CHAPTER EIGHT

O Zenobia!

How, O Zenobia, hast thou dared to insult Roman emperors?

AURELIAN to Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra

The story of Zenobia, third-century Queen of Palmyra, another adversary of Rome, provides not only a dramatic coda to the story of Boudica, first-century Queen of the Iceni but also, at first sight, a peculiarly appropriate one. There are so many interesting parallels to be discovered between their respective experiences quite apart from the simple fact that Zenobia, like Boudica, led her people to war. Both women were widows when they assumed power, both women ruled in theory as regents for their offspring, both women had been married to client-rulers of Rome, both women led revolts (that is, from the Roman point of view) destined to upset an existing relationship with Rome which had apparently been comfortably established under their late husbands’ sway.

Of course the status of widowhood is far from being peculiar to Boudica and Zenobia in the consideration of historic Warrior Queens. The frequent recurrence of what has been termed earlier the Appendage Syndrome – the Warrior Queen seen as an extension or prolongation of the rule of a particular great man – has produced widows as well as daughters. The nineteenth-century Rani of Jhansi is another prominent example of widowhood, as Queen Tamara of Georgia, Queen Elizabeth I of England and Indira Gandhi represent daughterhood. In her own way, the Rani of Jhansi comes close to fulfilling those conditions observed above concerning Boudica and Zenobia; not only was she a widow and a would-be regent, but she duly challenged an imperial power, except that the power in question was British not Roman.

For all these overall similarities linking the Warrior Queens of many different ages, at first inspection the Roman connection does seem to constitute a special link between Boudica and Zenobia. Once again some two hundred years after the death of Boudica, a Roman general found himself ‘waging a war with a woman’. This was the accusation made against Aurelian by his fellow Romans, leaving him to expostulate in reply: ‘As if Zenobia alone and with her own forces only were fighting against me … as a matter of fact, there is a great force of the enemy …’ Here is another familiar syndrome at work, that of Shame, the one which caused the Romans to bow their heads in dismay after the destruction of Camulodunum, for, in the words of Dio Cassius quoted earlier, ‘all this ruin was brought upon [them] … by a woman’.¹

It is only the cooler light of second inspection which uncovers important differences between the two queens, both as they behaved and as they were treated. These differences serve as a salutary reminder, just before the ‘real’ Boudica is abandoned for the legendary Boadicea, that a host of very diverse women throughout history have fought beneath the generalized banner of ‘Warrior Queen’. The similarities are often imposed from outside by the existence of the stereotype. Where the stories are undoubtedly superficially alike, as with Boudica and Zenobia, one should be careful not to ignore the dissimilarities, to enable the individual female character to struggle out from beneath the web of legend – in the case of Zenobia a rare character indeed.

Zenobia was an Arab. That is to say, inscriptions give her the full names of Septimia Zenobia in Latin or Bat Zabbai in Aramaic. Her father may have been called Zabbai (although ‘Bat Zabbai’ can also mean ‘daughter of a merchant’ in Aramaic). At all events this father was probably a native of Palmyra or Tadmor, to give the city its historic name (the exact etymology of these two names, respectively Greek and Aramaic, remains obscure). He would have been part of the proud, cultured and wealthy Arab merchant-aristocracy who inhabited this splendid city, half religious monument, half commercial centre, situated at a vital confluence of caravan routes in the Syrian desert.²

If Zenobia’s descent was predominantly Palmyrene Arab, she may well have had dashes of many other bloods including Aramaean. She flourished after all in that interesting Middle Eastern area, the world’s ancient crucible, where the three languages Greek, Latin and Aramaic, in which Palmyrene inscriptions are expressed, stand for a confluence of cultures and races as well as trade routes. Some Jewish blood has been suggested on the ground that she treated the Jews of Alexandria sympathetically; but this was in fact a comprehensible political move, the Jews always forming a potential anti-Roman force since Titus’ destruction of all Jerusalem in AD 70. (Individuals who treat a given Jewish community with sympathy are often supposed to be of Jewish descent: a commentary on the long history of the Jews as a persecuted people.) But it is significant that Zenobia, who made much of historic bonds, never claimed one with Solomon, which in view of his mythic connection to the fortress of Tadmor would seem to dispose of a real Jewish link.³

The great Cleopatra (herself predominantly Greek but acting out the Egyptian with verve) was as it were the role model to which Zenobia aspired. Moreover the Palmyrene Queen claimed very firmly to be descended from her; there was a certain history of Alexandria, dedicated ‘to Cleopatra’, of which Zenobia must have been the actual dedicatee. The claim is generally thought to be false, although Zenobia’s knowledge of the Egyptian language and her predisposition towards Egyptian culture may conceivably indicate that her mother was Egyptian.⁴ The real significance of the claim is as a proof of Zenobia’s intelligence: she quickly appreciated the self-aggrandizement to be derived from a glamorous historic connection. As Cleopatra used the image of the goddess Isis, the Queen of War, to lend exciting credence to her own dreams of empire, so Zenobia drew Cleopatra’s own image to her. She also incidentally associated herself with Semiramis, and loved to dress up ‘in the robes of Dido’:⁵ one has the impression that no queen, however unfortunate her history, was left unturned in Zenobia’s relentless (but practical) evocation of female majesty.

