On the military level, it is perfectly true, as Suetonius was made to point out by Dio in his speech, that the Britons never had to besiege a city which was actually defended properly by the Romans, since Camulodunum’s defences were pitiful, and Londinium’s non-existent. Their defeat of Petilius was due to the success of the ambush: when the experienced Roman legionaries lured the wild Britons into their trap, they were able to cut them down without much difficulty.
And yet this is only a part of the story … the force of a patriotic flash flood (as Boudica’s rebellion is most plausibly seen) should never be underestimated. If positive hindsight, the explaining of why what did happen absolutely had to happen, is one enjoyable historical occupation, then the negative rather more dream-like dwelling on the what-might-have-been is another. Personalities come into play. The Procurator Catus Decianus fled from Londinium at the news of the fall of Camulodunum; Petilius’ recklessness led to his vanquishing; it would also have been perfectly possible for Suetonius to flee from Glevum (Gloucester) and reach the continent if things had turned out differently or if he had been of a different nature. As to Queen Boudica’s tactics and the potency of surprise, it was Mao Tse-tung in his brilliant and demonstrably effective essay on guerrilla warfare who advocated seizing the initiative whenever possible so that a small band of poorly equipped guerrillas could cause havoc and defeat a well-equipped army.19
The more victories the Britons clocked up, the more allies among their fellow tribesmen they would have gained. It was the winning side which was seductive to those with an eye to a profitable future. The Roman rule in Britain in AD 60, seventeen years after the invasion, was clearly neither so extensive nor so settled as it was afterwards to become; the memory of the people concerned is an important element where any occupation is being considered, an element not always sufficiently regarded. Many of the Britons in AD 60 – certainly Queen Boudica herself – could remember a time before the Romans came, and before the Romans ruled, and being blissfully unaware of the ‘historical inevitability’ of the four hundred years of Roman occupation, may have genuinely believed that they could enjoy freedom in the future.
What kind of freedom was envisaged? The answer to that question surely lies in the Roman maladministration which provoked the Iceni in the long term, as the Roman maltreatment of the Queen and her daughters provoked them in the short. The indignation of the native inhabitants of Camulodunum, compelled to labour and pay for an imperial cult, an imperial temple, alien to their religion and to their way of life, falls into the same category. It was as a patriot – of the Iceni cause – and a partisan that Queen Boudica rose. It is as a challenge to the Roman might by tribes generally termed inferior – ‘nothing to fear from the Britons who are too weak to cross the sea and assault us’, Strabo had written in an age before the invasion – that her uprising is best seen.
Had Queen Boudica continued her rout, challenged the army of Suetonius at a place of her own choosing – with her numbers and her desperate courage – she might have presented the picture of the winning side to the other tribal leaders. The ‘glorious victory’ might just conceivably have gone the other way. But this is to make her a prudent calculating Roman leader as Suetonius was. She remained and remains a Celt, bold, inspiring, but not so far as we know calculating.
And in this manner her story ends. Or so it must have seemed to those who knew her, with the enforced ‘pacification’ of the Iceni by just that fire and sword which Boudica herself had temporarily and bloodily employed. But Boudica’s story did not end there. The death of this obscure British queen, buried in an unknown grave, was in fact only the beginning of the story. The phoenix Boadicea would rise from the ashes of Boudica. What happened to this phoenix later, why Boudica/Boadicea did not rest forever forgotten, is one theme of the rest of this book. The other interwoven theme is the multiple fascination exercised by the Warrior Queen, illustrated in so many different civilizations, including those where the Roman writ never ran and where the name of Boadicea was never known, each story contributing to the mosaic.
The first story – that of Zenobia – is however given as a dramatic coda to that of Boudica, because she too in her time challenged the might of Rome.
* Nowadays the London–Manchester InterCity railway line passes through the site of the battle; the historically minded traveller may salute the memory of the Queen of the Iceni from the windows of the train.
