Tombs constructed in late Republican Rome include…

There has been friction, since the expanding Roman Republic and the Parthian Empire had come into contact in the mid-first century BCE, betwen the two great powers over the control of the various states lying between them.

The largest and most important of these is the Kingdom of Armenia.

Tacitus says that in 20 BCE, the Armenians sent messengers to Roman Emperor Augustus to tell him that they no longer wanted Artaxias II as their king, and asked that his brother Tigranes III (then in Roman custody in Alexandria, Egypt) be installed in his place.

Augustus readily agrees, and sends a large army under Tiberius to depose Artaxias II.

Before they arrive, however, Artaxias II is assassinated by some of his other relatives, and the Romans put Tigranes III on the throne unopposed.

Tiberius is sent East under Marcus Agrippa in 20 BCE.

Around the time that Octavian had been named Augustus by the Roman Senate, becoming the first Roman emperor, Tiridates II of Parthia had briefly overthrown Phraates IV, who was able to quickly reestablish his rule with the aid of Scythian nomads.

Tiridates had fled to the Romans, taking one of Phraates' sons with him.

The Parthians had captured the standards of the legions under the command of Marcus Licinius Crassus (53 BCE) (at the Battle of Carrhae), Decidius Saxa (40 BCE), and Mark Antony (36 BCE).

After several years of negotiation, Tiberius leads a sizable force into Armenia, presumably with the goal of establishing it as a Roman client-state and as a threat on the Roman-Parthian border.

In negotiations conducted in 20 BCE, Phraates arranges for the release of his kidnapped son.

In return, the Romans receive the lost legionary standards taken at Carrhae in 53 BCE, as well as any surviving prisoners of war.

The Parthians view this exchange as a small price to pay to regain the prince.

Armenia remains a neutral territory between the two powers.

Augustus hails the return of the standards as a political victory over Parthia; this propaganda is celebrated in the minting of new coins, the building of a new temple to house the standards, and even in fine art such as the breastplate scene on his statue Augustus of Prima Porta.

With the conquest of Lusitania, Asturia, and Gallaecia, Rome completes its subjugation of the Iberian Peninsula. Between 25 and 20 BCE, Emperor Augustus reorganizes the region into three provinces:

• Hispania Tarraconensis (eastern and northern Iberia),
• Hispania Baetica (southwestern Iberia), and
• Provincia Lusitania (western Iberia).

Initially, Lusitania includes Asturia and Gallaecia, but these territories are later transferred to the jurisdiction of the newly established Provincia Tarraconensis. The remaining province is then designated as Provincia Lusitania et Vettones.

Geographical Boundaries of Lusitania

• Northern border: The Douro River.
• Eastern border: A line running through Salmantica (modern Salamanca) and Caesarobriga (modern Talavera de la Reina) to the Anas River (modern Guadiana).

Octavian, now called Augustus and head of the Roman Principate, has between 31 and 20 BCE restored to King Herod the Jewish territories that Pompey had taken away, and in this enlarged kingdom he has created a sound administrative system of Hellenistic type.

Able but ruthless, feared and hated by his people, Herod promotes Hellenization among the Jews.

Herod in the eighteenth year of his reign (20–19 BCE) rebuilds the Jewish Temple.

The Temple Mount esplanade is artificially enlarged with supporting walls (including the Western Wall) to house the splendid new Temple.

The new Temple is finished in a year and a half although work on outbuildings and courts is to continue for another eighty years.

To comply with religious law, Herod has employed a thousand priests as masons and carpenters in the rebuilding.

Yuval Baruch, archaeologist with the Israeli Antiquities Authority, will on  September 25, 2007, announce his discovery of a quarry compound that provided Herod with the stones to renovate the Second Temple.

Coins, pottery and iron stakes found proved the date of the quarrying to be about 19 BCE.

Archaeologist Ehud Netzer confirmed that the large outlines of the stone cuts is evidence that it was a massive public project worked on by hundreds of slaves.

Immense towers, integrated in the older Hasmonean walls, strengthen the new royal palace, whereas a new citadel defends the Temple.

An amphitheater adds to the Hellenistic character of the city.

Center of religion, goal of obligatory pilgrimage, and the seat of the ruler and of the autonomous court of the Sanhedrin, the Jewish Council of Elders, Jerusalem becomes a great metropolis of the Hellenistic world.

The Sanhedrin, which traces its origins to a council of elders established under Persian and Syrian rule, is the highest Jewish legal and religious body under Rome.

The Great Sanhedrin, located on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, supervises smaller local Sanhedrins and is the final authority on many important religious, political, and legal issues, such as declaring war, trying a high priest, and supervising certain rituals.

