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39Antony meanwhile resigned his office on the very first day, putting Lucius Sempronius Atratinus in his place; and consequently some name Sempronius and not Antony in enumerating the consuls. 2In his endeavour to take vengeance on the Armenian king with the least trouble to himself, he asked for the hand of the king’s daughter, in order, as he said, to marry her to his son Alexander; he sent on this errand one Quintus Dellius, who had once been a favourite of his, and promised to give the king many gifts. 3Finally, at the beginning of spring, he came suddenly into Nicopolis (the place founded by Pompey), and while there sent for the king, stating that he wished to have his aid in planning and executing some measures against the Parthians. And when the king, suspecting the plot, did not come, he sent Dellius to confer with him again, and meanwhile, for his own part, marched with undiminished haste towards Artaxata. 4In this way he succeeded in inducing him to come into his camp, after a long time, partly by using the king’s associates to persuade him, and partly by using his own soldiers to terrorize him, and by writing and acting toward him in every way precisely as he would toward a friend. 5Thereupon he arrested him, and at first kept him without fetters and led him around to the various forts where the king’s treasures were deposited, in the hope that he might secure them without a struggle; for he professed to have arrested him for no other purpose than to levy tribute upon the Armenians for the safeguarding of the king and to maintain his sovereignty. 6When, however, the keepers of the gold would pay no heed to the king, and the Armenian citizens who bore arms chose Artaxes, the eldest of his sons, king in his stead, Antony bound him in silver chains; for it was unseemly, apparently, that this man who had been king should be bound in fetters of iron.
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