ABSTRACT
The story of Julia Domna is dramatic and powerful, even tragic. Surprisingly, it has not been made into a novel or a film for television or the big screen,1
given the battle scenes, the wild backdrops of Yorkshire moors and the Taurus mountains, and the splendour of north Africa and Egypt. But Domna is not like Cleopatra VII, a notorious deviant from the conventions of her time, hostile as the chroniclers Cassius Dio, Herodian and the Historia Augusta are; it is her integration into ruling circles of Graeco-Roman society at the turn of the second and third centuries that make her a subject for history. Domna is both a personality who demands to be studied for her own sake and a Tolstoyan figurehead, carried along by events2 – and serving to show how the currents are flowing.
