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.