will ride into to Tehran on the backs of US and Israeli missiles to magically orchestrate a ‘transition’ to democracy.
The aggressors have been deceived by their own metaphor; ‘regimes’ are not actually like the bodies of living organisms, despite the millennia-long history of this image in political thought, and ‘cutting off their heads’ does not in fact result in the rapid deaths of polities. By most accounts, the highly militarized and repressive Iranian state apparatuses are deeper entrenched than ever, and thousands of Iranians (most horribly, the schoolgirls of Minab, whom we should never forget) have paid for T***p-Netanyahu et al.’s delusions with their lives; ecological devastation has been inflicted, and all manner of infrastructure and cultural heritage grievously damaged. Meanwhile, Israel continues its campaign of devastation in Lebanon, even as Hizbullah indicates that Iran will continue to support it (another US-Israeli war objective missed).
You’d think that the President of the United States, having enthusiastically prosecuted this war, and proclaimed imminent or actual victory several times, as well as repeatedly claimed destruction of Iranian military and nuclear capabilities (the latter already of course apparently destroyed last summer during the 12-Day War), might be just a little humiliated by this failure to achieve any of his objectives, and having provoked worldwide inflation and an energy crisis to boot. I suspect T***p is so deeply narcissistic and so surrounded by flatterers that he is almost incapable of feeling humiliation, even if this incapacity is itself the consequence of a life that has almost constantly flirted with imminent and catastrophic humiliation, from his youthful inability to be accepted by New York high society to his multiple bankruptcies and his repeated brushes with the law, at least some of which should have ended with him in jail.
It is striking, then, that a few hours ago Esmail Baqaei, the spokesperson for the IRI’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, posted a reference on Twitter to the Roman emperor Philip the Arab, who in 244 CE sued for peace after his youthful predecessor, Gordian III, was slain at the Battle of Misiche, probably near present-day Fallujah, on the Euphrates a little to the west of Baghdad. The Iranian emperor Shapur I, second emperor of the Sasanian dynasty, granted Philip peace, but only on condition that he pay the substantial tribute of 500,000 gold denarii, as well as cede Mesopotamia and Armenia (more often than not Iranian possessions anyway) to Shapur. Shapur commemorated this in inscriptions and in no less than five rock reliefs with various versions of his defeat of Gordian (portrayed dead under his horse), Philip suing for peace, and his later defeat of the emperor Valerian (whom he captured in 260 at the battle of Edessa); these may be found at three locations in the modern-day southern Iranian province of Fars: Darab; Tang-e Chogan in Bishapur (three reliefs in total); and Naqsh-e Rostam, the most detailed and striking image, which is the one Baqaei posted on Twitter, with the humiliated emperor kneeling before the Iranian monarch.
It is hardly surprising that Baqaei chose this image and this episode from the centuries-long history of Roman-Iranian conflict; Shapur’s victories over three Roman emperors — killing one, humbling another, and capturing a third — were probably the high point of these wars from an Iranian imperial perspective. It is easy enough, too, to identify the United States, with all its domed capitol buildings and high-minded rhetoric covering a history of violent imperial expansion as a self-conscious modern avatar of ancient Rome (the rhetoric from the present administration being anything but high-minded, however). I wonder, though, whether another episode from these intermittent (and frankly futile — neither side ever managed to hold onto their conquests in Mesopotamia or Syria for very long) wars, from their very beginning, in fact, might not also deserve an airing for those fond of ancient analogies to present events.
