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 his-

torical, 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,

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