* From time to time traces of these forts, symbolic of the repression of the Iceni, emerge as a result of drought and aerial photography: in this way the Roman camp at Pakenham was shown up in 1976, and excavated in 1985 before being engulfed by a bypass.
CHAPTER EIGHT
O ZENOBIA!
How, O Zenobia, hast thou dared to insult Roman emperors?
Aurelian to Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra
The story of Zenobia, third-century Queen of Palmyra, another adversary of Rome, provides not only a dramatic coda to the story of Boudica, first-century Queen of the Iceni but also, at first sight, a peculiarly appropriate one. There are so many interesting parallels to be discovered between their respective experiences quite apart from the simple fact that Zenobia, like Boudica, led her people to war. Both women were widows when they assumed power, both women ruled in theory as regents for their offspring, both women had been married to client-rulers of Rome, both women led revolts (that is, from the Roman point of view) destined to upset an existing relationship with Rome which had apparently been comfortably established under their late husbands’ sway.
Of course the status of widowhood is far from being peculiar to Boudica and Zenobia in the consideration of historic Warrior Queens. The frequent recurrence of what has been termed earlier the Appendage Syndrome – the Warrior Queen seen as an extension or prolongation of the rule of a particular great man – has produced widows as well as daughters. The nineteenth-century Rani of Jhansi is another prominent example of widowhood, as Queen Tamara of Georgia, Queen Elizabeth I of England and Indira Gandhi represent daughterhood. In her own way, the Rani of Jhansi comes close to fulfilling those conditions observed above concerning Boudica and Zenobia; not only was she a widow and a would-be regent, but she duly challenged an imperial power, except that the power in question was British not Roman.
For all these overall similarities linking the Warrior Queens of many different ages, at first inspection the Roman connection does seem to constitute a special link between Boudica and Zenobia. Once again some two hundred years after the death of Boudica, a Roman general found himself ‘waging a war with a woman’. This was the accusation made against Aurelian by his fellow Romans, leaving him to expostulate in reply: ‘As if Zenobia alone and with her own forces only were fighting against me … as a matter of fact, there is a great force of the enemy …’. Here is another familiar syndrome at work, that of Shame, the one which caused the Romans to bow their heads in dismay after the destruction of Camulodunum, for, in the words of Dio Cassius quoted earlier, ‘all this ruin was brought upon [them] … by a woman’.1
It is only the cooler light of second inspection which uncovers important differences between the two queens, both as they behaved and as they were treated. These differences serve as a salutary reminder, just before the ‘real’ Boudica is abandoned for the legendary Boadicea, that a host of very diverse women throughout history have fought beneath the generalized banner of ‘Warrior Queen’. The similarities are often imposed from outside by the existence of the stereotype. Where the stories are undoubtedly superficially alike, as with Boudica and Zenobia, one should be careful not to ignore the dissimilarities, to enable the individual female character to struggle out from beneath the web of legend – in the case of Zenobia a rare character indeed.
