ZENOBIA AND VICTORIA  
THE Emperor Alexander Severus and his mother were murdered in the year 235. We may convey a just impression of the period that followed this odious crime by the brief observation that in forty years nearly forty Emperors appeared on the darkened stage of the Roman Empire, and that nearly every one of them perished at the hands of Roman soldiers. The anarchy was arrested for a time when, in the year 270, the energetic Aurelian came to the throne. People and Senate greeted the strong man with genuine enthusiasm, and among the cries of joy or hope with which the Senators hailed him we find this singular aspiration: “Thou wilt deliver us from Zenobia and Vitruvia.” It is a piquant contrast with the disdain that their fathers had had for women—a confession that their vast Empire was now dominated by two women, without male consorts. But for the timely appearance of Aurelian there was a prospect that they would divide the rule of the world between them. One was a Syrian, the other a Gallic, queen; but each of them bore the title of Augusta, and they are the next commanding personalities to engage our interest.
 
Many years were to elapse between the death of Mam?a and the appearance of these two remarkable women, but we need do no more than glance at the many Empresses of an hour whose names are hardly discernible in that turbulent era. The huge barbarian who had purchased the throne by a brutal murder did not long enjoy234 it. The Empire heard with horror and disdain that this Thracian shepherd had seized the mantle of Antoninus and Marcus. The people of Rome, in particular, recollected with alarm the contempt they had shown him in his earlier years, and offered prayer in the temples that the gods might divert his steps from the south of Italy. He met their disdain with vindictiveness, and ruthlessly executed those who remembered his humble origin, or whose wealth could add to his revenue. His Empress, Paulina, vainly endeavoured to restrain his bloody hand, and succeeded only in drawing it upon herself.18 At length his exactions struck a spark of rebellion in Africa, and a new Emperor was appointed.
The African Proconsul, Gordianus, was an excellent Epicurean of the fine old Roman type. He had wealth, culture, character, and taste. After filling the highest offices at Rome with grace and applause, he was now quietly discharging the duties of Proconsul, and relieving the long hours of leisure with a tranquil enjoyment of letters, at the little town of Thysdrus, about a hundred and fifty miles to the south of Carthage. With him in Africa was his son Gordianus, an epicure rather than an Epicurean, who solaced his exile from Rome with the engaging company of twenty-two ladies. Their respective pleasures were violently interrupted in the beginning of the year 238. The father, a white-haired old man, with broad red face, was resting in his house after his judicial labours, when a band of men, with blood-smeared swords, burst into the luxurious villa, told him that they had rebelled against the tyrant, and peremptorily informed him that he was Emperor. His objections were unheeded, and he set out, with misgiving, for Carthage. But the pride of the Carthaginians was quickly chilled by the news that Maximinus’s commander in Africa was advancing against their city. An armed force was hastily equipped, sent out under the lead of the younger Gordian, and cut235 to pieces. The younger Emperor had died on the field: the white-haired old man hanged himself.
Rome, meantime, had recognized the rule of the Gordians, and was now throbbing with a just apprehension of the vengeance of Maximinus. The certainty of punishment inspired it with a measure of courage, and two new Emperors were created—a vigorous son of the people, Pupienus Maximus, and a perfumed representative of the nobles, Balbinus. The choice did not please the people, who beset the Senate with sticks and stones, so a handsome boy, such as Rome loved, was associated with them. He was a Gordianus, the fourteen-year-old son of the elder Gordian’s daughter. The city rang with preparations for war, and in the early summer Maximus led out his weak and apprehensive force. The terrible Maximinus and his legions had crossed the Alps, and were descending on the plains of Italy. Luckily for Rome, they met a desperate resistance at Aquileia. Protected by strong and well-equipped fortifications, with ample provisions, the inhabitants repelled the fiercest attacks of Maximinus, and jeered at him and his dissolute son from the walls. When the thongs of their slinging-machines wore out, the women of Aquileia gave their long tresses to the soldiers to weave into cords. Maximinus vented his temper on his own troops, and one morning the besieged were delighted to see the soldiers advancing with the grisly heads of Maximinus and his son on the tips of their spears.
Maximus returned to gladden Rome with the news, but it was decreed that six Emperors were to die that year. The soldiers, who had had another fight with the Romans during the war, were sullen and treacherous. Balbinus they hated for his effeminacy, Maximus for his rigour. The returning troops brought grievances of their own, and it was only the loyalty of the German soldiers that held the guards off the palace. Then there came a day when the delight of the games drew most of the soldiers away, and the guards marched upon the palace.236 Maximus hastily ordered the loyal troops to be summoned: Balbinus cancelled the order. Their relations had been strained for some time, and each looked upon this sudden onslaught as a device of the other. The German troops arrived at last, to find the palace empty, and learn that the three Emperors were in the hands of the guards. They started at once for the camp, and found the bleeding remains of Maximus and Balbinus on the street. With them another ephemeral Empress passes dimly before us. The coins seem to indicate that Maximus was the husband of Quintia Crispilla at the time of his death.
