ABSTRACT
After the defeat against the Parthians, the Seleucid Empire sank in agony, Syria into a long period of chaos. Rome was the second power to take the legacy of the Seleucids in the Near East, and to follow the Parthians in the footsteps of political Hellenism. There, where Sulla and Lucullus failed, a great man of the Roman-Republican period succeeded: Pompey, who, in unambiguous allusion to Alexander the Great, called himself Magnus. Palmyra's first appearance, at least on the historiographic stage, was made a decade after the events described by Strabo on the account of Caecilius Bassus. Meanwhile Caesar had been murdered, and the Roman Empire had been divided between the triumvirs Octavian and Mark Antony. Rome's relationship with the Parthians, which initially, even if not friendly, at least had been peaceful, had worsened considerably. The Romano-Parthian wars caused Palmyra to become the bottleneck of trans-continental commodity exchange between the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf.
