In 260 AD, Rome suffered the most humiliating moment in its eight-hundred-year history. Emperor Valerian marched east to fight Shapur I, the king of Persia, and lost everything — not just the battle, but himself. He was captured alive near the city of Edessa in modern Turkey, the only reigning Roman emperor ever taken prisoner by a foreign enemy. The Persians reportedly used him as a human footstool. Rome’s eastern half was now wide open, and the greatest empire on Earth was breaking apart.
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Crowns & Conquests·2/5·1′
The place
Palmyra
The Desert Lion Who Saved Rome
When Persia humiliated Rome and captured its emperor alive, a desert prince from Palmyra marched to the gates of the Persian capital -- and the empire he saved would destroy his city
260-267 AD (Crisis of the Third Century; Valerian's capture through Odaenathus's assassination)Palmyra
Moral of the Story
“The man who saves the empire is not always the emperor -- sometimes it is the desert prince whose name is written in a script that Rome cannot read, and the reward for saving an empire is to have that empire destroy your city the moment it no longer needs you.”
Characters
S
Septimius Odaenathus (ruler of Palmyra, King of Kings)E
Emperor Valerian (captured by Persia, 260 AD)S
Shapur I (Sasanian King of Kings)E
Emperor Gallienus (who granted Odaenathus authority over the East)H
Hairan (Odaenathus's eldest son, murdered alongside him)M
Maeonius (the assassin, Odaenathus's nephew)Source
Historia Augusta, 'Life of Gallienus' and 'The Thirty Pretenders'; Zosimus, New History; Peter the Patrician, fragments; Shapur I, Res Gestae Divi Saporis (SKZ inscription, Naqsh-e Rostam); Lactantius, De Mortibus Persecutorum; Fergus Millar, The Roman Near East; Dodgeon and Lieu, The Roman Eastern Frontier and the Persian Wars (AD 226-363); Watson, Alaric, Aurelian and the Third Century