We know much less than we would like about the Syrian queen Zenobia of Palmyra, and rather less than our 19th-century predecessors, who wrote before source-criticism eliminated much of the supposed evidence for her life. For a short time in the 260s and 270s AD, Zenobia ruled most of the Roman near east without reference to anyone's authority but her own. In defeat and forced retirement, she became a Roman matron from whom one might still claim descent a hundred years later. Her old age was lived out in Tivoli, the site of the Emperor Hadrian's grand villa. It had been Hadrian, on one of his many eastern tours, who had given Palmyra the status of a free city, setting it on the path to riches and power that culminated in the triumphant half-decade of Zenobia's reign. Perhaps the former queen saw the irony.

LRB 31 March 2011 | PDF Download