Two Queens... and One Tragedy...

The ancient peoples of the East were favored with a number of women who ruled their countries directly, and whose deeds and stories have been immortalized through the histories of those peoples. Yet despite the care that writers and students of history have taken in tracing the stories of the famous among them, the matter of the relation of one of these queens to another, and of the extent to which they influenced one another, remains a neglected matter, rarely studied.

In this article I shall attempt to study the relations that existed between two of the East's famous queens, whose lives formed an important part of our country's political and cultural history — Cleopatra the Egyptian and Zenobia the Syrian. There may be, in the lives of these two women — although they did not live in one age, nor rule one country — a closeness and a likeness such as we can scarcely find between women of a single milieu and a single era.

The first of these two queens lived in Egypt in the first century shortly before Christ. She was of the Ptolemaic family, Greek in origin, who had sat upon the throne of the land of the Nile since the beginning of the third century B.C. As for Zenobia, she was a woman of the third century A.D., in the city of Palmyra, the fortified center commanding the sole line of communication between Mesopotamia and Coele-Syria, across the Syrian Desert. She was the wife of Odaenathus Septimius, king of Palmyra and northern Syria.

Both women were ambitious, with personal aims and many aspirations. They were also strong, possessing means that opened before them the way to realize their hopes. From this ambition and this strength the two queens set out to pour their history into two singular molds — a setting-out in which the influence of Cleopatra upon Zenobia is revealed with clarity and precision.

Cleopatra ascended the throne of Egypt at the age of seventeen. Sharing the rule with her was Ptolemy Dionysus, her brother and husband. But Cleopatra was not content with half a throne, and wanted the crown of Egypt for a single head. So she called upon Julius Caesar, her friend, to make war on her brother. And when Ptolemy was killed, the people insisted on appointing his younger brother as his successor and as Cleopatra's partner. But Cleopatra chafed at the bonds of brotherhood once again, and killed her brother by putting poison in his food. Thus it became possible for her to rule Egypt without a rival — a rule that was indispensable, as a first step, to the achievement of her designs.

As for Zenobia, although she did not match Cleopatra in cruelty and in recklessness toward kinship and affection, she too sought to hold the kingship alone and to rid herself of her husband, her partner in her palace. Her husband was a famous and beloved king, whose prestige reached the land of the Persians in the east and the empire of the Romans in the west. The love of monopolizing the rule led her to take part in a conspiracy plotted by one of the emirs of Palmyra to kill Odaenathus and his son, the heir to the throne; and to take part, afterward, in fighting that ambitious emir and being rid of him!

Cleopatra, after ridding herself of her rivals, had to lean upon outside support by which to guarantee the survival of her power and its expansion at the expense of Egypt's neighbors. Zenobia grasped the same thing, when she saw with her penetrating eye that any expansion of the kingdom of Palmyra must be propped up by strong outside backing. And the Romans were the people upon whom both queens relied to obtain this guarantee they were seeking.

But the two queens differed in the means of achieving friendship with the Romans, though they did not differ in the reasons for this friendship, nor in its results. For Cleopatra relied, in this, on the femininity of her body, while Zenobia relied on the masculinity of her nature.

Cleopatra possessed great beauty mingled with charm and allure. She lived in a time and a place that sanctified beauty and permitted the forbidden for its sake. So Cleopatra found nothing to stand between her and the realization of her personal ambitions by means of the flagrant femininity that was hers, and by bestowing that femininity upon the man who could bring her to her goals. She lived with Julius Caesar in Rome for a long while. When he died she married his successor, Antony, and bore him three children. Then she made overtures to Octavius, who killed Antony and succeeded him in the leadership of the ancient

world, and tried to catch him in the nets of her love. But he turned away from her, realizing how cheap her love had become.

Zenobia, however, refused to use her beauty and her femininity in the service of her political desires. This may go back to the firmness of her morals and the excellence of her upbringing, and to the hold that Palmyra's traditions, and its people's attachment to the higher values, had upon Zenobia's soul. That queen was also subject to the influence of Bishop Paul of Samosata, in Antioch, and of the philosopher Longinus, in Palmyra — two men who called for holding fast to virtue and morality. This besides Zenobia's being influenced by certain schools of Christian and Hebrew thought.

