When the first Roman herald reached Palmyra to announce the coming of the Roman ambassadors who had been sent by Aurelian to demand her submission, Zenobia was related to have been at her hunting-villa just without the city. It was in the forests lying to the north of this summer palace that she pursued the wild boar, tiger, or panther in the daring chase. As the messengers of Aurelian arrived at the palace gates, the queen had just returned from the hunt. Never did she look more regal. She was mounted upon a white Arabian steed of peerless beauty, caparisoned with harness gleaming with jewels. Zenobia was leaning upon her long hunting-spear. She wore upon her head a Parthian hunting-cap adorned with a long white plume, fastened by a glittering diamond worth a king’s ransom; her costume was also Parthian, and was most perfectly adapted to display the exquisite proportions of her graceful form. Her dark eyes were flashing with scarcely less brilliancy than the diamond which adorned her brow, as she sat her horse with regal dignity, and her countenance betokened her dauntless pride and warlike courage as the messengers of her enemy were announced. Not waiting to dismount, she exclaimed with tones of imperial command, “Bid the servants of your emperor draw near, and we will hear them.”
Announced by trumpets and followed by their train, the ambassadors of Aurelian advanced to the spot where Zenobia calmly awaited them, surrounded by her royal attendants.
“Speak your errand,” said the queen.
“For a long series of years,” replied the ambassador, “the wealth of Egypt and the East flowed into the Roman treasury. That stream has been diverted to Palmyra. Egypt, Syria, Bithynia, and Mesopotamia were dependents upon Rome, as Roman provinces. The queen of Palmyra was once but the queen of Palmyra; she is now queen of Egypt and of the East, – Augusta of the Roman Empire, – her sons styled and arrayed as Cæsars. By whatever consent of former emperors these honors have been won or permitted, it is not, we are required to say, with the consent of Aurelian. While he honors the greatness and genius of Zenobia, he holds essential to his honor and the glory of the Roman world, that the Roman Empire should again be restored to the limits which bounded it in the reigns of the Antonines.”
“You have spoken,” replied Zenobia to the ambassadors, with a calm voice and steady glance, “with plainness, as it became a Roman to do”; and then her eye flashed with proud disdain as she drew her stately form up to still more lofty proportions, and she continued: “Now hear me, and as you hear, so report to him who sent you. Tell Aurelian that what I am, I have made myself; that the empire which hails me queen has been moulded into what it is by Odenathus and Zenobia; it is no gift, but an inheritance, a conquest, and a possession; it is held, not by favor, but by right of birth and power; and when he will give away possessions or provinces which he claims as his, or Rome’s, for the asking, I will give away Egypt and the Mediterranean coast. Tell him, that as I have lived a queen, so, the gods helping, I will die a queen; that the last moment of my reign and my life shall be the same. If he is ambitious, let him be told that I am ambitious too – ambitious of wider empire, of an unsullied fame, and of my people’s love. Tell him I do not speak of gratitude on the part of Rome; but that posterity will say that the power which stood between Rome and Persia, and saved the empire in the East, which avenged the death of Valerian, and twice pursued the Persian king, even to the gates of his own Ctesiphon, deserved some fairer acknowledgment from an ally whom its arms had thus befriended than the message you now bring from your Roman emperor.”
With proud dignity the ambassadors were then dismissed, and Zenobia prepared to defend her rights and kingdom. Nor did she indolently permit the emperor of the West to approach the gates of her fair Palmyra. With brave rashness she went forth to meet him, and two great battles were fought, one near Antioch, and the second near Emæsa. In both these contests the brave Zenobia herself led her troops to the onslaught, giving the second place in command to her valiant warrior Zabdas, whose great prowess in arms had hitherto made him a successful general. But in both these battles Zenobia was defeated, and she was forced to fall back within the gates of Palmyra. Here she made a brave and last defence. And again she boldly defied Aurelian from her towers, as she had already defied him on the field of battle. So great was her courage and so valiant her defence, that Aurelian was obliged to admit her claims of being a most powerful and determined foe, and thus wrote of her: “Those who speak with contempt of the war I am waging against a woman, are ignorant of both the character and power of Zenobia. It is impossible to enumerate her warlike preparations of stones, of arrows, and of every species of missile weapons and military engines.”
So doubtful was Aurelian of the result of the siege, that he offered terms of an advantageous capitulation to the brave queen of Palmyra; but she indignantly rejected his proposals in a famous Greek epistle, in which she defied his power. Zenobia, expecting reinforcement from her provinces, and thinking that Aurelian, being encamped in a desert, could not long hold out, especially as he was constantly harassed by bands of Arabs attacking his army in the rear, felt confident that the siege would not be prolonged. But Aurelian, incensed by her haughty letter, roused himself to greater vigilance, cut off all her supplies as the several companies of her allies approached, and found means to subsist his army even in the desert. At length the city could hold out no longer. Zenobia determined to fly, and endeavor to raise succor for her beloved city in her surrounding provinces. Such, indeed, was the reason assigned for this apparent cowardice on her part, which was so contrary to her previous record of undaunted bravery. Mounted on the fleetest of her dromedaries, she succeeded in reaching the banks of the Euphrates, but she was pursued and taken captive, and brought into the presence of the Roman emperor. Aurelian sternly demanded how she dared thus defy the power of Rome. Still every inch a queen, and yet not forgetting a wise policy, she replied, “Because I disdained to acknowledge as my masters such men as Aureolus and Gallienus. To Aurelian I submit, as my conqueror and my sovereign.”
While this conference was being held in the tent of the Roman Emperor, the Roman soldiers came rushing in a riotous mass, demanding the instant death of Zenobia. But notwithstanding her previous bravery and fortitude, history records that, in this moment of terrible danger, Zenobia did not display equal courage to the famous Cleopatra, who resolved to die rather than submit to her Roman conqueror. It is stated that Zenobia laid the blame of her obstinate resistance upon the aged Longinus and others of her chief counsellors, in order to save her own life. Whether this were indeed the truth or not, the facts are that the great philosopher Longinus, and other chief men of Palmyra, were put to death by Aurelian, and the life of Zenobia was saved. But for this seeming betrayal of her most faithful subjects, Zenobia may not have been to blame; for the desire to preserve the haughty Queen of the East, in order that she might grace his coming triumph in Rome, was a sufficient reason to account for Aurelian’s conduct in saving her life, and putting to death her chief men, without it being necessary to ascribe to such a brave and noble woman as Zenobia such ignoble and cowardly actions. That she did not take her own life like Cleopatra, but bore her reverses with calm dignity, appears in these more enlightened days to be surely more to her credit than to her dishonor; and in the light of modern civilization, the picture of the beautiful Zenobia, walking with firm step and imperial bearing among the captives of the Roman conqueror, excites deeper feelings of admiration than Cleopatra, the suicide, lying dead upon her royal bed of state.
Palmyra being conquered, Aurelian seized upon its vast treasures, and leaving there a Roman garrison, he started to return to Europe, carrying with him Zenobia and her family. But having reached the Hellespont, tidings came to him that the Palmyrenes had revolted. Aurelian immediately retraced his steps, and arriving before Palmyra, he ruthlessly destroyed that beautiful city, sparing neither old men, women, nor children, in his bloody work