un-buried in the streets to be eaten by the dogs.  Men ran away from their sickening friends in fear.  As the sun set they felt in doubt whether they should be alive to see it rise in the morning.  Cowards hid their alarms in noisy amusements and laughter.  Not a few in very despair rushed into riot and vice.  But the Christians clung to one another in brotherly love; they visited the sick; they laid out and buried their dead; and many of them thereby caught the disease themselves, and died as martyrs to the strength of their faith and love.

As long as Odenathus lived, the victories of the Palmyrenes were always over the enemies of Rome; but on his assassination, together with his son Herodes, though the armies of Palmyra were still led to battle with equal courage, its counsels were no longer guided with the same moderation.

[Illustraton:  159.jpg COINS OF ZENOBIA]

Zenobia, the widow of Odenathus, seized the command of the army for herself and her infant sons, Herennius and Timolaus; and her masculine courage and stern virtues well qualified her for the bold task that she had undertaken.  She threw off the friendship of Rome, and routed the armies which Gallienus sent against her; and, claiming to be descended from Cleopatra, she marched upon Egypt, in 268 A.D., to seize the throne of her ancestors, and to add that kingdom to Syria and Asia Minor, which she already possessed.

Zenobia’s army was led by her general, Zabda, who was joined by an Egyptian named Timogenes; and, with seventy thousand Palmyrenes, Syrians, and other barbarians, they routed the Roman army of fifty thousand Egyptians under Probatus.  The unfortunate Roman general put an end to his own life; but nevertheless the Palmyrenes were unsuccessful, and Egypt followed the example of Rome, and took the oaths to Claudius.  For three years the coins of Alexandria bear the name of that emperor.

On the death of Claudius, his brother Quintillus assumed the purple in Europe (A.D. 270); and though he only reigned for seventeen days the Alexandrian mint found time to engrave new dies and to issue coined money in his name.

On the death of Claudius, also, the Palmyrenes renewed their attacks upon Egypt, and this second time with success.  The whole kingdom acknowledged Zenobia as their queen; and in the fourth and fifth years of her reign in Palmyra we find her name on the Alexandrian coins.  The Greeks, who had been masters of Egypt for six hundred years, either in their own name or in that of the Roman emperors, were then for the first time governed by an Asiatic.  Palmyra in the desert was then ornamented with the spoils of Egypt; and travellers yet admire the remains of eight large columns of red porphyry, each thirty feet high, which stood in front of the two gates to the great temple.  They speak for themselves, and tell their own history.  From their material and form and size we must suppose that these columns were quarried between Thebes and the Red Sea, were cut into shape by Egyptian workmen under the guidance of Greek artists in the service of the Roman emperors; and were thence carried away by the Syrian queen to the oasis-city in the desert between Damascus and Babylon.