Zenobia was an Arab. That is to say, inscriptions give her the full names of Septimia Zenobia in Latin or Bat Zabbai in Aramaic. Her father may have been called Zabbai (although ‘Bat Zabbai’ can also mean ‘daughter of a merchant’ in Aramaic). At all events this father
was probably a native of Palmyra or Tadmor, to give the city its historic name (the exact etymology of these two names, respectively Greek and Aramaic, remains obscure). He would have been part of the proud, cultured and wealthy Arab merchant-aristocracy who inhabited this splendid city, half religious monument, half commercial centre, situated at a vital confluence of caravan routes in the Syrian desert.2
If Zenobia’s descent was predominantly Palmyrene Arab, she may well have had dashes of many other bloods including Aramaean. She flourished after all in that interesting Middle Eastern area, the world’s ancient crucible, where the three languages Greek, Latin and Aramaic, in which Palmyrene inscriptions are expressed, stand for a confluence of cultures and races as well as trade routes. Some Jewish blood has been suggested on the ground that she treated the Jews of Alexandria sympathetically; but this was in fact a comprehensible political move, the Jews always forming a potential anti-Roman force since Titus’ destruction of all Jerusalem in AD 70. (Individuals who treat a given Jewish community with sympathy are often supposed to be of Jewish descent: a commentary on the long history of the Jews as a persecuted people.) But it is significant that Zenobia, who made much of historic bonds, never claimed one with Solomon, which in view of his mythic connection to the fortress of Tadmor would seem to dispose of a real Jewish link.3
The great Cleopatra (herself predominantly Greek but acting out the Egyptian with verve) was as it were the role model to which Zenobia aspired. Moreover the Palmyrene Queen claimed very firmly to be descended from her; there was a certain history of Alexandria, dedicated ‘to Cleopatra’, of which Zenobia must have been the actual dedicatee. The claim is generally thought to be false, although Zenobia’s knowledge of the Egyptian language and her predisposition towards Egyptian culture may conceivably indicate that her mother was Egyptian.4 The real significance of the claim is as a proof of Zenobia’s intelligence: she quickly appreciated the self-aggrandizement to be derived from a glamorous historic connection. As Cleopatra used the image of the goddess Isis, the Queen of War, to lend exciting credence to her own dreams of empire, so Zenobia drew Cleopatra’s own image to her. She also incidentally associated herself with Semiramis, and loved to dress up ‘in the robes of Dido’:5 one has the impression that no queen, however unfortunate her history, was left unturned in Zenobia’s relentless (but practical) evocation of female majesty.
Zenobia’s fantasies about Egypt should not be allowed to obscure the strong tradition to which she actually belongs. Zenobia is in fact part of a discernible pattern of pre-Islamic Arabian queens with military connections, many of them coming from her own Syrian homeland or areas adjacent. The researches of Nabia Abbott have revealed at least two dozen of these formidable ladies over six centuries, following the visit of the Queen of Sheba to Solomon in the tenth century BC. Various origins have been ascribed to this fabulous Queen including south Arabian and Abyssinian: more importantly she exemplifies ‘the exercise of the right of independent queenship among the ancient Arabs’.6
The Assyrian records give glimpses of troublesome Arab queens such as Zabibi, finally subjugated and forced to pay tribute in 738 BC, and Samsi, who may have been her successor and, after military defeat, underwent the same fate. It was from the royal house of Emesa, annexed to Syria, that the Emperor Septimius Severus in about AD 185 chose as his wife Martha, the daughter of the priest-king – she who became the powerful Julia Domna and introduced the Semitic goddess Tanit (as Caelestis Dea) to the Roman world. Mamaea, the redoubtable daughter of Julia Domna’s sister, Julia Maesa, ruled for her son the Emperor Alexander, even accompanying him on the German campaign in 234; a generation older than Zenobia, but hailing from the same ‘Syrian’ cradle, she was described by Gibbon as having ‘manly ambition’.7
Nor did this tradition end with Zenobia herself: from about AD 373 to 380, a hundred years after Zenobia’s disappearance from the scene of history, we encounter another Syrian Arab queen named Mawia, probably a Ghassanid. Mawia too rode in person at the head of her army, made excursions into Phoenicia and Palestine, ravaged the land to the frontiers of Egypt, and defeated the Roman armies; later she sent her fleet of Arab cavalry to the aid of the Romans when they in their turn were hard-pressed by the Goths. The last ‘queen’ of pre-Islamic Western Arabia was the famous – or infamous – Hind Al-Hunud about whom many traditions have congregated, some bloodthirsty, but all pointing to her independence. And it is worth recalling too that as late as 656 Aishah, ‘the beloved of Muhammad’ (the Prophet’s last wife), was present at the Battle of the Camels at the heart of the fighting. More than that, Aishah’s role in the internecine strife of which this battle was the culmination showed that at this date men would still follow a woman to war.8
Zenobia may have looked to Cleopatra for inspiration, but Zenobia’s Arab tradition in which, as with the Celts, queens could ride to battle (and to victory) was an important element in her story. And the Holy Figurehead element in a woman’s presence at the scene of battle as an inspiration, even a quasi-goddess, was also common to the Arabs, as to the Celts, in the pre-Islamic tradition of the Lady of Victory. By this tradition, some woman of quality would be placed within the portable qubbah or sacred pavilion of the tribal deity and, with her attendants, form a sacred group within sight of the warriors, singing songs of encouragement to them. The Lady of Victory, her hair flowing and her body partly exposed, embodied an appeal to valour and passion. (As late as the nineteenth century, William Palgrave described one particular ‘huge girl’ who encouraged the Amjan Bedouins against the heir to the throne of Nejed in this manner; when she was slain, they were defeated.)9
Another crucial element in Zenobia’s career was the geographical situation of Palmyra itself, halfway between the two mighty and contending empires, one of which was Roman. It would be equally unsuitable to regard Zenobia as some kind of Hollywood ‘Desert Queen’, riding out of a dust storm, with a tent for her court and a palm frond for her sceptre, as it would be to regard Boudica as a woad-stained shrieking Celtic savage. Both women – both leaders – came from complex civilizations; in the case of Zenobia, the civilization from which she sprang had been affected deeply by that of Rome.
