yield its position without a blow, if briskly attacked.  Accordingly, as on a former occasion, they charged up the hill on which the Roman camp was placed, hoping to take it by sheer audacity.  But the troops inside were held ready, and at the proper moment issued forth; the assailants found themselves in their turn assailed, and, fighting at a disadvantage on the slope, were soon driven down the declivity.  The battle was renewed in plain below, where the mailed horse of the Parthians made a brave resistance; but the slingers galled them severely, and in the midst of the struggle it happened that by ill-fortune Pacorus was slain.  The result followed which is almost invariable with an Oriental army:  having lost their leader, the soldiers everywhere gave way; flight became universal, and the Romans gained a complete victory.  The Parthian army fled in two directions.  Part made for the bridge of boats by which it had crossed the Euphrates, but was intercepted by the Romans and destroyed.  Part turned northwards into Commagene, and there took refuge with the king, Antiochus, who refused to surrender them to the demand of Ventidius, and no doubt allowed them to return to their own country.

Thus ended the great Parthian invasion of Syria, and with it ended the prospect of any further spread of the Arsacid dominion towards the west.  When the two great powers, Rome and Parthia, first came into collision—­when the first blow struck by the latter, the destruction of the army of Crassus, was followed up by the advance of their clouds of horse into Syria, Palestine, and Asia Minor—­when Apamsea, Antioch, and Jerusalem fell into their hands, when Decidius Saxa was defeated and slain, Cilicia, Pamphylia, Caria, Lydia, and Ionia occupied—­it seemed as if Rome had found, not so much an equal as a superior; it looked as if the power heretofore predominant would be compelled to contract her frontier, and as if Parthia would advance hers to the Egean or the Mediterranean.  The history of the contest between the East and the West, between Asia and Europe, is a history of reactions.  At one time one of the continents, at another time the other, is in the ascendant.  The time appeared to have come when the Asiatics were once more to recover their own, and to beat back the European aggressor to his proper shores and islands.  The triumphs achieved by the Seljukian Turks between the eleventh and the fifteenth centuries would in that case have been anticipated by above a thousand years through the efforts of a kindred, and not dissimilar people.  But it turned out that the effort made was premature.  While the Parthian warfare was admirably adapted for the national defence on the broad plains of inner Asia, it was ill suited for conquest, and, comparatively speaking, ineffective in more contracted and difficult regions.  The Parthian military system had not the elasticity of the Roman—­it did not in the same way adapt itself to circumstances, or admit of the addition of new arms, or the indefinite expansion