Almost three centuries earlier, when Rome certainly had an empire, but not yet an emperor, Marcus Licinius Crassus was one of the three men at that empire’s head as part of the so-called FirstTriumvirate; the other two were and remain more celebrated, Gnaius Pompeius aka Pompey, and his great rival and future nemesis, Julius Caesar. In 56 BCE Crassus, who was incredibly rich (sound familiar?) but also incredibly jealous (again, sound familiar?) of the accomplishments of his fellow rulers (unlike them, he had no military successes to his name), decided to fund and lead a military campaign against Iran without Senate approval (this parallel is almost uncanny). The Roman populace were hostile to the campaign (and finally, after so many years of supporting their government whenever it embarked on its latest campaign, the majority of Americans were against the present war from the outset), and Crassus was only able to leave Rome safely when Pompey provided him an escort. Modest (again in a way that should be familiar), he thought of himself as a new Alexander and set off with his 38,000 crack troops to make war on the Sasanians’ predecessors, the dynasty known to the Romans as the Parthians, imagining that he would easily conquer (I will stop drawing attention to the parallels at this point).
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By late 55 BCE he was in Syria (Roman territory, where he was appointed governor) with his seven legions, having first lost several ships after making the foolish decision to sail on the Mediterranean during winter storms, and without actually declaring war he invaded Mesopotamia (Parthian territory) in 54 BCE. The Iranian emperor, Orodes II, had sent an envoy to open talks, beginning with the most basic and reasonable of requests — why are you invading us anyway? — but Crassus (according to the Roman philosopher Plutarch, who wrote a biography, in Greek, of Crassus as part of his ‘Parallel Lives’ series) dismissed the envoy by telling him he would let him know once he had reached Seleucia, a major city on the Tigris in present-day Iraq (near Baghdad), and therefore under Parthian rule.
Crassus’ mis-steps as a general were numerous, including letting himself and his army be led on a wild goose chase in the desert by a certain Abgar (or Ariamnes), an Arab and apparently ruler of Edessa, who was secretly coordinating with Surena, the Parthian general (not his actual name, but a hereditary title indicating he was the head of the powerful noble Suren family; his name is nowhere recorded, and he was executed on Orodes’ orders not long afterward). Eventually the Parthians engaged the bewildered Romans in 53 BCE at Carrhae (Harran) in Syria (today in Turkey, just over the border) and defeated them, Crassus being killed in battle and the Roman legions’ standards being captured — a major symbolic defeat as well as a practical military one. (Mark Antony would in 36 BCE lead a less shambolic, but still unsuccessful campaign, against the Parthians in an attempt to retrieve these standards; they were eventually returned a few years alter when the first Roman emperor, Augustus, sensibly signed a peace treaty with Phraates IV).
But the most extraordinary part of Crassus’ sorry story is the part I have saved for the end. Plutarch relates that after the battle, Surena had Crassus’ severed head sent to his king. Orodes II was busy with the wedding festivities of his son to the sister of the Armenian king, Artavasdes II (who despite being an Iranian ally and probably from the Parthian perspective some kind of vassal, had actually offered advice to Crassus — to attack via the Armenian mountains and not the Mesopotamian plains — which Crassus had ignored).
As part of these festivities, they were watching a performance (in Greek; Artavasdes apparently himself even wrote in Greek) of Euripides’ play The Bacchae, in which the Bacchae, devotees of the god Dionysus and driven mad by him, led by Agave, mother of Pentheus king of Thebes, whose worship Pentheus has tried to prohibit, fall upon Pentheus, killing him (Agave in her insanity mistakes him for a wild beast), and severing his head, which Agave carries on stage.
Surena’s envoy, hotfooting it from the battlefield, arrived not long before this moment and, so Plutarch tells us, was able to give his account of what happened, whereupon Pentheus’ head (or whatever represented it in this nuptial production — what a subject for a marriage feast!) was replaced with the actual head of Marcus Licinius Crassus.
Now, T***p is not going to meet this fate, of course, and in any case severing of heads is repugnant; but aren’t we entitled to hope — to think — to believe — to insist that one day the current head of the government of the United States should too meet his just deserts, but in a court of law, and eventually in a federal prison? And unlike the poor Bacchae, unwilling and unwitting instruments of a jealous god, but also unlike the rather less pitiable orchestrators of the current war, we shall insist that the head shall meet its fate, but without deluding ourselves that decapitation ever solved anything.
