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 incapable 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.13 Odainat 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 Odainat 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 spe
aks 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 hoc 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 banquets 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 hardheaded 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 only dux 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.20 This 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 partial towards 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 indee
d 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 forever. 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.