Zenobia’s fantasies about Egypt should not be allowed to obscure the strong tradition to which she actually belongs. Zenobia is in fact part of a discernible pattern of pre-Islamic Arabian queens with military connections, many of them coming from her own Syrian homeland or areas adjacent. The researches of Nabia Abbott have revealed at least two dozen of these formidable ladies over six centuries, following the visit of the Queen of Sheba to Solomon in the tenth century BC. Various origins have been ascribed to this fabulous Queen including south Arabian and Abyssinian: more importantly she exemplifies ‘the exercise of the right of independent queenship among the ancient Arabs’.⁶

The Assyrian records give glimpses of troublesome Arab queens such as Zabibi, finally subjugated and forced to pay tribute in 738 BC, and Samsi, who may have been her successor and, after military defeat, underwent the same fate. It was from the royal house of Emesa, annexed to Syria, that the Emperor Septimius Severus in about AD 185 chose as his wife Martha, the daughter of the priest–king – she who became the powerful Julia Domna and introduced the Semitic goddess Tanit (as Caelestis Dea) to the Roman world. Mamaea, the redoubtable daughter of Julia Domna’s sister, Julia Maesa, ruled for her son the Emperor Alexander, even accompanying him on the German campaign in 234; a generation older than Zenobia, but hailing from the same ‘Syrian’ cradle, she was described by Gibbon as having ‘manly ambition’.⁷

Nor did this tradition end with Zenobia herself: from about AD 373 to 380, a hundred years after Zenobia’s disappearance from the scene of history, we encounter another Syrian Arab queen named Mawia, probably a Ghassanid. Mawia too rode in person at the head of her army, made excursions into Phoenicia and Palestine, ravaged the land to the frontiers of Egypt, and defeated the Roman armies; later she sent her fleet of Arab cavalry to the aid of the Romans when they in their turn were hard-pressed by the Goths. The last ‘queen’ of pre-Islamic Western Arabia was the famous – or infamous – Hind Al-Hunūd about whom many traditions have congregated, some bloodthirsty, but all pointing to her independence. And it is worth recalling too that as late as 656 Aishah, ‘the beloved of Muhammad’ (the Prophet’s last wife), was present at the Battle of the Camels at the heart of the fighting. More than that, Aishah’s role in the internecine strife of which this battle was the culmination showed that at this date men would still follow a woman to war.⁸

Zenobia may have looked to Cleopatra for inspiration, but Zenobia’s Arab tradition in which, as with the Celts, queens could ride to battle (and to victory) was an important element in her story. And the Holy Figurehead element in a woman’s presence at the scene of battle as an inspiration, even a quasi-goddess, was also common to the Arabs, as to the Celts, in the pre-Islamic tradition of the Lady of Victory. By this tradition, some woman of quality would be placed within the portable qubbah or sacred pavilion of the tribal deity and, with her attendants, form a sacred group within sight of the warriors, singing songs of encouragement to them. The Lady of Victory, her hair flowing and her body partly exposed, embodied an appeal to valour and passion. (As late as the nineteenth century, William Palgrave described one particular ‘huge girl’ who encouraged the Amjan Bedouins against the heir to the throne of Nejed in this manner; when she was slain, they were defeated.)⁹

Another crucial element in Zenobia’s career was the geographical situation of Palmyra itself, halfway between the two mighty and contending empires, one of which was Roman. It would be equally unsuitable to regard Zenobia as some kind of Hollywood ‘Desert Queen’, riding out of a dust storm, with a tent for her court and a palm frond for her sceptre, as it would be to regard Boudica as a woad-stained shrieking Celtic savage. Both women – both leaders – came from complex civilizations; in the case of Zenobia, the civilization from which she sprang had been affected deeply by that of Rome.

Around AD 114, Palmyra had theoretically become part of the Roman Empire, while the Emperor Hadrian judiciously allowed the city considerable liberty in order to benefit from its celebrated archers as defenders of what was now his own frontier against the Parthians. Moreover the Palmyrenes were allowed to be responsible for their own municipal taxes: another wise move. Palmyra flourished under this loose mutually beneficial tutelage. At the beginning of the third century the Emperor Septimius Severus made Palmyra into a colony and allowed a properly elected senate to manage its affairs; distinguished Palmyrenes began to add Roman names to their Semitic ones.

As Zenobia was not an unsophisticated Bedouin queen, so Palmyra itself was not a remote and ruined city lost in the midst of sands, as some ancient geographers suggested. On the contrary, vital caravan routes linked it to the seaboard cities of Phoenicia, to Emesa, to Damascus and to Egypt itself, Palmyra providing the link between these and Seleucia, and the more distant eastern regions. Foreign armies might not easily penetrate the intervening deserts, but the camel caravans of the merchants had no such problems. So the substantial animals toiled endlessly to and fro – camels in prime condition could carry loads of up to 200 kilos – and thus the Palmyrene merchants emulated Macaulay’s Lars Porsena, who ‘bade his messengers ride forth, east and west and south and north, To summon his array’; except that the camels of the Palmyrenes bore back with them an array of goods, not soldiers: from perfumes and aromatic oils to skins and salt. A tariff of commercial dues dated AD 137 reveals how far afield the tentacles of Palmyrene trade actually spread: silks and jade from the Chinese frontiers are listed, and from India muslins, spice, ebony, ivory and pearls.¹⁰

The merchant–aristocrats lived well: in their day two emperors visited Palmyra. The merchants made great profits and patronized the arts with their money (it is always agreeable to find these two activities considered compatible). A hundred years before Zenobia, a special tax was imposed on imported bronze statues and busts; the wealthy citizens had a special penchant for erecting columns and colonnades and adorning them with self-congratulatory inscriptions. Jewellery loaded down the women – how Zenobia would one day come to feel the weight of those splendid jewels! If the colonnaded edifices showed the influence of Rome, the shadow of Palmyra’s other great neighbour also fell across her culture: local deities might be given Roman names but wear Parthian dress. Later Persian costume, rugs and jewels mingled with the Roman styles.

