“Zenobia, Queen of the East, to Aurelius Augustus. No one has ever yet made by letter such a request as you make. In matters of war you must obtain what you want by deeds. You ask me to surrender, as if you were unaware that Cleopatra preferred to die rather than lose her dignity. We are expecting auxiliaries from Persia, and the Saracens and Armenians are with us. The robbers of Syria beat your army, Aurelian. What will happen to you when our reinforcements come? You will assuredly have to lay aside the pride with which, as if you were a universal conqueror, you call on me to surrender.”
The expectation of reinforcements was sincere, but was destined to be disappointed. Day after day Zenobia and her officers looked out over the desert from their invincible walls, and descried no sign of the deliverers. Persia was distracted by the death of Sapor; the Armenians and the Saracens had been seduced from her by Aurelian. Food began to fail, and the iron legions clung tenaciously to the little strip of country and intercepted whatever aid came to her. Zenobia resolved to go to Persia herself in quest of aid. Under cover of the night she stole out of the town, and fled toward Persia on a dromedary.
Within a few days the anxious Palmyreans again saw their Queen—a captive in the hands of the Roman soldiers. It is probable that she had been betrayed. Aurelian, at all events, heard of her flight, and sent a company of horse in pursuit. They reached the banks of the Euphrates just as Zenobia and her attendants had entered a boat, and brought her back to the camp. She was one hour too late to save her liberty, or sacrifice her life. Palmyra sadly opened its gates, and Aurelian transferred its priceless treasures and rare curiosities to his wagons. Its chief officers and Zenobia he led away to Emesa, and put them on trial for rebellion.
The reader of Gibbon will expect that we have now reached a point where the virility of Zenobia faints and the eternal feminine reveals itself. Gibbon records, indeed, the bold answer which Zenobia made to Aurelian’s complaint of her infidelity to Rome; but he goes on to say that, as the fierce demands of the soldiers for her death fell on her ears, she tremblingly pleaded for life, and, with a cowardice that her sex only could palliate, insisted that Longinus and the others had seduced her from her duty. Happily, we have a clear right to quarrel with the procedure of the great historian at this point. There are two versions of the behaviour of Zenobia: that of the Latin historians, Trebellius Pollio and Vopiscus in the “Historia Augusta,” and that of the Greek historian Zosimus. The Latin writers, who lived at Rome in the generation after Zenobia, make her reply boldly to Aurelian, and do not say a word about her casting the blame on others. The Greek writer, a much later compiler, represents her as, in the words of Gibbon, “ignominiously purchasing life by the sacrifice of her fame and her friends.” Gibbon affects to reconcile the two by making the woman’s weakness follow upon the momentary show of courage.
To this method of reconciling contradictory and unequal authorities we may justly demur. The much later version of Zosimus is not only less entitled in itself to acceptance, but it is seriously enfeebled when he goes on to make the wildly erroneous statement that Zenobia died on the way to Rome, and her companions were sunk in the Bosphorus. We have every right to follow the Latin historians. Zenobia was brought before Aurelian, and the soldiers fiercely demanded that she should be put to death. Exasperated as the Emperor was, he refused to slay a woman, and asked her why she had dared to resist the majesty of Rome. “In you,” she replied, “I recognize an Imperial majesty, because you have vanquished me, but I saw none in Gallienus.” Her life was spared. What Roman general could have resisted the wish to grace his triumph at Rome with a greater than Cleopatra? The troops, with their vast treasures and their captives, moved slowly homeward, after executing Longinus and some others.
ZENOBIA
ENLARGED FROM THE COIN IN THE BERLIN MUSEUM
In the triumph which Aurelian had so splendidly earned, and no less splendidly celebrated, we catch our last certain glimpse of the Queen of the East, one of the most notable women of all time. Along the flower-strewn lane between the dense walls of citizens passes one of the longest and grandest processions that ever led a victor to the Capitol. An immense number of tamed elephants, lions, tigers, leopards, bears, and other beasts move slowly and sullenly along, and eight hundred pairs of gladiators give promise of the impending spectacles. Then there are cars heavily laden with the gold, silver, and jewels of Palmyra, the rare presents of Persia, the purples of India, and the silks of China. Then there is the long and extraordinary train of captives, representing the nineteen nations which Aurelian has subdued, even women who have been taken, in male costume, in the sternest battles. At last the melancholy line is closed by the lithe bronzed figure, with brilliant black eyes and teeth like pearls, of the woman whose beauty, genius, and daring have been on the lips of Rome for several years. Clothed for the last time in the heavily-jewelled robes of a queen—she had complained that she was not strong enough to walk under the load of jewels—she drags along the golden chains which bind her hands and feet, and a slave sustains the weight of the gold band round her throat. Beside her, in scarlet cloak and Gallic trousers, is Tetricus, Victoria’s last Emperor in Gaul. The whole Empire is again subject to Rome. And before the car of the conqueror three empty chariots are driven: one is the gold and silver car of Odenathus, one, of gold studded with gems, is a present from Persia, and the third is the car which Zenobia had made for her triumphant entry into Rome. Never had Emperor looked from his car on so superb a triumph. In less than a year Aurelian would be assassinated.
The last phase of Zenobia’s life is not quite clear. Zosimus is certainly wrong in his reproduction of a story that she died, or took her life, before she reached Rome. Still later and equally negligible writers ventured to say that she became a Christian, and even that Aurelian married one of her daughters. The “Historia Augusta,” which we may follow, as it was written in Rome a generation later, tells us that Aurelian gave her a villa near Hadrian’s palace at Tivoli, where she spent the rest of her life in the education of her children and the prosy duties of a Roman matron, and, we may conjecture, in looking back with sad but proud recollection on the stirring romance of her career. Bishop Eusebius observes briefly in his “Chronicle” that she lived to a great age, and was held in the greatest regard at Rome.