Rome and the East
striking in that, fragmentary as it is, it seems to exhibit the transliteration
of a Palmyrene word into Latin. For GUB in the Latin text seems to be a
transliteration of GBY’, possibly meaning ‘‘craters,’’ which may have been re-
corded as offerings. With this fragmentary text, in which for the first time
the Latin appears between the Greek and the Palmyrene, instead of first, the
Latin epigraphy of the city of Palmyra comes to an end, a few decades before
it rose to colonial status and acquired a new constitution. The only excep-
tions are a military inscription of.., and then, after the collapse of
Palmyrene power in the s, inscriptions of the Tetrarchic period. But it was
in the context of the colonial period that one family at least rose to Roman
senatorial rank.
The Position of Septimius Odenathus
and His Son Septimius Hairanes in the s
The rest of this paper will not be concerned with the dramatic events of
the s and s which briefly brought a prominent Palmyrene, Septimius
Odenathus, and then his widow Zenobia and his son Septimius Vabalathus,
to a leading role in the history of the Roman Near East.^24 Instead it builds on
the re-interpretation of the presumed earlier history of the dynasty offered
in a very important article by Michal Gawlikowski, published in .^25 Here
Gawlikowski showed that we have no evidence from before the s for
members of the family occupying a leading role in Palmyra (or, still less, as
representing a line of local dynasts). What we have instead, in the s, is a
picture of an important local family, of Roman senatorial status, whose posi-
tion is reflected in a series of honorific inscriptions in Greek and Palmyrene.
Roman concepts, and individual Latin words, are everywhere present. But
the Latin language, as such, is not. None the less, a study of the role of Latin
terminology in the Greek and Palmyrene public vocabulary of thecoloniain
this period can add considerably to the force of Gawlikowski’s argument.
The claim to imperial power by the family was to be a product of later cir-
cumstances, and was made by a senatorial family from within the context
of the Romancoloniafrom which they came. What that context was is the
subject of this section. The texts need again to be set out in order. It should
be stressed that these are the earliest dated inscriptions put up to honour any
. On the s and s, see F. Millar, ‘‘Paul of Samosata, Zenobia and Aurelian: The
Church, Local Culture and Political Allegiance in Third-Century Syria,’’JRS (): –
( chapter of the present volume).
. M. Gawlikowski, ‘‘Les princes de Palmyre,’’Syria (): .