Central to Palmyra was the great Temple of the Sun.¹¹ Yet by the third century the official sun worship of the Palmyrene state was being supplemented by an alternative religion: a vague yet spiritual kind of monotheism – the worship of the unknown god, to whom those inferior categories of women and servants also made offerings. Here, where the unknown god and the celestial pantheon of other gods were content to receive harmless sacrifices of incense and wine, a generally liberal atmosphere prevailed, in which, according to inscriptions, the Jews also found their place (and adapted to Palmyrene customs).

The collapse of the Parthian Empire and the arrival of the Sassanids to the newly imperial throne of Persia in AD 227 put an end to a status quo which had been prosperous and far from disagreeable for Palmyra. At the same time the worldwide vigour of imperial Rome was declining – or to be more specific the emperors were obsessed by the Gothic threat on their northern frontiers. Obviously new perils threatened what was, to outsiders, essentially the buffer state of Palmyra. It was against this background of transitional turmoil that Odainat (otherwise Septimius Odenaethus), husband of Zenobia and self-styled King of Palmyra, decided like Shakespeare’s Henry V to pluck the flower of opportunity.

Zosimus, a fifth-century Greek whose history of the Roman Empire up till 410 casts an interesting light on Zenobia, refers to Odainat as a ‘person whose ancestors had always been highly respected by the emperors’. Certainly Odainat came of an illustrious family. His grandfather – or possibly great-grandfather, at any rate another Odainat – had become a Roman senator in about AD 230, eighteen years after all free men within the Empire were made Roman citizens. The son or grandson of this first Odainat, Hairan (Herodianus), was the first to bear the equivocal title of chief of Palmyra – or in Aramaic Ras Tadmor.¹²

Odainat, son of Hairan and husband of Zenobia, was made a Roman consul in AD 258. Two years later the Roman Emperor Valerian was defeated by Sapor I of Persia, held captive in disgusting conditions and finally killed. It was under these circumstances that Odainat took to the field with the archers and spearmen of Palmyra on the one hand, the cavalry of the desert Arabs on the other; remnants of the tattered Roman legions may also have assisted him. Palmyra might have preferred to lean towards Persia rather than towards Rome, in view of the latter’s debilitated state. It was the Persian Emperor who declined to lean towards Palmyra. Under the circumstances Odainat had little choice but to sally forth against him.

As it was, Odainat’s forces swept all before them, and according to one chronicler they finally captured the magnificent treasure of the Persian Emperor. In 261 Odainat secured another victory at Emesa (now Homs) in western Syria, where a Roman general had taken advantage of the fluid times to set himself up as a usurper. Very likely, Odainat had been given some general title of command by Rome before he sallied forth. But in 262 the incoming Roman Emperor Gallienus – himself capable of avenging the murdered Valerian – made Odainat, the man who could actually do so, officially dux romanorum and later imperator.

There is some understandable confusion over what these titles actually meant. For one thing, they must have meant different things to the Romans, who were particular about the niceties of such things but absent, and to the Palmyrenes themselves, not so particular but on the spot. There is no evidence that Odainat was granted the distinctive title of Augustus by Gallienus or, more to the point, claimed it. He did have himself inscribed as ‘King of kings’ at Palmyra – but then Palmyra was a long way from Rome.¹³Odainat was a realist: he showed himself content with the substance of his power, the fact that he had saved the fortunes of the Roman Empire in the east and shored up those of Palmyra.

It was however not Odainat himself but Zenobia who mesmerized ancient historians. The so-called Scriptores Historiae Augustae – a collection of biographies, probably written in the fourth century, dealing with the Roman emperors from AD 117 to 284 – are full of her praises. Of the six authors to whom the Scriptores are attributed, ‘Trebellius Pollio’ and ‘Flavius Vopiscus’ are responsible for the period in which Zenobia flourished.¹⁴ ‘The noblest of all the women of the East’, wrote Trebellius Pollio, dilating also on her personal charms: she was also speciosissima – ‘the most beautiful’ – and elsewhere venustatis incredibilis – ‘of an incredible attraction’. His description of Zenobia – eyes black and powerful beyond the usual wont, teeth so white that many believed she wore pearls in her mouth, complexion wonderfully dark – suggests that we may look for her type among the surviving portraiture of Palmyrene art, where the impressive women with their strong noses and enormous almond-shaped eyes look out with baleful dignity; a type indeed not far from that of Zenobia’s proclaimed ancestress Cleopatra.¹⁵

At the same time these historians, writing of course with hindsight and a full knowledge of Zenobia’s remarkable career, were quick to praise her more ‘masculine’ qualities: her hardihood for example. Odainat himself was celebrated for his hunting; he would live in the forests and endure heat, rain and other hardships in pursuit of lions, panthers and bears: in this way he was naturally equipped for the rigours of his Persian campaigns. But Zenobia too went on these hunting trips, and so she was fit enough to accompany him on his military sorties.