The youthful Gordian had been taken to the camp, and Rome was forced to acknowledge him as sole Emperor. Intoxicated, as so many had been, by the sudden obtaining of so vast a power, he seemed at first inclined to the model of Caligula. His uncle’s concubines and his mother’s eunuchs were in a fair way to rule the ruler. But a wise tutor, Timesitheus, obtained a better influence over him, and he soberly chose his daughter, Furia Sabina Tranquillina, as his Empress. The whole prospect of the Empire changed with his marriage, in 241 or 242, but the evil genius of Rome intervened once more. The Persians had again crossed the eastern frontier, and the Emperor and his father-in-law went to Asia to take command. The war was proceeding with success, when Timesitheus contracted a mysterious illness and died. Gordian gave his command to a dashing cavalry leader named Philip—the man who, we have strong reason to think, had poisoned Timesitheus. Philip was a handsome Arab, whose father had led a band of robbers in the desert. But the son was astute, and Gordian suspected nothing. Before many months the camps were simmering with discontent. Pay was reduced, and the troops were reluctantly informed by Philip that it was the command of the Emperor. Regiments found themselves quartered in districts where it was impossible to obtain sufficient food, and Philip begged them to regard the youth and military inexperience of Gordian. The plot culminated in the early spring of 244. Gordian was slain,237 and the son of the Arab pillager of caravans received the purple from the soldiers.
 
MARCIA OTACILIA SEVERA
The new Empress of Rome, Marcia Otacilia Severa, attracts our attention for a moment on account of the claim of the early Christian writers that she belonged to the new religion. The claim must have had some foundation, but the story on which it is generally based is regarded with reserve by historians. St. Chrysostom and others declare that, when Philip and Otacilia passed from the Euphrates, where Gordian had been murdered, to Antioch, they went to the Christian church for service on Easter-eve; and that the bishop refused to admit them in any other character than that of penitents expiating a foul crime. Duruy ridicules the idea that a bishop would have dared so to address an Emperor in public before the middle of the third century, and it is certainly difficult to believe. Indeed, historians generally suspect that, as the story itself implies, Otacilia supported her husband in his criminal ambition, and are reluctant to regard her as a Christian. Her nationality is unknown, and she hardly emerges from the obscurity in which the scanty chronicles have left the reign of her husband.
Let us hasten through the pages of ghastly adventure, and come to more interesting women. In the year 249 the troops in M?sia pressed the purple on one of the ablest Roman generals, Decius, and Philip was slain in the contest that followed. Otacilia fled with her son to the Pr?torian camp, but the guards killed the boy in her arms, and sent her back sadly into the common ranks from which she had so unhappily risen. The wife of Decius, Herennia Etruscilla, who is known to us only from coins and an inscription, had little better fortune, since Decius perished in a war with the Goths two years later (251). His son and successor, Hostilianus, died in the following year, not without a suspicion of crime. The colleague of Decius and successor of his son, Gallus, was murdered in 253, together with his son Volusianus, with whom he had shared the Empire; and the rival and successor of Gallus was238 assassinated within four months. Then Valerianus, an aged and distinguished Senator, came to the throne, and we begin to have less fleeting glimpses of the ladies of the court, and to make acquaintance with the two remarkable women who will especially occupy us.
The elder Valerian does not long remain on the stage. The weakness into which the Empire had fallen was soon observed by its enemies on every side, and the frontier provinces were being devastated. Investing his elder son, Gallienus, with the purple, Valerian went to the East to oppose the Persian monarch, Sapor, who threatened the whole of Roman Asia, and after a time fell, with his army, into the hands of the enemy. Whether or no it be true that the proud Persian used to step on the person of the aged Emperor to mount his horse, it is at least certain that Valerian died among the Persians after some years of ignominious captivity, and his skin, stuffed and padded to the proportions of a man, was long exhibited as the most glorious of Sapor’s many trophies. There are later writers who assert that his second wife, the Empress Mariniana, was captured with him, and brutally treated until she died, but the authority is slender. Cohen, the great authority on Roman coins, warns us that, though there are coins of a certain Mariniana, who seems to have been a lady of Valerian’s court, it is not certain that she was his wife.
