Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 18.djvu/219

PALMYRA 201 greatest merchant prince, with the openest hand, and the Avidest circle of connexions along the trade routes, was the real head of the community, and could do what he pleased with boule and demos except when a Roman commander interfered. Odaenathus appears to have been the head of a party which secretly meditated revolt, but the outbreak was prevented by a Roman officer Rufinus, who procured his assassination. 1 He left two sons ; the elder named Hairan appears in an inscription of 251 A.D. as "head of the Palmyrenes, but it was the younger brother Odsenathus who sought revenge for his father s death and inherited his ambition. In him the old Bedouin blood reasserted itself ; an Esau among the Jacobs of Tadmor, he spent his youth in the mountains and deserts, where the hardships of the chase prepared him for the fatigues of war, and where no doubt he acquired the absolute influence over the nomad tribes which was one of the chief secrets of his future success. In 258, the year of Valerian s ill-fated march against Sapor, Odyenathus is called hypatikos or consular, the highest honorary title of the empire, in an inscription erected to him by the gold and silver smiths of Palmyra. The title no doubt had just been conferred by the emperor on his way eastward, and the munificent patron of the guild of workers irt precious metals had, we may judge, liberally scattered their wares among the wives and daughters of the Bedouin sheikhs. He meant to have a strength and party of his own, whatever the issue of the war. If we may trust the circumstantial account of Petrus Patricius, the captivity of Valerian and the victorious advance of Sapor induced Odienathus to send gifts and letters to Sapor, and it was only when these were rejected that he threw himself heart and soul into the Roman cause. Sapor was offended that Odoonathus did not appear before him in person ; the Palmyrene chief in fact did not mean to be the mere subject either of Persian or Roman, though he was ready to follow whichever power would leave him practically sovereign at the price of occasional acts of homage. Rome in her day of disaster could not afford to be so proud as the Persian ; the weak Gallienus was the very suzerain whom Odaenathus desired ; and, joining his own considerable forces with the shattered fragments of the Roman armies, the Palmyrene commenced a successful war with Persia, in which he amply revenged himself on the arrogance of Sapor, and not only saved the Roman East but reduced Nisibis, twice laid siege to Ctesiphon itself, and furnished Gallienus with the captives and trophies for the empty pomp of a triumph. From the confused mass of undigested and contradictory anecdotes which form all the history we possess of this period it is impossible to extract a satisfactory picture of the career of Odtenathus ; but we can see that he steadily aimed at concentrating in his OAvn person the whole sovereignty of Syria and the neighbouring lands, and as the organization of the empire had entirely broken down, and almost every Roman general who had a substantial force at his com mand sooner or later advanced a claim to the purple, the Palmyrene prince, ahvays acting in the name of Gallienus, gradually disembarrassed himself of every rival repre sentative of Western authority throughout the greater part of Roman Asia. In the year 264 he was officially named supreme commander in the East, 2 and, though to 1 See the anonymous continuator of Dio (Fr. Hist. Gr., iv. 19f>). The elder Odtenathus is also alluded to in Pollio s life of Cyriades, from which one may infer that he plotted with a Persian party in Syria. 2 This date is given by Pollio (Gallienus, c. 10) and is confirmed by other notices. The order of events is very obscure, and Pollio is self- contradictory in several places. But the two events which he dates by consulates, and which therefore are probably most trustworthy, are the Impcrium si Odienathus in 264 and the rejoicings in Rome over his the Romans he was a subject of the empire, among his own people he was an independent sovereign, supreme over all the lands from Armenia to Arabia, and able to count on the assistance of both these nations. Odainathus himself seems to have been engaged in almost constant warfare in the east and north against the Persians and perhaps the Scythians, but in his absence the reins of government were firmly held by his wife Zenobia, the most famous heroine of antiquity, to whom indeed Aurelian, in a letter preserved by Trebellius Pollio, ascribes the chief merit of all her husband s success. Septimia Zenobia was by birth a Palmyrene ; her native name was Bath Zabbai (De V., 29) ; 3 and Pollio s descrip tion of her dark beauty, black flashing eyes, and pearly teeth, together with her unusual physical endurance and the frank commanding manners which secured her author ity in the camp and the desert, point emphatically to an Arabic rather than a Syrian descent. 4 To the union of firmness and clemency, which is the most necessary quality of an Eastern sovereign, Zenobia added the rarer gifts of economy and organization, and an unusual range of intellectual culture. She spoke Coptic as well as Syriac, knew something of Latin, and had learned Greek from the famous Longinus, who remained at her court to the last, and paid the penalty of his life for his share in her counsels. She was also a diligent student of Eastern and Western history, and the statement that she enjoined her sons to speak Latin so that they had difficulty in using Greek implies a consistent and early adoption of the policy which made the success of Odaenathus, and, taken in con nexion with Aurelian s testimony, in a letter preserved by Pollio, that she had the chief merit of her husband s exploits, seems to justify the conclusion that it was her educated political insight that created the fortunes of the short-lived dynasty. In the zenith of his fame Odaenathus was cut off by assassination along with his eldest son Herod, and it is generally assumed that the murder took place under Gallienus. The authority for this view is Pollio, who says that on receiving the news Gallienus sent an army against the Persians, which was destroyed to a Persian victories in 265 (reading consulntu for consulta in Gall. c. 12 with Klein in Rhein. Mus. 1880, p. 49 sq. ). With this agrees Jerome s date of 265 for the campaign ugainst Sapor ; and it is also possible to make out from the series of Palmyrene inscriptions referring to a certain Septimius Worod that in 263-264 the military organization of Palmyra ceased to be Roman. On the other hand up to 262-263 Syria was held by Macrianus and his son Quietus. Odfenathus took Emesa and destroyed Quietus probably in 263. Up to this time his sphere of action was limited by the desert, but the overthrow of Quietus left him the only real power between Rome and Persia. There is really no evi dence that he was at war with Sapor before 265, and before 263 he was hardly in a position to send an embassy to him. It is most likely that his final decision in favour of Rome was not made till the fall of Emesa. Pollio is certainly wrong in saying that in 265 Odsenathus was named Augustus. He seems to have been misled by a medal in which the Augustus represented dragging Persians captive was really Gallienus, whom we know to have triumphed for Odrenathus s victories. But after his Persian successes Odaenathus strengthened his position, as we learn from coins, by having his son associated in his imperium. The first year of Wahballath is 266-267, when his father, as will be presently shown, was still alive. The title of " king " was perhaps not conferred on Wahballath till the reign of Aurelian (Sallet, Xum. Zeit., 1870). 3 The original reading of De Vogiie and Waddington, Bath Zebina, is now known to be incorrect. Zabbai is a genuine Palmyrene name, borne also at this period by Septimius Zabbai, the general of the forces of the city. 4 We need not attach any weight to the fact that Zenobia, when she was mistress of Egypt, boasted of descent from Cleopatra and the Ptolemies. Athanasius, in speaking of the support she gave to Paul of Samosata, calls her a Jewess ; this is certainly false, for her coins bear pagan symbols. Athanasius probably drew a hasty conclusion, not so much from her sympathy with the Monarchian Paul as from her patronage of the Jews in Alexandria, for which the evidence of an inscription from a synagogue still exists (see Mommseu in Zcitsch. f. Xumismalik, v. 229 sq., 1873). XVIII. 26