Not only was she fit enough – disdaining the comfort of a woman’s coach and even a man’s chariot, in favour of a horse – but she was also sufficiently daring. Zosimus considered flatteringly enough that Zenobia had ‘the courage of a man; and with the assistance of her husband’s friends, acted in every respect as well as he had done’. But Trebellius Pollio went much further. When he wrote that Zenobia ‘in the opinion of many was held to be more brave than her husband’, he was expressing an opinion, often linked to the Shame Syndrome, but also a syndrome in its own right, which makes the woman ‘the better man of the two’. There is no real reason to suppose that Zenobia was more courageous than Odainat, who sounds to have been both a vigorous general and a brave soldier; she was undeniably more reckless. It was Zenobia’s gender which gave her the advantage. Because of that, even to parallel the achievements of her husband inexorably made Zenobia the Better-Man.

In other ways the idealized portrait of Zenobia as a Warrior Queen neatly encompasses the most useful qualities of both sexes. Her voice, as has been mentioned apropos that of Boudica, was not harsh (unfeminine) but clear and manly (useful for rallying the troops). Leaping off her horse, she could walk with her footsoldiers three or four miles. Indeed, Zenobia had little taste for having other women about her, eunuchs being preferred to maidservants. She could also drink-with-the-boys (like the voice, the question of drinking-with-the-boys being another perennial if unstressed problem for female rulers). But her chroniclers emphasized that Zenobia never drank without an ulterior motive: either she drank diplomatically with foreigners such as the Persians in order to get them drunk; or she drank graciously with her own generals. Either way, this rare creature was, it seems, never by any chance intoxicated.

Then there is the bizarre matter of Zenobia’s famous ‘chastity’. The exact number, order of birth and indeed names of Zenobia’s various sons are not clear. What is quite certain is that she gave birth to at least three and possibly more. Marital relations with Odainat therefore could hardly be denied. But by a brilliant piece of propaganda, Zenobia’s undoubted periodic admission of Adainat to the marriage bed was transformed into actual evidence of her chastity: ‘she would not know even her own husband, except for the purpose of conception’, wrote Trebellius Pollio. ‘For when once she had lain with him, she would refrain until the time of the month to see if she was pregnant; if not, she would again grant an opportunity of begetting children.’

Zenobia’s semi-Lysistratan policy was to gain her the awed respect of subsequent (male) historians, as it impressed the fourth-century Trebellius Pollio. Gibbon allowed Zenobia to surpass Cleopatra in both ‘chastity and valour’ and one cannot help thinking that her reputation for the former subtly helped on her reputation for the latter. ‘How praiseworthy was this decision in a woman!’ wrote Boccaccio, describing Zenobia as ‘so virtuous … that she must precede all other foreign women in fame’. He then indulged in a wonderful fantasy concerning her tomboy girlhood. Boccaccio has Zenobia scorning womanly exercises and wandering the forests instead to kill goats and stags with her arrows. She also wrestles with young men, carefully preserving her virginity at all points, in the passage – strongly reminiscent of Virgil on the subject of Camilla of the Volscians – cited earlier. As a grown woman, Boccaccio’s Zenobia hides her beauty under armour, and never speaks to her soldiers except behind the protection of her helmet, a detail captured by Ben Jonson in his Masque of Queenes of 1610, whose illustration shows Zenobia ‘the chaste’ in her ‘cask’ or helmet but with long curling hair flowing beneath it, to say nothing of one exposed breast, liable, one would think, to inflame the least wanton soldier.¹⁶

Naturally the truth of the legend concerning Zenobia’s ‘chastity’ can hardly be established at this point. A sceptic might be forgiven for requiring further evidence that this alluring wife of an Eastern potentate actually carried out her stringent method of sex control. But that is less important in the context than the excitement which the legend of the husband-denying Zenobia produces. The Chaste Syndrome accords well with a satisfyingly puritanical picture of the warrior-woman, the pure figurehead, her holy virginity equated with the holiness of her cause. By throwing in the theory of sex control, even married women like Zenobia can belong to it.

Around AD 266 or 267 the problem of marital attentions, if it existed, ceased to trouble Zenobia altogether. Under circumstances which have never been fully unravelled, her husband Odainat met his death. The ostensible assassin was his nephew Maeonius, whom Odainat had punished for insubordination. In the same attack also died Odainat’s presumed heir, Hairan; this was the son of his first marriage, the typically unsatisfactory offspring of a successful general, being given to ‘Grecian luxury’. That left Zenobia, the second wife, to assume the regency of Palmyra on behalf of her own son Vaballathus Athenodorus.

Any stepmother who sees an elder son preferred by right of birth to her own, and then lives to witness her own offspring benefiting from this son’s premature death, stands to be suspected of complicity in the crime.¹⁷ If Zenobia did help Hairan on his way, she was certainly not the first stepmother to do so. The hard evidence against Zenobia does not seem to go further than this post hoc, propter hos kind of argument, nor does the ambitious temperament she subsequently revealed necessarily make her a murderess even if matters had indubitably turned out conveniently for her. Zenobia however is far from being the only person who had something to gain from the death of Odainat. There is also the question of Rome.

Although the Romans appeared to acquiesce in Odainat’s tacit assumption of viceregal powers, they had plenty of historical experience of self-styled emperors-in-the-East, none of it satisfactory. The perennial problem was how to secure their frontiers and yet keep down their various mushrooming lieutenants. It may be that the removal of Odainat, that hardy and effective general, was not displeasing to them; it may even be that they conspired to secure it. A youngish woman as regent for a boy would present much less of a threat. Or so the Romans thought.

