It's the ancients on history hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and in today's

episode where we're heading to the Eastern Mediterranean and one of the great jewels of the ancient near east, the city of Palmyra.

In the mid-third century AD, this incredibly rich and cosmopolitan city came under the control of an extraordinary

queen. Her name was Zenobia. The Roman Empire was in crisis and during that turmoil

Zenobia rose to the fall to forge an empire stretching from Egypt to Syria.

Her story really stands out in the turbulent tale of Rome's third century crisis.

To explain all about this Palmyra Queen,

from the Historia Augusta to her main foe Oridian,

well I was delighted to welcome back to the show

The wonderful Dr. Emma Southern. I really do hope you enjoy and here's

Emma.

Emma wonderful to have you back on the podcast.

Thank you so much for having me back. It feels like too long since we last chatted about horrible

Romans. It has been too long and we did talk about particularly horrible Romans with that figure of Clodius didn't we so of all

Romans he's a very very interesting one one of the most horrible well we're talking about

a topic slightly different today but still we're thinking about Rome this figure of Zenobia

Now Emma sometimes we get this impression of Zenobia almost as this Syrian Budica, but a story it's so much more complicated than that. It really is. To reduce it to a

women fighting against Rome I think is to really take out as much of the complication as you can about how what a Roman is and how you think

about the Roman Empire and how you think about women in the Roman Empire as well because

basically everything that Zenobia does is exactly the same as every

other usurper Augustus is doing throughout the early third century which is declaring herself an Empress and then fighting with other

Roman troops and fighting other parts of the Roman army in order to take over parts of the Empire and to be the final man standing or final

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