Palmyra: Queen of the East
News at the end of May that the Islamic State had seized the territory surrounding the ancient city of Palmyra was greeted with horror and dread around the world. Palmyra was one of the great cities of the classical world: a Syrian trading-post built into a flourishing city under Roman patronage and imbued with the values of Greek Hellenism, it played a vital role in both the economy and the security of the Roman Empire. The spirit of the city, melding the great cultures of antiquity, Greek, Roman, and Persian, is most clearly visible today in its magnificent architecture.
But — as we were reminded by a recent dispatch from the New Yorker — while the buildings of Palmyra are precious and irreplaceable, their stones sit mute if we forget about the people who built them. For it is not Palmyra’s architecture, but the story of its last queen, Zenobia, that provides a compelling response to the brutality we see in Syria today.
The knowledge most English speakers have about Zenobia is ultimately derived from the picturesque account of Gibbon, who is quoted at length in the New Yorker article by Lawrence Wright. If ever there was a person whose life and work were emblematic of a distinctly Western outlook and sensibility, it was Gibbon, and the great historian of Rome was clearly impressed by the rebel of Palmyra. Yet at the same time, as Wright points out, both sides of the conflict in Syria, the Assad regime and Islamist fighters alike, have also claimed Zenobia’s legacy as their own.
For while ISIS has continued its campaign of cultural cleansing of the pre-Islamic past, destroying two sacred Shiite mausolea and several statues from the Roman period in the area, militants have vowed, at least for now, to spare Palmyra itself.
But far more heinous than the destruction of any monument has been the use to which those ruins have been put: in the amphitheater of the ancient city, where once people gathered to watch the works of Sophocles and Euripides, a different sort of tragedy played out as ISIS fighters — many of them merely teenagers — carried out a mass-execution of captured Syrian soldiers.
And that is precisely why Zenobia’s story is so important, particularly at this moment. Her life is a repudiation of all that ISIS stands for, and especially in light of ISIS’s manifold crimes against women, her story deserves revisiting now more than ever.
To those outside the field, Classics as a discipline can often seem guilty of perpetuating the false notion that the achievements of the ancient world are the sole cultural patrimony of the West — an accusation which, sadly, we must admit has at times been more than justified.
Zenobia embodied the values that make classical civilization worth caring about, even as she challenged that civilization’s assumptions about a woman’s proper role in society and politics. As such, she stands as a powerful reminder that the supposed dichotomy between East and West is a false one — a fact always worth reasserting in the face of both ISIS barbarism and Western reactionism alike. While she did declare herself Empress and claim sovereignty over much of the Eastern half of the Empire, she was not driven by any belief that the Roman Empire lacked legitimacy as a political entity in and of itself. Nor did her revolt represent a rejection of the cosmopolitan Hellenistic society that stretched from the Thames to the Euphrates.
At a time when the resources of the Empire were stretched to their limits and the future of what “Rome” would mean was far from certain, Zenobia demanded that an emperor recognize her as an equal partner in rule. When he refused, her opportunism crossed into outright rebellion. Whether they knew it or not, many future emperors would follow the example she set, not least among them Constantine the Great: only by the standards of her gender were her demands unreasonable and unprecedented.
Palmyra began as an oasis trading post in the deserts of Eastern Syria, 150 miles West of the Euphrates. Falling under the patronage of the Romans after they formally annexed Syria in the 1st century BCE, Palmyra quickly grew into a central node of the Roman economy: the two main routes of the great Silk Road, running from Eastern China through India and Persia all the way to the Roman forum, converged on the same road, running across the deserts of Syria right through the gates of Palmyra. (This path across the desert also rendered Palmyra a key site strategically, a fact recognized by the Romans and, unfortunately, by ISIS today.) Over the course of the next two centuries, the ruling merchant-elites of Palmyra would erect the fabulous city of stone and marble whose vestiges ISIS threatens today.
The city’s fortunes within the Empire peaked in 211 CE, when it received the ius Italicum, granting it exemption from tribute, and the official designation as a colonia, the highest and most autonomous status a city could hold within the imperial constitution.
But by this time, the Empire itself was under increasing strain from within and without. The assassination of Emperor Commodus in 192 (not, sadly, in the Colosseum at the hands of the General Maximus, as the movie Gladiator has it) marked the first rumblings of what historians would come to call ‘the Crisis of the 3rd Century,’ in which most who claimed the title of emperor would eventually (or quickly) be assassinated, and the violent struggle for succession often erupted into full-scale civil war. By 249, the crisis had become so acute that the murder of yet another Emperor, Philip the Arab, led to the effective dissolution of the Empire. Wracked by military infighting, foreign invasion, rampant inflation, plague, and famine, the territory of the Roman Empire split into a series of fluctuating independent kingdoms. It would not be reunited under a single authority for another two decades as more than 30 individuals vied for leadership of the Roman world.
While Rome lay paralyzed by internal convulsions, however, the Sassanid Empire — the great Persian power to its East — was on the march. In the decade after Philip’s death, the armies of the dynamic King Shapur twice invaded Roman Syria, marching all the way from the Tigris to the Mediterranean. Having taken the cities of Aleppo and Antioch, Shapur captured the Emperor Valerian himself in 260. (Roman legend had it that Valerian lived out the rest of his days serving as the footstool of the Great King, and that upon his death his body was stuffed and put on display as trophy.)
