What remained of Zenobia? A name on antique medals, a profile spoiled on old coins. She was beautiful, it appears, and the Eastern pearl was not more dazzling than her teeth. Her eyes were charming and full of fire and her figure majestic. The singularity of her dress answered to that of her character. She wore on her head a helmet surmounted by a ram's head and a flowing plume, and on her robe a bull's head of brass, for often she fought with the soldiers, her arms bare and a sword in her hand, and supported on horseback the most prolonged fatigue. Firmness in command, courage in reverses, loftiness of sentiments, diligence in business, dissimulation in politics, audacity without restraint, ambition without limits, such were, according to Trebellius Pollion, the defects and the accomplishments of this extraordinary woman.
Would one not say that he who traced this portrait had known Hester Stanhope? She added only to the outline of Zenobia six feet of height, her haughty features, her clear complexion and Pitt's love of orating. But it is not sufficient to have a masculine costume to acquire virility and audacity, and it seems that under the cuirass embellished with jewels, as under the koumbaz and the machllah, the two strangers, though divided by sixteen centuries, in courage and ambition are sisters. Sisters also in their religious aspirations as numerous as different, in the eclecticism of their doctrines and their dogmas. They both belonged to that class of restless minds which is ever ready to welcome new and subversive philosophical theories, prompt to understand and to assimilate, prompt also to oblivion and to change.
Was Zenobia Jewess, Christian, polytheist or idealist? Greedy to know everything, she had drawn to her Court a disciple of Plotinus, Longinus, who professed the purest neo-Platonism, and Paul of Samosata, Archbishop of Antioch, a not very edifying Christian, whose subtle discussions on the mystery of the Incarnation prepared the coming of Nestorius. She had made of these two men who represented each two currents of ideas, if not hostile, at least dissimilar, her civil counsellors. In default of confession, deeds speak; and in this astonishing choice is betrayed the descendant of the Greeks dowered with that marvellous faculty of assimilation appropriate to her race which skims over everything without adhering to anything. And that is why at Palmyra they walked on the ruins of a temple of Baal and a synagogue, of a church and of a temple of Diana.
And Lady Hester, had she beliefs more solidly established? She had grown and lived, she also, in the midst of a disturbance and tumult of ideas too contradictory to preserve a firm religion. The great breath of revolutionary theories set in motion by Rousseau had turned other heads better balanced than hers. If she did not founder, she contracted a sort of exalted misanthropy, peculiar to women, in which Byron and Goethe had a large share. The ground was prepared for the innumerable sects of the East, which multiply like mushrooms on a stormy day, to make spring up there the harvest of their philosophies and their revelations hostile and divine. She was no longer Anglican and not yet Mohammedan. Under cover of the good and accommodating Protestant arbitrator, she was able to invent a religion adapted to circumstances. As a country in danger launches a national loan, she will make an appeal every time. From some, she will borrow Fatalism; from others, the belief in the coming of a Messiah; from others, Biblical prophecies; from others, again, the existence of evil spirits.
And what resemblances between these two beautiful Amazons of the East! Soul intrepid and pride insensate. It is Zenobia, whose father a magistrate of Palmyra, a simple curule edile charged with the policing of the frontiers, calling herself a King's daughter and of the lineage of Cleopatra, and exhibiting the table service of gold plate on which the Queen of Egypt was served at festivals at Alexandria! It is Hester Stanhope, in her last years, deceived, robbed, devoured, despoiled by a pack of servants both numerous and greedy, replying to the doctor who was entreating her to reduce this clique: "Yes, but my rank!"
Certainly, it is necessary to transpose the facts, the frame, the actors. It is necessary to lower the historical ladder to the rung of anecdote, but the quality of soul, does it not remain the same? Setting aside all that modern civilisation has added or taken away from the manner of thinking, of living and of feeling in the third century, we may say that, if we invert the parts, if we make Hester Stanhope ascend the throne of Palmyra (she would have very much enjoyed that position), if we make Zenobia descend to the tent of the English traveller, they are not misplaced.
Hester Stanhope, would she not have deserved the praise of Aurelian writing of Zenobia, after having crushed at Antioch and at Emesa the heavy Palmyrian cavalry, the archers of Osrhoene and those impetuous bands of Arabs called so justly the brigands of Syria: "I should prefer for my glory and my safety to deal with a man," she whose implacable hostility and proud resistance were to make Mahomet Ali and Ibrahim Pacha remark, twenty years later, that "the Englishwoman had given them more trouble to conquer than all the insurgents of Syria and Palestine."
Zenobia, shut up in Palmyra, besieged by the Roman legions who were digging mines to shake the solid ramparts at the angles crowned by towers, replied proudly to Aurelian, who offered her life in return for the surrender of the town:
"No one before thee has made in writing such a demand. In war, one obtains nothing save by courage. You tell me to surrender, as if you did not know that Queen Cleopatra preferred death to all the dignities which they promised her. The help of Persia will not fail me. I have on my side the Saracens and the Armenians. Conquered already by the brigands of Syria, Aurelian, wouldst thou be able to resist the troops which are expected from all parts? Then without doubt will fall that ridiculous pride which dares to order me to surrender, as if victory could not escape thee."
Lady Hester would willingly have signed this letter of which the biting tone and the emphatic turn would not have displeased her.