So feeble did the Empire now become that its enemies made the most extensive and destructive inroads. The Persians advanced so far as to sack Antioch, the Franks overran Spain and reached Africa, the Alemanni spread terror in the north of Italy and even threatened Rome, and the Goths poured over Greece and Asia Minor. Gallienus received the news of each successive disaster with an insipid joke. Glittering with the jewels which encrusted his belt, his dress, and even his shoes, his hair powdered with gold dust, he dined from dishes of solid gold, in the company of his concubines, while his father suffered in captivity, and his subjects groaned under the hardship of invasion, famine, pestilence, and earthquake. His Empress,239 Cornelia Salonina, seems to have disdained his cowardly luxury, and she was replaced in his affection, though not in her position, by a charming barbarian. Attalus, King of the Marcomanni, had a beautiful daughter named Pipa or Pipara, whose attractiveness was brought to the notice of Gallienus. He frivolously submitted to the Senate that, since Rome had so many enemies, it were wise to disarm some of them; and he asked Attalus for the hand of his daughter. The shrewd barbarian stipulated for a large part of Pannonia, and in return for that valuable slice of the Empire permitted his pretty daughter to be the concubine of the Roman Emperor. She never appears on the coinage, while Salonina—whose grave, intellectual features suggest that she found solace in culture—remains Augusta to the end. Serviez finds an admirable trait of Salonina’s character in the punishment of a man who had sold her some false jewels. He was sentenced to the lions; but when the terrible gates were opened, a harmless fowl flew out upon him, and he was discharged with the fright. The Roman historian, however, ascribes the trick expressly to Gallienus.19
In the eight years of Gallienus’s complete control of the Empire (260–268) it was distracted and worn with misery and anarchy. The “Historia Augusta” estimates that “thirty tyrants” arose in that short period to dispute the power of the corrupt Gallienus; Gibbon reduces the number to nineteen; Duruy counts twenty-eight claimants to the throne. There was, in any case, a period of profound demoralization, and as nearly all these generals met with a violent death, involved many others in their fall, and very frequently led their troops in civil warfare, the drain on the impoverished system was disastrous. It is amongst these “thirty tyrants” that we find Zenobia and Victoria.
240 Zenobia was the wife of Odenathus, the ruling man in the independent town of Palmyra. The town, which had become an important commercial centre, lay on the edge of the Syrian desert, and had long maintained a position of neutrality between the Romans on the west and the Parthians to the east. It had the title of a Roman colony, and Odenathus cannot have been more than its leading citizen and, perhaps, head of its Senate. To this little State came the news that the Roman Emperor was detained in ignominy by the King of Persia. Odenathus sent to Sapor a most polite suggestion that his conduct was improper, and gilded his remonstrance with a caravan of valuable presents. The presents were disdainfully thrown into the Euphrates, and the blustering Sapor threatened to punish his insolence. With great boldness the leading citizen of Palmyra formed an irregular army out of the neighbouring villages and the Arabs, with a few Roman troops, and inflicted a substantial reverse on the Persian troops. Gallienus gracefully acknowledged his service, and extended the Imperial title to him and his wife Zenobia, who became the representatives of Roman power in the East.
Zenobia was, says Trebellius Pollio in the “Historia Augusta,” “one of the most noble of all the women of the East, and also one of the most beautiful.” Her nobility rests upon her claim that she descended from Cleopatra, a point that we are unable to examine. The portrait-bust of her in the Vatican does not so much suggest exceptional beauty as exceptional power. It is a face of extraordinary strength and peculiar features. We can very well imagine her, as she is described for us, riding out on horseback before the assembled troops, her piercing black eyes aflame with spirit, a military helmet on her head, and a purple robe, embroidered with gems, so attached to her person as to leave naked the fine arm with which she emphasized her orders. She maintained a court of Persian magnificence, but was far removed from Persian insolence. She did not disdain to drink with her officers, and even to endeavour241 to surpass them in drinking. Yet it is uniformly stated that this remarkable independence of Syrian ideas as to a woman’s position was united with a chastity of the most sensitive and peculiarly scrupulous character. When we add that she was a woman of exceptional culture, spoke Latin, Greek, and Egyptian, had so complete a command of the history of the East that she wrote a book on it, and enjoyed the daily companionship of the philosopher Longinus, who was tutor to her sons, we seem to have exhausted possible merit, and ventured into the province of legend. But we have still to say that her military and political ability was no less than her beauty, her culture, or her virtue. We shall see later that the finest Emperor of the age, Aurelian, spoke with extraordinary appreciation of her skill in warfare and in polity.
Even as the wife of Odenathus, Zenobia was not inactive. She is said to have urged his bold attack on Persia, and she shared the longest marches of the soldiers when the campaign began. But she was soon the sole ruler of the East, in the interest, at first, of Rome. During the Persian war Odenathus quarrelled with a relative and officer, named M?onius, and was only prevented by the intercession of his son, Herodes, from putting him to death. Herodes was the son of Odenathus by a former wife, and would be the natural heir to his dignity. The two sons whom Zenobia had borne him, Timolaus and Herennianus, were mere boys, but Zenobia had an older son, Vaballath, by a former husband. We can understand that there would be some jea............