Amidst the chaos and upheaval, Palmyra would prove its worth to Rome — and reveal its true strength.
While Rome was still reeling from Valerian’s defeat and capture, Odenathus, the vassal king of Palmyra, pushed the forces of Shapur back across the Euphrates; by 267, he had forced the Sassanids out of central Mesopotamia and back to their capital of Ctesiphon on the Eastern bank of the Tigris.
Already a vir consularis, Odenathus was awarded for these services with the titles of dux Romanorum and restitutor totius Orientis by Valerian’s successor, Gallienus. But amidst the celebrations of his triumph over Shapur, Odenathus found himself on the end of an assassin’s dagger (it was rumored that Gallienus, fearful of the growing power of his vassal, had a hand in the plot). With his son and heir Vabalathus barely more than a child, it was left to his young wife Zenobia to assume control of the city and the Roman forces in the region, acting as Queen Regent.
Zenobia was likely no more than 27 when she came to sole power, but even the year of her birth — like so much else of her life — cannot be known for certain. The 6th century Greek historian Zosimus is regarded by historians as the most reliable source for the events of Zenobia’s reign, but his account of this episode in Roman history is primarily concerned with the actions of the Emperor Aurelian, and he offers little insight into Zenobia’s character.
In the Latin tradition, our best source is the notoriously slippery Historia Augusta, where she features in the Lives of Gallienus and Aurelian and receives her own entry in the text known as the Thirty Tyrants. But as the historian Pat Southern notes in Empress Zenobia, her portrait in these sources often owes more to the author’s rhetorical needs than to a valid understanding of her personality and motivations.
Zenobia has a rich life too in later Arab and even Jewish sources (according to Jewish tradition, Palmyra — or Tadmor in its Hebrew and Arabic name — was founded by King Solomon); though these for the most part tend towards the realms of myth rather than history, they do point to the fact, however obscurely, that the political context for Zenobia’s struggle with Rome also involved her relationship with her Arab neighbors. We have no literary evidence for the life of Zenobia from Palmyrene sources.
Still, even with the necessary wariness of literary embellishment, a fairly consistent portrait of Zenobia’s character does emerge. Her aims and motivations can be reasonably guessed at from her actions themselves, as recorded in the historical narrative. And from authors who themselves relied on earlier sources, we can get at least some sense of her self-presentation and the assessment of her near-contemporaries. That assessment, though it tended to be expressed in traditional tropes of ancient rhetoric, was almost universally positive: she was considered “the most noble of all the women of the East, and the most beautiful.”
The family of Zenobia claimed descent from the Ptolemies, and the young queen explicitly modeled herself after Cleopatra, the most famous member of that clan and the final ruler of an independent Egypt. Her father likely served at one point as duovir or strategos (both the Latin and Greek titles were used) of Palmyra, one of the chief magistrates of the city, and her family may also have had important kinship ties to the local desert tribes. Scholars and nationalists alike have raised serious objections to the likelihood of either supposed extraction, Greek or Arab. But to insist upon the issue either way is to miss the point entirely: what matters is that in her lifetime, Zenobia could reasonably claim affinity with both cultures.
Zenobia had ruled alongside her husband and accompanied him on his Persian campaigns; the sentiment that she possessed the “courage of a man” (high praise from ancient historians) is repeated in both the Greek and Latin sources. She was equally celebrated for her dedication to intellectual pursuits: she was fluent in several languages and authored a monograph on her native region. She brought Cassius Longinus, formerly the head of Plato’s famed Academy in Athens, to Palmyra to act as her teacher and adviser, and with his help she founded a school for the study of philosophy in the nearby city of Apamea.
But her ambitions went beyond the realms of culture and learning — and her husband’s assiduous fealty to Rome.
Within three years of assuming sole rule in Palmyra, Zenobia launched an assault on the key Roman province of Egypt. As the lawful successor of Odenathus, she could plausibly construe her actions as an attempt to uphold the legitimate power of Rome when its authority was being contested. But her justification was also rooted in dynastic terms: Egypt belonged to her by birthright as the heir to Cleopatra. And she did not stop with such ancestral claims: by late 271, she had seized control of much of Roman Syria, Egypt, and Asia Minor as far as Ankara — nearly a third of the total territory of the Roman Empire.
Meanwhile, political and military chaos continued to rage in the West. As Zenobia consolidated her power, at least three more Roman emperors had come and gone. But their latest successor, Aurelian, would prove more capable — and tenacious — than his predecessors. Recognizing the danger posed by Zenobia’s seizure of Egypt — the mouths of Rome were fed by the wheat of the Nile — Aurelian immediately dispatched a lieutenant with orders to take back the province.