In place of this refusal to make beauty a road to political glory, Zenobia drew from the masculinity of her thinking and her temperament — that is, from the ruggedness of her nature, the courage of her heart, and the might of her resolve — a strength that enabled her to persuade her husband to make war on the Persians in order to win the goodwill of the Romans. Then she shared with her husband in those wars of his, and secured for her city the favor of the Roman emperor, who proclaimed her husband king over Syria. Her relations with the Romans remained good even after she came to rule alone. And when her army undertook the conquest of Egypt, she claimed that she was doing so only to restore the land of the Nile to the Roman dominion that had all but vanished!

The two queens also resorted to another weapon that made it easier for them to attain what they were striving after. That weapon lay in their claim of a right to what they demanded — a right of lawful inheritance. For Cleopatra's fundamental demand, after she had secured the throne of Egypt for herself, was the occupation of certain provinces near Egypt, bound to it by historical, political, geographical, and economic ties — foremost among them the petty states of Syria, such as Judaea, Jordan, the coasts of Phoenicia, and Coele-Syria. As for Zenobia, her fundamental demand likewise, after she in her turn had secured a throne shared with none but her infant son, was to seize the land of the Nile and possess its riches.

And just as Cleopatra hit upon an argument with which to support her claim to the land of Syria, so Zenobia found a similar argument. Cleopatra reminded her Roman friends that she was of Syrian origin, and that she was descended from Cleopatra the First, daughter of Antiochus, the great one of the Syrian Seleucids, who had married Ptolemy Epiphanes the Fifth; and she claimed that the Syrian provinces had been her ancestress's portion, and that it was her right to seize them and turn them to account. Zenobia resorted to the very same claim. She spread it abroad among the people that she was one of Cleopatra's granddaughters, and that she was the sole heiress of the Ptolemaic throne that had ruled over Egypt. And she put forward her son, the child, as sovereign of that throne, as lawful heir of the Ptolemaic line!

And in order to compensate for this

descent by blood from houses that were not of the very stock of the two peoples they ruled, each of them resorted to similar means to win the people's love and favor, and its backing for her in her expansionist projects. To this end Cleopatra encouraged the intellectual and literary movements in the city of Alexandria, and dealt generously with the great scholars of the age — foremost among them Boethus the mathematician, Dioscorides the physician, and Sosigenes the astronomer. She built a number of libraries, streets, playing-grounds, and palaces. She educated herself at the hands of a number of scholars, and spread throughout the country an excellent atmosphere of learning. Zenobia followed her pattern: she contributed to the building of the renaissance of learning in northern Syria, encouraged men of letters and thinkers and lavished gifts upon them, drew philosophers and sages close to her, brought up her children in the care of famous teachers, and ordered the building of canals, aqueducts, bridges, and roads, and the adorning of the capital with monuments and statues. Zenobia also mastered several languages, among them Greek, Aramaic, Latin, and Egyptian.

The two queens also endeared themselves to the peoples of Syria and Egypt through the personal qualities for which each was famous. The Syrians admired Zenobia's courage and her taking part in battles, the majesty of her bearing, her passion for hunting and horsemanship, the strength of her body and the hardness of her limbs; just as the Egyptians admired Cleopatra's femininity, the softness of her appearance, the delicacy of her frame, and the coquetry of her ways.

These two women were able, by endearing themselves to the people and drawing it close, to win its affection and secure its help. The people of Palmyra rose against the Romans when they took their queen captive, and the people of Alexandria stood by their queen through most of her days.

But history, which enslaved Zenobia, just as it had enslaved Cleopatra before her, and made her follow in Cleopatra's footsteps through its reports and its events, would not rest until it had mocked Zenobia as it had mocked Cleopatra herself, and until it had sealed the lives of the two queens with a single ending. The very state that vanquished Cleopatra vanquished Zenobia. The dreams of the one were scattered like the dreams of the other. The throne of the first passed away in her own country and in her Syrian possessions, and the claim of the second fell away from Palmyra and from Egypt. And just as the inhabitants of Syria rose against Cleopatra, conspired against her and defied her, so the Egyptians rose against Zenobia's army and drove out its men.

And thus did history let fall a single curtain upon both tragedies. In the first tragedy Cleopatra appeared stretched upon the ground at the mercy of a great serpent licking her blood; and Zenobia appeared, at the close of the second tragedy, walking in abasement and degradation to Rome, with fetters upon her hands and her feet.