As it was, Zenobia’s immediate reaction to her new position was more that of the swift voracious hawk than that of the placid domestic dove. Swiftly she struck against Egypt, taking advantage of the fact that the Roman Empire itself was being hard-pressed on its other frontiers, notably in northern Italy, by those unwelcome strangers at the European feast, the Goths. (Their first attacks had occurred about thirty years earlier.) By 269 her general Zabdas had secured most of the country; at the same time Zenobia had simply annexed most of Syria to the Palmyrene kingdom. Some local difficulties with Egypt – where many distinctly preferred the distant Roman overlordship to that of neighbouring Palmyra – meant a second campaign by Zabdas. But in neither case – Egypt or Syria – was the beleaguered Roman Emperor Gallienus in any position to protest.

It was then the turn of Asia Minor: by 270 Zenobia had conquered as far as Bithynia, which commanded the Bosphorus. Only at Chalcedon were the gates closed against the Palmyrenes, who, far from their base, could not take the city. Nevertheless in the few years since her husband’s death, Zenobia, in a great swathe of conquest, had sickled out a vast new empire for the tiny Palmyrene state from Egypt in the south right up to the Bosphorus in the north. And to crown it all Zenobia now took a step which Odainat had never taken: she declared herself formally independent of Rome.

By this time, Zenobia was controlling not only much of the commerce so vital to Rome – which depended for example on Egypt entirely for corn supplies – but also the trade routes with Abyssinia, Arabia and India. In addition, her northern swathe brought her in touch with the Bosphoran route to Thrace. Yet despite the menace of this eastern situation, the Roman Emperor still preferred – however grudgingly – to allow some form of concordat with Zenobia, while the still greater Gothic threat remained to be eliminated. In the words of the Scriptores Historiae Augustae on the fortunes of Rome at this point: ‘Now all shame is exhausted, for in the weakened state of the commonwealth … even women ruled most excellently.’¹⁸

Whether Zenobia ruled excellently or not, depending on one’s view of extended conquest, she certainly ruled, and with a deliberate pomp which pointed most magisterially back towards that of Cleopatra; even the gold vessels used at her banquet were said to have been those bequeathed by the great Queen. Furthermore Zenobia established a court known, however briefly, for its intellectual brilliance as well as the more material coruscation of its jewellery. Prominent among the scholars and men of letters who surrounded her at her invitation was Cassius Longinus, the eminent writer on Greek rhetoric and philosophy, himself probably Syrian. Then there was Callinicus Sutorius, originally from Petra, a sophist and historian who had taught at Athens. It was Callinicus who actually wrote that history of Alexandria – significantly, capital of the Ptolemies – which was sometimes ascribed to Zenobia herself. But then the desire, however wistful, to be known as a published scholar is not in itself an ignoble ambition for a prince – or a princess. Moreover Zenobia’s was an empire founded on tolerance rather than exclusivity. Her benevolence towards the Jews of Alexandria has been mentioned. According to tradition, she also established relations with Paul of Samosata, the Christian Bishop of Antioch, condemned for certain doctrinal errors at the Synod of Antioch held in 268.¹⁹

What was the mainspring of all this imperial – and imperious – activity on the part of the Palmyrene Queen? The recreation of vanished Ptolemaic glories was a thrilling pursuit indeed, yet it was a chimera, one which had never haunted the more hard-headed and practical Odainat. With Zenobia, acting on behalf of her son Vaballathus, on the other hand, one can trace the mounting tenor of her claims through various inscriptions in Egypt, Syria and Palmyra, as the break with Rome gets nearer. Vaballathus was not onlydux romanorum like his father, but rex and basileus(Greek for king) and despot – ruler. Zenobia herself was regina and basilissa – queen – and, most magnificently, the two of them were Augustus and Augusta. Finally, at some date after 11 March 271 and before August, Zenobia on behalf of Vaballathus struck money in both their names.²⁰This was a declaration of war against the Empire.

The French authority on the history and customs of Palmyra, J. G. Février, knew the answer to Zenobia’s driving force. For the impartial historian, he wrote, one trait dominates her character: ‘une ambition féroce, insatiable’.²¹ One may be far more partialtowards Zenobia, sympathetic to the problems which she overcame and to the near-miraculous achievements which for however short a span were hers, and still find the answer to be the right one. How else could she have urged her troops on that extraordinary sweep of conquest, how else set up her Cleopatrine court, if she had not been animated by ferocious and certainly insatiable ambition? This is where Zenobia, as a type of Warrior Queen, parts company significantly with Boudica, and with many others of the Boadicean ilk, who for one reason and another were driven into a military solution.

Unlike Boudica, Zenobia had not been wronged: she had not been scourged, her daughters had not been raped, the Romans had not taken over her people’s land nor imposed lethal taxes upon Palmyra. Following the pattern of Odainat, there was an opportunity here for renewed Palmyrene aggrandizement while the Empire remained weak, even if the Palmyrene archers, no longer supplemented by Roman legionaries, would have to look out for the Persian enemy on their other frontier. But Zenobia – in this indeed like Cleopatra – preferred a bolder course.

It is not clear whether Zenobia ever claimed formal joint rule with her own son²² and since she enjoyed effective power during Vaballathus’ youth one can only imagine how she would have dealt with the problem of his majority had the Palmyrene Empire survived so long. As it was, her style of majesty, like the Palmyrene culture to which she belonged, took profitably from the worlds which she straddled. Symbolically, the vast oriental jewel which hung from her helmet was not the kind of brooch generally worn by women, but that of Eastern kings, for Zenobia copied the regal pomp of the Persians in her banquets and the obeisance she received; on the other hand she stepped forth to public assemblies like the Roman emperors. Zenobia was the type of striking and intelligent woman whose original Appendage status is soon forgotten. When the enveloping masculine carapace was broken, she stepped out from the fragments of the shell with zest.

