The absolute monarch who, for his own fancied security, commences a system of executions, is led on step by step to wholesale atrocities from which he would have shrunk with horror at the outset.

Phraates had removed brothers whose superior advantages of birth made them formidable rivals.

He had punished with death a father who ventured to blame his act, and to forget that by abdication he had sunk himself to the position of a subject.

Could he have stopped here, it might have seemed that his severities proceeded not so much from cruelty of disposition as from political necessity; and historians, always tender in the judgments which they pass on kings under such circumstances, would probably have condoned or justified his conduct.

But the taste for bloodshed grows with the indulgence of it.
In a short time the young king had killed all his remaining brothers, although their birth was no better than his own, and there was no valid ground for his fearing them; and soon afterwards, not content with the murder of his own relations, he began to vent his fury upon the Parthian nobles.