Augustus has traveled in Sicily, Greece, and Asia from 22 BCE to 19 BCE, effecting important reorganizations wherever he went.

Immense satisfaction to Rome is caused by an agreement in 20 BCE with Parthia, under which the Parthians recognize Rome's protectorate over Armenia and returns the legionary standards captured from Crassus thirty-three years earlier.

In 19 BCE, there is some adjustment of Augustus’ powers to allow him to exercise them more freely in Italy.

Comprehending well the importance of ideology and propaganda, Augustus sponsors and encourages the leading writers and artists of his time, such as the historian Livy and the poets Virgil and Horace.

Horace, whose interests have returned to the discursive mode of his earlier Satires, explores the possibilities of poetic moral essays in his 20 short Epistles, published in 20 BCE.

He publishes a longer Epistle on literary matters, entitled the “Art of Poetry,” in 19 BCE.

Roman elegiac poet Albius Tibullus, who (in the two books of poetry that can definitely be attributed to him) writes mostly on the subject of love, addresses his mistresses Delia and—later—Nemesis, as well as the young man Marathus.

Writing in a simple but elegant style, Tibullus often praises the life of rural seclusion in his bucolic poems.

He dies, probably in his late twenties, in 19 BCE.

Virgil, before setting out on a voyage to Greece and Asia during which he intends to complete the Aeneid ("the story of Aeneas”), requests that the work be destroyed if anything should happen to him before the poem is complete.

Catching a fever, he dies in Brundisium on September 21, 19 BCE.

Augustus overturns the author’s request and has the epic masterpiece published.

The poem, in twelve books, deals with the founding of Roman civilization by the Trojan Aeneas, of whose adventures Naevius and Ennius had previously written.

Virgil models the characters and events of the Aeneid after their Homeric predecessors: in the first six books, Virgil successfully unifies around the figure of Aeneas the searching theme of Homer's Odyssey; in the last six books, he analogizes that of the Iliad with his account of the war and final reconciliation of the Trojans and the Latins), creating multiple correspondences between both halves.

Through the judicious use of analogy, image, and symbol, Virgil emphasizes the cost in sacrifice and loss of humanity inherent in the ideals of Augustan Rome, while outwardly glorifying these same ideals.

The Aeneid, soon made a standard school text, becomes a national epic—an explanation of Augustan Rome’s origins and heroic past—and establishes Virgil, with Homer, as one of the great epic poets.

The huge, symmetrically planned Baths of Agrippa (Thermae Agrippae), built by Agrippa, are the first of the great thermae constructed in the city.

In their first form, constructed at the same time as the Pantheon and on axis with it, as a balaneion, they are apparently a hot-air bath with a cold plunge, not unlike a sauna.

With the completion of the Aqua Virgo, the aqueduct completed by Agrippa in 19 BCE, the baths are supplied with water and become regular thermae, with a large ornamental pool (Stagnum Agrippae) attached.

Agrippa furnishes his baths with decorations that may have been executed in glazed tiles and with works of art: the Apoxyomenos of Lysippus stands outside.

By 19 BCE, Augustus returns to Rome, having left the final pacification of Hispania in the hands of his trusted deputy, Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa. In Gaul and Spain, Agrippa successfully subdues the Cantabrians, a fiercely independent Iberian-Celtic tribe regarded as the most warlike people of the peninsula.

With their defeat, the Roman conquest of the Iberian Peninsula is effectively complete. However, while major hostilities end in 19 BCE, sporadic rebellions continue until 16 BCE.

As in other conquered territories, Rome begins imposing its administrative and social reforms. Yet, despite the heavy losses suffered by the indigenous population, local resistance remains strong, forcing the Romans to station two legions—X Gemina and IIII Macedonica—in the region for another seventy years to maintain control.

Agrippa, returning to Rome in 18 BCE, receives the power of a tribune (tribunicia potestas), which Augustus also possesses.

Perhaps, too, he now receives an imperium majus (if he had not already been granted it in 23).

Glaphyra, born and raised in Cappadocia, is a royal princess of Greek, Armenian and Persian descent, whose father is the Roman ally king Archelaus of Cappadocia; her only natural sibling is her younger brother Archelaus of Cilicia.

Her paternal grandfather was the Roman ally and priest-king Archelaus of the temple state of Comana in Cappadocia, while her paternal grandmother, for whom she was named, was the hetaera Glaphyra.

The priest-kings of Comana descend from Archelaus, the favorite high-ranking general of Mithridates VI of Pontus, who may have married a daughter of that monarch.