Zenobia seems at first to have struck a conciliatory line with Aurelian. Though we would be right to be skeptical of the purported letter recorded in the Historia Augusta in which she supposedly offers to recognize the legitimacy of Aurelian’s claim to the imperial throne, numismatic evidence does point in this same direction. Upon Aurelian’s ascent to the rank of emperor, Zenobia, in control of the mint at Antioch, began to issue coins with the head of Aurelian on one side and that of her son on the other — in essence an acknowledgement of Aurelian’s claim, but also an assertion of her son’s (and thereby, her own) status as co-equal ruler in the Eastern half of the Empire.
Aurelian was unmoved, and it was soon clear that confrontation would be inevitable. The conqueror of the West quickly disappeared from the coins of Antioch — as did Vabalathus. In their place, new coins featured an image of Iuno Regina, queen of the gods, on one side, and on the other the face of a woman with the inscription above her head, ZENOBIA AUG[USTA]: Empress Zenobia.
After victories in Italy, Gaul, and along the Danube, in 272 Aurelian finally crossed into Asia Minor. He quickly rolled back Zenobia’s gains there and pushed onwards into Syria, where in two major engagements he shattered her army. As he laid siege to Palmyra, Zenobia sought the aid of the Sassanids, but was apprehended at the Euphrates and delivered to Aurelian. Upon the capture of their queen, the citizens of Palmyra opened their gates to the conqueror and the city itself was initially spared, though an ill-timed (and ill-fortuned) rebellion later that year prompted the Emperor to sack the city.
Back in Rome, Aurelian held his triumphal procession, celebrating his victory over so many enemies and the successful reunification of the Empire at long last. As was the custom of Roman conquerors, the defeated Zenobia and her children were paraded through the streets of the capital. In a piquant image whose mordant irony was surely lost on neither the queen nor her vanquisher, Zenobia’s feet, hands, and neck were bound by gold chains so large an attendant was needed to support them, and her body was covered in so many jewels that she almost fainted under their weight.
But Aurelian respected his former enemy too much to allow her to suffer the prescribed fate of Rome’s triumphal victims, who were returned to prison after the procession and ritually strangled as the conquering general mounted the steps to the Temple of Jupiter. Instead, she was granted a generous estate in Tibur, modern day Tivoli. There she lived the life of a Roman matron to the end of her days, even seeing her children married off to the families of the noble houses of Rome — or so the legend goes.
Western media and authorities made much of two recent cases in which teenage girls from both the US and the UK ran away from home in a deliberate attempt to join ISIS. (The American girls were apprehended en route and returned to the US, where one has since been sentenced for attempting to aid a terrorist organization; the British girls are presumed to have successfully entered Syria.) Whether they were aware of it or not, by seeking to cross into ISIS-controlled territory, these girls were choosing, in the words of the historian Gillian Kenny, a lifetime of
restriction to gendered spaces which are familiar to historians of women in medieval Europe… These East London schoolgirls are now living under a cultural system that imposes an idea of what ideal womanhood should be that echoes the words of European medieval thinkers on the subject, but which can be even more misogynistic and hardline on female rights than manifested in our medieval past and which clashes profoundly with what being a teenage girl can mean in a post-feminist West.
The author of the Historia Augusta laments as a sure sign of his fallen times that “while the Emperor proved himself worthless, even women ruled most excellently”. The women of the ancient world knew all too well their own restrictions to gendered spaces — restrictions which the life and reign of Zenobia defied at every turn.
Zenobia was in fact but one of the many, many, many bold and daring women who played an important role throughout the history of the Roman world. For most of these, the misfortune of belonging to the losing side and the strong biases of the source material against their gender have conspired to obscure their role in shaping the course of history. But fortunately for us, in her person and her actions Zenobia — like her predecessor and putative kinswoman Cleopatra — cut too singular a figure to be excised from the pages of history.
Not surprisingly, it is the work of writers and artists, from Boccaccio and Chaucer down to the present day, that has kept alive the memory of Zenobia throughout the ages. In his lively and erudite Palmyra and Its Empire, Richard Stoneman dedicates an entire appendix to representations of Zenobia in literature; in the same vein, Pat Southern opens her biography of “Palmyra’s Rebel Queen” not in the 3rd century, but in the late 1990s, when Syrian television broadcast a 22-part mini-series on the life of Zenobia that was widely watched throughout the Arab world.
In the two decades that have passed since Zenobia’s debut on the Syrian airwaves, her country has become the site of one of the most violent protracted humanitarian crises in the world today. Given the unforgivable atrocities that continue to be committed on all sides, it may seem strange to insist that a drama whose players have been dead for well over 1700 years has any relevance today.
But in the face of a benighted worldview that seeks to erase from history anything that does not fit within its ideology, reasserting the story of a Syrian, Arab, proto-feminist icon who embodied, in the words of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “the intellectual power [and] moral heroism of woman”, seems precisely what the historian is called to do. In that light, we will do well to restore to her proper place in the popular imagination Zenobia Augusta, Queen of Palmyra, Empress of Rome.
Stephen Daly Distinti holds a BA and MA in Classics from Columbia University. He currently teaches Latin and Ancient Greek at Fordham Preparatory School in the Bronx. He is the author of A Notebook for Caesar’s De Bello Gallico and A Notebook for Vergil’s Aeneid.
