Jake Nabel: The Arsacid Princes of the Roman Empire
Abstract
Misunderstanding in Ancient Interstate Relations: The Arsacid Princes of the Roman Empire
In the first century CE, several Arsacid princes from the Iranian empire of Parthia were sent to live at the court of the Roman emperor. While Roman authors called these figures “hostages” and scholars have studied them as such, this talk will employ Iranian and Armenian sources to argue that the Parthians would have seen them as the emperor’s foster-children. These divergent perspectives allowed each empire to perceive itself as superior to the other, since the two sides interpreted the transfer of royal children through conflicting cultural frameworks. Moving beyond the paradigms of anarchy and hierarchy, this focus advances a new vision of interstate relations with misunderstanding at its center. The talk is based on the book The Arsacids of Rome, which was recently published by the University of California Press in the Pourdavoud Institute’s Iran and the Ancient World series.
About the Speaker
Jake Nabel
Pennsylvania State University
Jake Nabel is the Tombros Early Career Professor of Classical Studies and an Assistant Professor of Classics & Ancient Mediterranean Studies at Penn State. He is a historian of ancient Rome, pre-Islamic Iran, and the points of contact between the two. Jake has published on Roman-Parthian relations, Latin and Iranian literature, ancient political thought, and the Hellenistic east. His current book project is on the concept of freedom in late antique Iran.