The Palmyrenean landowner Bathzabbai, the Roman citizen Iulia Aurelia Zenobia, more commonly known by her Greek name Septimia Zenobia or simply Zenobia (240-after 274 CE), head of a clan and from the middle of 272 Empress and Augusta, is one of the most fascinating female personalities of the third century. As head of the government of the caravanserai city of Palmyra, she played a leading role in a veritable saga of victories, first alongside her husband, the senator and consul Odainath, and then alone following his violent death in 268, thwarting the Imperial court of Rome itself.

Part of the important “Women in Antiquity” series, to which authors of the stature of Barbara Levick and Corey T. Brennan have previously contributed, Nathanael Andrade has written this admirable and well-articulated book on a woman whose character was “larger than life”, like that other famous ruler from a couple of centuries earlier, Cleopatra, who was a conscious role model in some of the Palmyrene’s political decisions, and with whom she has frequently been compared since Antiquity.