Roman-Parthian Wars

The Roman-Parthian Wars were a series of conflicts fought between the Roman Republic and Empire and the Parthian Empire over roughly two and a half centuries, contesting control of Armenia, Mesopotamia and the broader frontier between the Mediterranean and Iranian worlds. The wars opened disastrously for Rome with the destruction of Crassus's army at the Battle of Carrhae in 53 BC, one of the Republic's worst military defeats, and continued through Mark Antony's failed Parthian campaign, Trajan's short-lived annexation of Mesopotamia in the early second century AD, and repeated Roman sacks of the Parthian capital Ctesiphon under emperors including Lucius Verus and Septimius Severus. Neither side achieved a lasting conquest of the other's core territory, and the recurring wars instead produced a long, contested but relatively stable frontier that persisted until the Parthian Arsacid dynasty was overthrown from within by the Sasanians in 224 AD, who inherited and continued the rivalry with Rome.