Rome’s Rebel: QUEEN ZENOBIA

Senator’s Wife & Conqueror of the Roman East

Dear Classical Wisdom Member, 

What makes a rebel? 

We think of those who fight against oppression, dictators, empires, governments and leaders. Sometimes they are freedom fighters, other times vain glory seekers. 

But those who rebelled against Rome had one thing in common...they were Roman....and there were plenty of them! 

While some were more successful than others, all had the courage and audacity to oppose the greatest empire the world had known... and some even managed to humble, even for a moment, Rome herself. 

So today we will look at one such rebel, one that certainly captures the imagination: Queen Zenobia. 

Becoming ruler at the young age of 27, she was,

“according to the often unreliable Historiae Augustae, an incredible beauty, with swarthy skin, black eyes, and teeth as white as pearls. She was an outdoors girl who had enjoyed hunting as a child, and was given an excellent education once she married the much older Odaenathus at the age of fourteen, so that by the time power came into her hands she was fluent in Palmyran, Greek, Latin, and Egyptian.” 

She also had big designs in Syria... but how far did her rebellion go? 

Read on below to enjoy this special guest column by none other than Stephen Dando-Collins, which is an exclusively released extract from his newest book, “Rebels Against Rome: 400 Years of Rebellion against Rome.”

Enjoy!

All the best,

Anya Leonard

Founder and Director
Classical Wisdom and Classical Wisdom Kids

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QUEEN ZENOBIA Senator’s Wife, Conqueror of the Roman East. Syria and Egypt, AD 

By Stephen Dando-Collins

With the Roman East in chaos in the 260s, King Odaenathus of the rich Silk Road city-state of Palmyra in Syria, a Roman client kingdom, had combined his own army of heavy cavalry and mounted archers with Roman infantry to defeat Persian forces and regain Roman assets in the East. This had earned him the gratitude of the Roman emperor Gallienus, who was fighting a tide of barbarian invasions across the Danube and contending with the so-called Empire of Gaul created by the rebel governor Postumus. Rome’s Senate was so grateful to Odaenathus for his efforts on its behalf in the East that it awarded him the title of Reformer and Commander of the Entire East. It also granted him imperium, making him superior to the governors of Rome’s eastern provinces. 

In 267, the king and his adult son by his first marriage, Septimius Herodianus—his Palmyran name was Hairan—were assassinated in Bithynia while returning from a military campaign. Who was behind this assassination is unclear. The actual assassin was said to be Odaenathus’s cousin Maeonius, who immediately declared himself king, only to be killed himself within twenty-four hours of his declaration. 

Some writers suspect the assassination was engineered by Odaenathus’s young second wife, Queen Zenobia, to elevate her own son to the throne. The theory is that Zenobia put Maeonius up to it, only to have him immediately executed as a traitor. Certainly, the day following Odaenathus’s death, his younger son and Hairan’s half-brother, the eight-year-old Vaballathus, was declared king by the army. Zenobia, who had apparently, and unusually, accompanied her husband on campaign, was simultaneously handed the powers of regent, to rule in her son’s name until he came of age. 

The queen’s full Roman name was Zenobia Septimia. In Palmyran, a dialect of Aramaic, she was Bat-Zabbai, or Daughter of Zabbai. Just twenty-seven years of age on becoming unofficial ruler of Palmyra, Zenobia was, according to the often unreliable Historiae Augustae, an incredible beauty, with swarthy skin, black eyes, and teeth as white as pearls. She was an outdoors girl who had enjoyed hunting as a child, and was given an excellent education once she married the much older Odaenathus at the age of fourteen, so that by the time power came into her hands she was fluent in Palmyran, Greek, Latin, and Egyptian. 

Zenobia was also very smart, and with her young son’s elevation to the throne and inheritance of his father’s Roman titles and powers, she exercised those powers with care, in the name of both her son Vaballathus and Rome. Over the next three years, Zenobia strengthened Roman fortresses along the Euphrates River, the border between Syria and Persia, and kept the Persians at bay. But with chaos in the West, which included five Roman emperors in ten years, ongoing rebellion in Gaul, and constant barbarian threats, Zenobia began to think about taking the East for herself. She would later claim that Cassius Longinus, her Syrian-born tutor in Greek, who later became her chief adviser, encouraged her to create a Palmyran Empire. 

Queen Zenobia's Last Look upon Palmyra by Herbert Gustave Schmalz (1888)

When the Roman emperor Claudius II, or Claudius Gothicus, died from disease in January AD 270 at Sirmium, in the Balkans, and with his successor, Aurelian, hard-pressed fighting German invasions of Italy, Zenobia saw her chance.