Around AD 114, Palmyra had theoretically become part of the Roman Empire, while the Emperor Hadrian judiciously allowed the city considerable liberty in order to benefit from its celebrated archers as defenders of what was now his own frontier against the Parthians. Moreover the Palmyrenes were allowed to be responsible for their own municipal taxes: another wise move. Palmyra flourished under this loose mutually beneficial tutelage. At the beginning of the third century the Emperor Septimius Severus made Palmyra into a colony and allowed a properly elected senate to manage its affairs; distinguished Palmyrenes began to add Roman names to their Semitic ones.
As Zenobia was not an unsophisticated Bedouin queen, so Palmyra itself was not a remote and ruined city lost in the midst of sands, as some ancient geographers suggested. On the contrary, vital caravan routes linked it to the seaboard cities of Phoenicia, to Emesa, to Damascus and to Egypt itself, Palmyra providing the link between these and Seleucia, and the more distant eastern regions. Foreign armies might not easily penetrate the intervening deserts, but the camel caravans of the merchants had no such problems. So the substantial animals toiled endlessly to and fro – camels in prime condition could carry loads of up to 200 kilos – and thus the Palmyrene merchants emulated Macaulay’s Lars Porsena, who ‘bade his messengers ride forth, East and west and south and north, To summon his array’; except that the camels of the Palmyrenes bore back with them an array of goods, not soldiers: from perfumes and aromatic oils to skins and salt. A tariff of commercial dues dated AD 137 reveals how far afield the tentacles of Palmyrene trade actually spread: silks and jade from the Chinese frontiers are listed, and from India muslins, spice, ebony, ivory and pearls.10
The merchant-aristocrats lived well: in their day two emperors visited Palmyra. The merchants made great profits and patronized the arts with
their money (it is always agreeable to find these two activities considered compatible). A hundred years before Zenobia, a special tax was imposed on imported bronze statues and busts; the wealthy citizens had a special penchant for erecting columns and colonnades and adorning them with self-congratulatory inscriptions. Jewellery loaded down the women – how Zenobia would one day come to feel the weight of those splendid jewels! If the colonnaded edifices showed the influence of Rome, the shadow of Palmyra’s other great neighbour also fell across her culture: local deities might be given Roman names but wear Parthian dress. Later Persian costume, rugs and jewels mingled with the Roman styles.
Central to Palmyra was the great Temple of the Sun.11 Yet by the third century the official sun worship of the Palmyrene state was being supplemented by an alternative religion: a vague yet spiritual kind of monotheism – the worship of the unknown god, to whom those inferior categories of women and servants also made offerings. Here, where the unknown god and the celestial pantheon of other gods were content to receive harmless sacrifices of incense and wine, a generally liberal atmosphere prevailed, in which, according to inscriptions, the Jews also found their place (and adapted to Palmyrene customs).