battle standards) by the Parthians was considered a grave moral defeat and evil omen for the Romans. When he was assassinated, Caesar was planning a retaliatory war. It was said that there would have been harsh retribution if Caesar won because the surviving son of Crassus would be among the Roman forces. However, the fall of the Roman Republic intervened, and the beginning of imperial monarchy at Rome followed. Sulla's first march on Rome in 88 BC had begun the collapse of the republican form of government, but the death of Crassus and the loss of his legions utterly reconfigured the balance of power at Rome. An old theory ran that the death of Crassus, along with the death of Julia in 54, Pompey's wife and Caesar's daughter, may have severed the ties between Caesar and Pompey, and the First Triumvirate no longer existed. As a result, civil war broke out. Caesar won, and the Republic quickly became an autocratic dictatorship. Several historians note the lapse of time between Crassus's death and the outbreak of civil war. Gaius Stern has claimed that the death nearly cut the links the First Triumvirate enjoyed with the blue-blooded aristocracy, leaving the entire state vulnerable to the friction that eventually turned into civil war. Thus, an immediate effect of the battle may have been the elimination of certain private checks and balances (such as Crassus's relationship to Metellus Pius Scipio) that had kept a lid on political tensions. In a regional context, however, the battle had little negative impact for Rome in the long-term as the following retaliatory invasion of Rome by Parthia in 40 BC was stopped and repulsed by Publius Ventidius Bassus, it did not prevent an invasion of Parthia by Mark Anthony in 36 BC (although this campaign ended in failure as well). It is rumoured that some of the survivors of Crassus's army ended up in China. In the 1940s, Homer H. Dubs, an American professor of Chinese history at the University of Oxford, suggested that the people of Liqian were descended from Roman soldiers taken prisoner after the battle. The prisoners, Dubs proposed, were resettled by the Parthians on their eastern border and may have fought as mercenaries at the Battle of Zhizhi between the Chinese and the Xiongnu in 36 BC. Chinese chroniclers mention the use of a "fish-scale formation" of soldiers as well as a double wooden