Zenobia, the widow of Odenathus, seized the command of the army for herself and her infant sons, Herennius and Timolaus; and her masculine courage and stern virtues well qualified her for the bold task that she had undertaken. She threw off the friendship of Rome, and routed the armies which Gallienus sent against her; and, claiming to be descended from Cleopatra, she marched upon Egypt, in 268 A.D., to seize the throne of her ancestors, and to add that kingdom to Syria and Asia Minor, which she already possessed.
Zenobia’s army was led by her general, Zabda, who was joined by an Egyptian named Timogenes; and, with seventy thousand Palmyrenes, Syrians, and other barbarians, they routed the Roman army of fifty thousand Egyptians under Probatus. The unfortunate Roman general put an end to his own life; but nevertheless the Palmyrenes were unsuccessful, and Egypt followed the example of Rome, and took the oaths to Claudius. For three years the coins of Alexandria bear the name of that emperor.
On the death of Claudius, his brother Quintillus assumed the purple in Europe (A.D. 270); and though he only reigned for seventeen days the Alexandrian mint found time to engrave new dies and to issue coined money in his name.
On the death of Claudius, also, the Palmyrenes renewed their attacks upon Egypt, and this second time with success. The whole kingdom acknowledged Zenobia as their queen; and in the fourth and fifth years of her reign in Palmyra we find her name on the Alexandrian coins. The Greeks, who had been masters of Egypt for six hundred years, either in their own name or in that of the Roman emperors, were then for the first time governed by an Asiatic. Palmyra in the desert was then ornamented with the spoils of Egypt; and travellers yet admire the remains of eight large columns of red porphyry, each thirty feet high, which stood in front of the two gates to the great temple. They speak for themselves, and tell their own history. From their material and form and size we must suppose that these columns were quarried between Thebes and the Red Sea, were cut into shape by Egyptian workmen under the guidance of Greek artists in the service of the Roman emperors; and were thence carried away by the Syrian queen to the oasis-city in the desert between Damascus and Babylon.
Zenobia was a handsome woman of a dark complexion, with an aquiline nose, quick, piercing eyes, and a masculine voice. She had the commanding qualities of Cleopatra, from whom her flatterers traced her descent, and she was without her vices. While Syriac was her native tongue, she was not ignorant of Latin, which she was careful to have taught to her children; she carried on her government in Greek, and could speak Koptic with the Egyptians, whose history she had studied and written upon. In her dress and manners she joined the pomp of the Persian court to the self-denial and military virtues of a camp. With these qualities, followed by a success in arms which they seemed to deserve, the world could not help remarking, that while Gallienus was wasting his time with fiddlers and players, in idleness that would have disgraced a woman, Zenobia was governing her half of the empire like a man.
Zenobia made Antioch and Palmyra the capitals of her empire, and Egypt became for the time a province of Syria. Her religion like her language was Syriac. The name of her husband, Odenathus, means sacred to the goddess Adoneth, and that of her son, Vaballathus, means sacred to the goddess Baaleth. But as her troops were many of them Saracens or Arabs, a people nearly the same as the Blemmyes, who already formed part of the people of Upper Egypt, this conquest gave a new rank to that part of the population; and had the further result, important in after years, of causing them to be less quiet in their slavery to the Greeks of Alexandria.