At this point, when the Roman East in its struggle with the Persian is left to its own resources, it will be appropriate to make mention of a remarkable state, which, created by and for the desert-traffic, now for a short time takes up a leading part in political history. The oasis of Palmyra, in the native language Tadmor, lies half-way between Damascus and the Euphrates. It is of importance solely as intermediate station between the Euphrates and the Mediterranean; this significance it was late in acquiring, and early lost again, so that the flourishing time of Palmyra coincides nearly with the period which we are here describing. As to the rise of the town there is an utter absence of tradition.[83] It is mentioned first on occasion of the abode of Antonius in Syria in the year 713 {41 B.C.}, when he made a vain attempt to possess himself of its riches; the documents found there--the oldest dated Palmyrene inscription is of the year 745 {9 B.C.}--hardly reach much further back. It is not improbable that its flourishing was connected with the establishment of the Romans in the Syrian coast-region. So long as the Nabataeans and the towns of Osrhoene were not directly Roman, the Romans had an interest in providing another direct communication with the Euphrates, and this thereupon led necessarily by way of Palmyra. Palmyra was not a Roman foundation; Antonius took as the occasion for that predatory expedition the neutrality of the merchants who were the medium of traffic between the two great states, and the Roman horsemen turned back, without having performed their work, before the chain of archers which the Palmyrenes opposed to the attack. But already in the first imperial period the city must have been reckoned as belonging to the empire, because the tax-ordinances of Germanicus and of Corbulo issued for Syria applied also for Palmyra; in an inscription of the year 80 we meet with a Claudian _phyle_ there; from Hadrian’s time the city calls itself Hadriana Palmyra, and in the third century it even designates itself a colony. [Sidenote: Military independence of Palmyra.]