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The chain is already on, and it is gold. The chronicle says the triumph loaded her with so much of it she could barely walk the route.

Palmyra was the toll booth of the world: an oasis city between the two empires where the silk, pearls, and incense of the East paid their way across to the Mediterranean, and its merchant princes built colonnades with the percentage. When the Persians captured the emperor Valerian alive in 260 and the Roman East fell open, it was Palmyra's lord Odaenathus who drove them back, with Rome's thanks and Rome's titles. Then he was assassinated, and his widow took over as regent for their 10-year-old son. Her name in the inscriptions is Septimia Zenobia. She hunted like a soldier, ran a court with a Greek philosopher in residence, and claimed descent from Cleopatra, which was ambitious in every direction at once. In five years she took most of the Roman East. Her armies occupied Egypt, which fed Rome; her authority ran through Syria and deep into Asia Minor; and the mints told the constitutional story in metal, striking her son's face beside the emperor's, then her son's alone, then hers, with the title Augusta. Rome in those years was a corridor of short-lived soldier emperors, and the gamble that no one would find time for the desert was nearly right. The man who found time was Aurelian, a Danube officer of no family who was reassembling the broken empire piece by piece. In 272 he beat her field armies twice, outside Antioch and at Emesa, and shut her inside Palmyra. She went out through the siege lines at night on a racing camel, riding for Persia and another war chest, and was taken at the Euphrates with the far bank in sight. Aurelian executed her philosopher Longinus, blaming him for the letter of defiance she had signed, and kept the queen herself for the parade. The triumph of 274 showed her to Rome in chains of gold, weighed, the chronicle says, with so many jewels she could barely walk. What came after is disputed in the sources and was probably ordinary: a villa at Tivoli, a marriage into the Senate, daughters. Rome preferred its monsters domesticated. Palmyra revolted again within the year, and Aurelian came back and took the city's future away for good; the caravans found other roads, and the colonnades kept only the sand. Schmalz painted her in 1888 at the hour between the two endings: the terrace above her own burning city, the moon low over the smoke, the gold chain already on her wrist, and at the foot of the stair a Roman escort that knows better than to hurry a queen taking a last look.