Title : I, Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra - Bernard Simiot - book

Summary :

Like Marguerite Yourcenar for her Memoirs of Hadrian , Bernard Simiot imagined that Queen Zenobia of Palmyra wrote her Memoirs. Thus, in this novel, which received the Goncourt Scholarship for Historical Narrative in 1978, he traces the extraordinary destiny of the queen who lived in the 3rd century AD and took a very active part in the transformations of the Eastern Roman world.
After the death of Odenath, her husband, who had received the title of Augustus and represented the emperor and Roman power, Zenobia seized power. Refusing Roman tutelage, she exercised the regency in the name of her son Waballaht. Intelligent and authoritarian, she led Palmyra to its peak. But in 272, Aurelian's armies conquered the kingdom she had carved out for herself in the eastern marches. As a prisoner, she was sent near Rome where she lived a gilded exile in a villa on Tibur.
Combining the best historical sources and novelistic invention, Bernard Simiot, winner of the Prix d'Académie française in 1984 for Ces messieurs de Saint-Malo , succeeds marvelously in this evocation of a rich and little-known period, during which the Eastern Roman world became Arabized. We see the development in this oasis through which the caravans passed a commercial and cultural civilization of extreme refinement, profoundly marked by the personality of this queen, an astonishing woman of action whose name remains forever linked to Palmyra, this Venice of the desert.

• EAN : 9782253041504
• Used book
• Book in good condition
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