Provoked by her insurrection, the Emperor Aurelian marched on Palmyra. After defeating Zenobia twice, at Antioch and Emesa, and braving the Syrian desert, Aurelian surrounded the city. Of the protracted siege that ensued, during which he was wounded, the emperor wrote back to Rome: “The Roman people speak with contempt of the war which I am waging against a woman. They are ignorant both of the character and of the power of Zenobia.” As hopes of relief from Persia faded, Zenobia attempted to flee by camel but was captured. Palmyra soon surrendered. Aurelian treated the vanquished Palmyrenes leniently, but was stern with their queen and her entourage. “The courage of Zenobia deserted her in the hour of trial,” writes Gibbon. He castigates her dishonourable betrayal of her “friends”, while lavishing praise on Longinus for embracing a true philosopher’s death. “Without uttering a complaint, he calmly followed the executioner, pitying his unhappy mistress, and bestowing comfort on his afflicted friends.” But Zenobia’s life was spared. She suffered the indignity of being led in triumph through Rome in chains of gold. Her subsequent fate is obscure, but according to one account she so impressed Aurelian with her dignity in defeat that he granted her freedom and a villa in Tivoli, where she married a senator, had several daughters and presided over a literary salon. Among her descendants may be St Zenobius, a Christian bishop who lived in Florence two centuries later.

Gibbon, however, sides with the sage against the warrior queen: “The fame of Longinus . . . will survive that of the queen who betrayed, or the tyrant who condemned him.” There are two things wrong with Gibbon’s account. Firstly, he is so prejudiced against what he sees as Zenobia’s inconstant lack of manly fortitude — not only was she a woman, but an oriental woman too — that he fails to put himself in her shoes. Lacking a convenient asp about her person, she did not have Cleopatra’s option of suicide, even if she had wanted it. It was natural for a queen to value her own life more highly than those around her (monarchs, then and now, do not have “friends”) because she embodied Palmyra: their sacrifice was necessary for her survival — and Zenobia was nothing if not a survivor. By choosing captivity over death Zenobia was obeying raison d’état. What of “the sublime Longinus”? He was not, as Gibbon supposed, the author of the celebrated treatise On the Sublime, which had been written two centuries earlier. In fact, none of Cassius Longinus’s works has survived; if he is remembered at all, it is mainly due to his ill-fated association with Zenobia. Moreover, despite his grey hairs, Longinus may have been justly served by her denunciation and his execution. Like Plato and Aristotle, he appears to have been an early example of that baleful phenomenon: the intellectual who meddles in politics. In the case of Longinus, it was Palmyra that paid the price for his decision to turn the lady he served into the vehicle of his ambition.

For Aurelian had not finished with Palmyra. Returning to Rome, the emperor was enraged to hear that its people had risen again and massacred his garrison. The emperor retraced his steps and this time he laid waste both to the city and its citizens. Palmyra’s temples were ransacked and the noble metropolis was left a smouldering ruin. The year was 273 AD.

Palmyra never recovered. As Gibbon observes, “it is easier to destroy than to restore. The seat of commerce, of arts, and of Zenobia, gradually sunk into an obscure town, a trifling fortress, and at length a miserable village. The present citizens of Palmyra, consisting of 30 or 40 families, have erected their mud huts within the spacious court of a magnificent temple.” Gibbon knew this because he had read and learned from Robert Wood, the British antiquarian who had recently visited the site and in 1753 published a pioneering description of what he had found there. The story of Palmyra’s rediscovery is as interesting as any other part of its long history, and even more momentous. For it was thanks to Wood’s great work, The Ruins of Palmyra, and especially to its engravings of the superb drawings of Giovanni Batista Borra, that the genius of Palmyra was to extend its influence throughout the Western world.