*

Zenobia was not to be allowed to pursue her daring course with impunity for ever. It is generally and plausibly believed that the new Roman Emperor Aurelian took the initiative in what followed. The time was at last propitious. Aurelian, a general who probably originally came from Lower Moesia, had done well in northern Italy against the invading Alemanni and Juthungi. The Dalmatian invasions were for the time being held off, and at home a revolt in the Senate had been quashed. Nor could Palmyra look towards Persia for any assistance against the traditional Roman enemy: it was now the turn of that empire to be paralysed by inner troubles following the death of Sapor I. Even if Zenobia provoked the actual outbreak of hostilities by cutting off the vital supply of Egyptian corn to Italy, she could not have expected her joyous suzerainty over such a vast area – all of it contiguous to the Roman overlordship – to remain unchallenged for long once Rome itself had the energy to spare.

Aurelian’s first task was to secure the reconquest of Egypt, under the generalship of Probus. This was not a task which presented too many difficulties since the Palmyrene presence was still the cause of much Egyptian resentment. At a conference at Palmyra itself, on the other hand, in August 271, a bare year since Zenobia’s bold essay of independence, pledges of loyalty were given to the family of Odainat, in effect to the Queen.

Two oracles were now consulted by the Palmyrenes concerning the fate of their eastern empire: the Apollo Sarpedonius at Seleucia and the Venus Aphacitis (of Aphaca in Syria). On a grander scale, it was a situation reminiscent of Boudica’s rally when she first invoked the goddess Andraste and then released the hare from the folds of her skirt ‘as a species of divination’. But the hare – doubtless by careful stage management – had run off in an auspicious direction. The Apollo Sarpedonius returned an answer which indicated that he found the mere enquiry odious:

Accursed race! Avoid my sacred fane

Whose treach’rous deeds the angry gods disdain.²³

As for the Venus Aphacitis, she declined to instigate that phenomenon of a rounded airy figure, appearing from a lamp of fire, which sometimes greeted the fortunate; and the Palmyrene offerings at her cistern floated unhappily on the surface, a sign that the goddess had rejected them.

As things turned out, Boudica’s auspiciously lolloping hare proved to be a false prophet, whereas the Apollo Sarpedonius and the Venus Aphacitis could have claimed the satisfaction, in some pantheon where they had gloomy colloquy with each other, of getting things absolutely right. But then what omen, favourable or otherwise, has ever altered the course of history? The fact was that with a strong Roman presence back on the Eastern scene, the luck of Zenobia – and Palmyra – was fast running out.

Aurelian’s first campaign took him as far as Ankara. The city duly opened its gates since the Palmyrenes had not left behind a garrison, either because Ankara was judged too far from their centre of operations, or because they had insufficient troops to do so. The first resistance encountered by Aurelian was in the defiles of Taurus, commanded by the city of Tyana, which the Palmyrenes held. Possibly aided by treachery, Aurelian was able to prevail. But he did not permit his troops to sate themselves on pillage in the customary manner – yet. After all, as he pointed out, resplendent and wealthy Palmyra lay ahead.

The Palmyrenes fell back on the line of the Orontes river, which flows north-west from Emesa to Antioch. Here just outside Antioch the two armies faced each other: but it was far from being such a disparate confrontation as that of Romans and Britons at Boudica’s ‘last battle’. It is true that the Roman legions were once again veterans of a life of war, such as those Suetonius had had at his command; Aurelian also had some light cavalry. But he had no archers or heavy cavalry. The Palmyrenes on the other hand had both: and the prowess of their archers was renowned throughout the East. Zenobia’s line of battle consisted of a line of archers on foot, with an imposing mass of both cavalry and infantry behind; unfortunately her cavalry, famous too for its zest and power, had a tendency to lose touch with the infantry due to the unchecked depth of its charge.

In the battle which followed, with Zenobia seen galloping alongside her troops although transmitting orders through her general Zadbas, this lack in restraint on the part of the Palmyrene cavalry proved crucial. Zosimus tells us that the Romans pretended to flee, luring the Palmyrenes on until both men and horses were ‘thoroughly tired, through the excessive heat and weight of their armour’.²⁴ As a result the Palmyrene cavalry was cut off and subjected to the most frightful slaughter.

Following this reverse, it even took a trick on the part of Zabdas to secure his re-entry to Antioch (he pretended to be leading in the captive Aurelian) since the waning fortunes of the Palmyrenes were evident to their subjugated neighbours. Zenobia, pursued by Aurelian, now fell back on Emesa, and it was here, on the banks of the Orontes, some five or six miles north of modern Homs, that her ‘last battle’ took place. According to Zosimus, Zenobia at this point still had, out of those Syrians loyal to her, seventy thousand men. But Aurelian’s own troops, augmented by reinforcement, may by this stage have been almost as numerous.

The battle was long and fierce: but in the end the fiery Palmyrenes, for all their archers and their cavalry, were no more match for the seasoned Roman legionaries than the warriors of the Iceni had been, with their decorated shields, chariots and long swords. The Roman staying-power could not be gainsaid. Once again the Palmyrene cavalry failed to re-form after its initial charge, and the Emperor was able to throw in his footsoldiers against them. ‘The slaughter was promiscuous,’ wrote Zosimus, ‘some falling by the sword and others by their own and their enemies’ horses.’²⁵ The field was covered with dead men and animals. So fell the flower of the Palmyrene aristocracy.

