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98 sharp after his cellar. This conduct was thought abominable in a crowned head, and excited the ridicule and contempt of his butlers and his people. Again, since the days of the great Cyrus, it had ever been the practice of oriental potentates to show themselves sparingly to their subjects, and even to their courtiers and ministers to be difficult of access; whereas Vonones was affable to all comers, and practised at Seleucia the courtesy which he had seen Augustus display at Rome. "Virtues," says Tacitus, "new to the Parthians were new vices. Between his good and evil qualities no distinction was made: they were foreign manners, and for that reason detested." The unlucky Vonones was in a very similar position to that of our George I. and George II., whose preference for Hanoverian ways and dishes, whose undisguised yearning for their palace at Herrenhausen and its stiff and punctilious ceremonies, and whose equally manifest distaste for English cookery, rendered them very unpopular with the nation that had not very willingly invited them to the throne.

Not, however, until Nero's reign, and shortly after his accession, do the Parthian wars occupy a prominent spaces in the 'Annals.' Cn. Domitius Corbulo was a soldier of the ancient stamp—one "fit to stand by Cæsar and give direction." He had highly distinguished himself under Claudius in a war against a German tribe, the Chauci, and by the excellent discipline he maintained in his army—not a universal merit at the time in Roman generals, as appears in several chapters of the 'History.' In the year 54, the Parthian king, Vologeses, invaded Armenia and expelled its king, Rhadamistus, who was under the pro-