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Juba was a historian, ethnographer, and client king of the Romans, and he concentrated his report On Arabia for Gaius Caesar on southern Mesopotamia, Arabia, and the coasts of the Persian Gulf and Red Sea, now known through Pliny the Elder’s Natural History (FGrH 275, especially F1–3, 30–34). Isidorus’s report, Parthian Stations (Stathmoi Parthikoi), is possibly the summary of a longer description, the Guidebook of Parthia (Parthias Periēgētikon) (Schoff 1914: 17).⁹ It is preserved in the late thirteenth-century Codex Parisinus suppl. gr. 443 and Codex Parisinus gr. 571 (Diller 1952: 19–20, 30; 46–47¹⁰ ) and like the bematists’ writings it describes the route and stations for a west-to-east journey. Isidorus reveals the continuity of Persian routes and stations and the eastern Hellenistic cities up to the first century CE, as well as the current geopolitical situation. Of the regions surveyed, he describes Mesopotamia in the greatest detail, tracing a route from Zeugma down the east side of the Euphrates through Anthemousia to Ichnai and Nikephorion, back across the Euphrates, down its west bank to Dura-Europos, and weaving across the river valley to Seleucia on the Tigris. In mapping this particular route Isidorus revealed to his Roman patrons the ramifications of new Parthian dominance in the Euphrates valley. Isidorus’s contemporary Strabo, writing only a decade or so earlier, represents an earlier situation in his description (16.1.27–28) of a very different highway across the desert, taken by merchants enjoying friendship with the desert nomads and wishing to avoid the higher tariffs exacted by local chieftains controlling the Euphrates river valley. By Isidorus’s time of writing the Parthians had enforced use of the older and longer Hellenistic route around the Fertile Crescent, so as to collect the tolls, an important source of income for their empire (Gawlikowski 1994: 27, 31). When Strabo produced a revised edition of his Geography around 18 CE he did not update the Parthian material (Roseman 2005: 28 n.9): Strabo’s first edition appeared in 7 BCE, and a revised edition in 18 CE, and he did not use Agrippa’s map as evidence, which fits with the earlier date since the map was not finished in 7 BCE.