But Zenobia did not fall. After a grim council of war, the decision was taken to abandon Emesa for the base stronghold of Palmyra, where at least the Palmyrenes would not have to contend with growing Syrian hostility. Zenobia’s withdrawal across the desert to Palmyra – a distance of perhaps one hundred miles – was something to which custom had habituated both her and her Arab troops. Aurelian’s pursuit, given the terrain and the ability of the nomads who inhabited it to harry him, was more of an ordeal and thus more of an achievement. And, once he had arrived to set up his blockade, Palmyra’s isolated position, with the caravans no longer active, told against her rather than her enemies. In the subsequent siege, it was famine as much as anything else which ravaged the inhabitants.

Zenobia however had not lost her spirit. It was at this point that her chronicler has her engaging in a correspondence with Aurelian on the subject of surrender.²⁶ Aurelian was already publicly bemoaning his fate in being matched against a woman in that passage quoted earlier: ‘as if Zenobia was contending against me with her own strength alone …’ To the Queen herself he wrote in contemptuous terms: ‘And you, O Zenobia, may pass your life in some spot where I shall place you in pursuance of the distinguished sentence of the Senate; your gems, your silver, gold, silk, horses, camels, being given up to the Roman treasury.’

‘Thou askest me to surrender’, replied the Palmyrene Queen proudly, ‘as if thou wert ignorant that Queen Cleopatra chose rather to perish than to survive her dignity.’ In answer to Aurelian’s indignant question: ‘How, O Zenobia, hast thou dared to insult Roman emperors?’ she answered: ‘Thee I acknowledge to be Emperor, since thou has conquered’, but the rest of them, including Gallienus, she did not consider worthy of the name of chief – princeps. She added: ‘Believing Vitruvia^f1 to be a woman like me, I desired to become a partner in the royal power, should the supply of lands permit.’

At the same time as firing off this defiant letter – about the authorship of which there would later be some significant dispute – Zenobia sought assistance from the Persians. It is kindest and by no means unreasonable to regard Zenobia’s subsequent secret flight from Palmyra as part of her plan for securing this Persian help, since Aurelian blocked off not only supplies but also any overt Persian relief force. Taking a female camel – ‘which is the swiftest of that kind of animal, and much more swift than horses’ – she managed to slip out of the beleaguered city. Riding furiously, Zenobia got as far as the Euphrates. Here she was captured as she was boarding a boat, either recognized or betrayed. Taken to Emesa, Zenobia found herself once more facing the Emperor Aurelian, but this time unaided by Palmyrene archers or cavalry.

Palmyra itself was captured and sacked. But in the persons of Aurelian and Zenobia an interesting battle of the sexes was joined, one from which the Palmyrene Queen undoubtedly emerged victorious. Aurelian for his part remained uneasy at his triumph over a mere woman, and reflected that in ages to come it might not redound entirely to his credit to have done so. He therefore continued to stress at length the amazing qualities of the Palmyrene Queen: a woman perhaps, but what a woman! So brave, bold, daring, prudent in council, firm in purpose, etc., etc. Moreover Odainat’s victories in Persia were due entirely to her, ‘such was the dread entertained of this woman, among the natives of the East and of Egypt, that she kept in check the Arabians, the Saracens and the Armenians’.²⁸ Frantically Aurelian attempted to elude the taint of the Shame Syndrome, generally supplied to those who were actually defeated by ‘mere women’ like Boudica, but still capable of adhering to those who defeated them.

Zenobia on the other hand, displayed an impudence which should make her the admiration of any strong-minded woman finding herself in a tight corner in a masculine-oriented society. She simply turned round and claimed immunity on the grounds of her sex. In short, she ‘produced many persons, who had seduced her as a simple woman’. Even her bold letter of defiance to Aurelian was now ascribed to the scholar Longinus, although another scholar Nicomachus asserted to the contrary that Zenobia had dictated the letter to him personally, in order that he should translate it into Greek (which she could speak but not write).²⁹ As a result, Longinus was executed. Zenobia however survived, as presumably had been her intention: for nothing more was heard after this of her bold desire to ‘perish rather than lose her dignity’.

All the evidence points to the fact that Zenobia was now taken captive to Rome. Zosimus is the only dissenting voice, but then in suggesting that Zenobia died on her way to Europe by her own hand he was manifestly trying to emphasize the identity of Zenobia with Cleopatra. Other versions agree with a wealth of circumstantial detail that Zenobia reached Italy in safety where she was obliged to walk in the Emperor’s triumph.³⁰

One would like to have witnessed this apotheosis of the Emperor Aurelian, although preferably not in chains. First came a parade of the most curious wild beasts, including not only elephants but tigers, giraffes and elks: subsequently the prudent Aurelian gave this menagerie to various Roman citizens so that the privy purse would not be burdened with their upkeep. Then came the gladiators and then the ambassadors of such diverse empires as Ethiopia, Persia, India and China. The human menagerie which followed was of no less interest to the inquisitive spectators: captives from, as it seemed, every corner of the globe attesting to the range of Aurelian’s victories, and all neatly labelled with placards round their necks to din in the geography lesson (as diplomats today are labelled at a United Nations session). In this manner there trailed past not only the recent victims of the East, but also Hibernians, Vandals, Franks and Swabians. Among these last were a group of Gothic women who had been discovered fighting in men’s clothes: helpfully the placards around their necks read ‘Amazon’.