Glaphyra's mother, the first wife of Archelaus, is an Armenian Princess whose name is unknown and who dies by 8 BCE.

She may have been a daughter of King Artavasdes II of Armenia, son of Tigranes the Great and Cleopatra of Pontus, a daughter of Mithridates VI.

If so, Glaphyra’s parents may have been distant relatives.

The Emperor Augustus in 25 BCE had given Archelaus extra territories to govern, including the new port city of Elaiussa Sebaste, located fifty-five kilometers (thirty-four miles) from present Mersin in the direction of Silifke in Cilicia on the southern coast of Anatolia, which Archelaus has renamed in honor of Augustus (Sebaste is the Greek equivalent word of the Latin "Augusta".)

The royal family has settled here, and Archelaus has built a royal residence and a palace on the island in the harbor.

Glaphyra holds the high ranking title of ‘king’s daughter’, reflecting of her descent and high birth.

She is an attractive and dynamic woman, reputed to be charming, desirable, and a force to be reckoned with.

Augustus encourages intermarriage among the families of Roman ally kings.

King Herod the Great of Judaea usually marries his children to relatives or to his subjects.

However, Herod wants his son Alexander to marry a foreign princess.

Herod negotiates a marriage alliance with Archelaus.

Glaphyra marries Alexander either in 18 BCE or 17 BCE in Herod’s court in Jerusalem.

Archelaus provides Glaphyra with a dowry, which Herod later returns to her.

The union of Alexander and Glaphyra is described as happy.

Glaphyra becomes a Jew upon her marriage and she does adopt Judaism, even though no mention of conversion is made in the account of her first marriage.

Glaphyra is to bear Alexander three children: two sons, Tigranes and Alexander and an unnamed daughter.

The names of Glaphyra and Alexander's children reflect their cultural ancestry and royal descent.

The two years following Augustus' return to Rome have witnessed social legislation attempting to encourage marriage, regulate penalties for adultery, and reduce extravagance.

Lex Julia (or: Lex Iulia, plural: Leges Juliae/Leges Iuliae) refers to a Roman law introduced by any member of the Julian family.

In the narrow sense (especially when used in the English plural form, Julian laws) they refer to a series of laws relating to marriage and morals, introduced by Augustus in 18-17 BCE.

These represent a specific attempt to force the nobles to marry and to have more children, and are more generally meant to encourage large families and increase the Roman population; adultery is establishing as a private and public crime (lex Julia de adulteriis).

In 17, there are resplendent celebrations of ancient ritual, known as the ludi saeculares (Secular Games), to purify the Roman people of their past sins and provide full religious inauguration of the new age.

Although the principate is not an office which can be automatically handed on, Augustus seems to be indicating his views regarding his ultimate successor when he adopts the two sons of his daughter Julia, boys aged three and one who are henceforward known as Gaius Caesar and Lucius Caesar.

Their father Agrippa, after participating in Augustus' celebration, returns to the East as vicegerent of the emperor.

The Bosporan kingdom has been controlled since 110 BCE by the kings of Pontus.

Asander, who had had married Pharnaces II’s daughter Dynamis before that ruler’s death, had ruled as an archon and later as king until his death in 17 BCE.

After the death of Asander, Dynamis had been compelled to marry a Roman usurper called Scribonius, who had pretends be to a relative of Dynamis, but the Romans under Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa interfere.

Agrippa orders orders Scribonius’ death and sets in his place the cultivated Polemon I, the Roman client king of Pontus, who marries Dynamis in 16 BCE.

Herod, as the Roman client king of Judea, had led a fleet to support Agrippa in the Bosporan affair, and the two now travel together along the coast of western Asia Minor.

Tiberius, after returning from the East in 19 BCE, had been married to Vipsania Agrippina, the daughter of Augustus’s close friend and greatest general, Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, appointed praetor, and sent with his legions to assist his brother Drusus in campaigns in the west.

While Drusus focuses his forces in Gallia Narbonensis and along the German frontier, Tiberius combats the tribes in the Alps and within Transalpine Gaul, annexing Raetia, comprising Vorarlberg and Tirol states in present-day Austria, the eastern cantons of Switzerland, and parts of Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg states in Germany, and Noricum, apparently as a bloodless conquest.

Roughly comprising modern central Austria and parts of Bavaria, Germany, the kingdom had been controlled by a Celtic confederacy that dominated an earlier Illyrian population.

At its greatest extent, it includes on the east Carnuntum (about twenty miles [thirty-two kilometers] east of Vindobona [now Vienna]), …