Four chariots in all formed part of the procession. One of these, which had once belonged to the King of the Goths, was drawn by stags: at the Capitol the stags would be slain and vowed to the altar of Jupiter. The others were of Eastern provenance: the chariot of Odainat, adorned with silver and gold, the chariot given to Aurelian by the Emperor of Persia, and the chariot of Zenobia (that chariot in which she had often disdained to ride, preferring with her ‘masculine energy’ the hardihood of horseback).

It was indeed Zenobia herself, walking in front of her chariot, who was the focus of every eye. She bore no placard round her neck, nor was she labelled ‘Amazon’ or for that matter ‘Penthesilea’ or ‘Hippolyta’. Nevertheless the half-fainting Palmyrene Queen (for once she might have been glad of that chariot), shackled by golden fetters and weighed down by the very mass of those jewels she had once displayed so proudly, stood by her very presence for Aurelian’s victory in the East, much as the Greek heroes’ legendary victories over the Amazons had symbolized the victory of Greeks over the barbarians.

Zenobia, the great survivor, survived the ordeal of the Triumph. She did more than that: she built a new life.³¹ At some later point, she seems to have married a Roman senator. At any rate she was able to retire in affluence to a villa, granted to her by the Roman state, at Tibur (Tivoli), near that of Hadrian. A hundred years later her descendants, either by this second husband or by Odainat – Vaballathus disappears from view, but two other sons walked with her in the Triumph – were known in senatorial circles; the fifth-century Bishop of Florence, Zenobius, may have owed his unusual name to a still remembered ancestress.

Zenobia’s instinct for survival, unlike her forcible marital chastity, has received a bad press from historians, although one can detect a certain gloomy satisfaction at finding a woman, however bold on the field, choosing to behave really badly in a genuine crisis. Theodor Mommsen thundered: ‘Zenobia, after she had for years born rule with masculine energy, did not now disdain to invoke a woman’s privileges and to throw the responsibility on her advisers.’ Gibbon was more philosophical: ‘as female fortitude is commonly artificial, so it is seldom steady or consistent’.³² For tradition has it that Zenobia, unruffled by such considerations, had the bad taste to enjoy her life as a Roman matron. She held a fashionable salon in her villa, where only her outlandish Roman accent (but then she did speak Greek, Aramaic and Egyptian) betrayed her exotic origins. As Zenobia dispensed hospitality and perhaps told stories of her tribulations walking in the Triumph or even tales of desert rides – did she ever dream of that female camel, the swiftest in the business? – Aurelian was obliged to return to Palmyra. There he quelled another insurrection. Finally both Palmyra and Alexandria were plundered to excess and the Palmyrene civilization passed away.

So finally the story of Zenobia and the Romans, as a coda to that of Boudica, reminds one that there could be advantages in being a Warrior Queen – as opposed to a Warrior King – as well as disadvantages; or at least so far as the queen herself was concerned. Boudica was scourged (and her daughters raped), which it has been suggested was a deliberate outrage on the part of the Romans, connected to Boudica’s sex; Zenobia on the other hand betrayed Longinus with impunity, if one leaves out of account her short bejewelled travail on foot. The Only-a-Weak-Woman Syndrome – ‘I am as good as (or even better than) a man when I ride to victory but I’m Only-a-Weak-Woman when I’m defeated’ – is also part of the history of the Warrior Queen.

None of this should detract from the achievements of Zenobia in her prime. There is a figure of Arab legend called variously Zebbâ, al-Zabbà or az-Zabbà: a beautiful warrior who leads her troops to victory in a series of confrontations, as well as indulging in some wily tricks, based on her own charms.³³ Zebbâ has two fortresses on the left and right banks of the Euphrates – in some stories her sister called Zainab (the Arab version of Zenobia) occupies one of them – and in one legend at least remains chaste; moreover Zebbâ, like Zenobia, is captured in an incident at a river. Although an exact connection between Zenobia and Zebbâ cannot be made – just as a historical figure like Boudica can never be exactly connected with the legendary Boadicea – nevertheless there are too many coincidences between them to dismiss it altogether.

It therefore seems fitting, as we go forward on the long march of Boudica’s mythical history, to remember that Zenobia also has her own lively myths in her own Arab culture (Zainab is a popular name in Syria today). A modern play by Assi and Mansour Al-Rahbani ends with Zenobia poisoning herself just before the Roman soldiers bind her in chains. She dies with the words ‘O Liberty!’ on her lips, and her mourning people promise themselves never to forget her (or the idea of liberty).³⁴

It is good to bear this Arab heroine in mind; for we shall find the ‘chaste’ Zenobia appearing from time to time in a somewhat pallid disguise in Europe:

That lovely form enshrines the gentlest virtues

Softest compassion, unaffected wisdom,

To outward beauty lending higher charms³⁵

as an eighteenth-century play had it. It is difficult to imagine this ‘beauteous mourner’ raising her ‘suppliant voice’ for ‘mild humanity’ carving out an empire from Egypt to Asia Minor in defiance of Rome itself. ‘O Zenobia, hast thou dared to insult Roman emperors?’ wrote Aurelian to the real-life Queen: she had and she did. It is Zenobia’s courage which links her to Boudica; her ambition (and her instinct for survival) sets her apart.

1 Victoria or Vitruvia, the influential mother of the rebel Gallic Emperor Victorinus (who succeeded Postumus in 268/9); she also helped the next Gallic Emperor, Tetricus, to power.²⁷