There are people who want to tell us that John Kennedy was not the best, nor the most important, or ought not to be the most famous, or wasn’t the greatest President of the United States. They point to his shortcomings—of which there were plenty—and say that he wasn’t perfect. No argument there—although it does make you wonder which President was? But did JFK matter any more than all the rest or was he just the handsomest, or the most tragic or maybe the best manipulator of the media? Probably all of those. All this argument is to miss the point, in fact several points.

This was to be remembered by the legionnaires as “the night of fire”. The Roman fireballs whooshed in their endless cone at the gate. Down through them, trailing vertical lines in the gloom, fell Zenobia’s fireballs. On the ground beneath men swarmed, the wink and dazzle and splattered of bursting fireballs among them, the screams of fear and pain going up from them, the gloom speckled by firefly streams of red-hot bullets from the bastions. The dead lay thick: and fresh companies rose up out of the ditch as if the underworld were vomiting thousands of its dead back to life; and beyond the ditch the Roman gun-crews, as if giving a drill display, served their weapons smartly by numbers, while a sleet of missiles riddled their gun-shields and mowed them down…(The guns referred to here are catapults.)
  The losses were too high. At daylight Aurelian called off the attack. He stood three hundred yards from the wall, between two shattered dart-guns, their dead crews sprawled around. His soldiers trudged past him, their backs to the city. He did not need to be told what these worn-out men were thinking. Their dejected silence was eloquent.
  The silence, the sound of their feet, the creak of their wheels, were one with his own mood; so that he was startled when a shouting broke out in the ranks. Men were turning to look up at the walls. Anger distorted their faces, and a deep note of anger was in their shouts. Some shook their fists. Some discharged useless arrows.
  He, too, looked up. For the first time in months he saw his adversary. She stood alone on one of the gate towers. She was looking down; in his direction it seemed. The clamour of his men faded in his ears. For him as he stood stock still, staring, there was no army, no wreckage around him, no city; only a tiny jaunty figure, in a white blouse and flaring red trousers, against the sky.
Not a bad yarn as ancient epics go is Alexander Baron’s Queen of the East, although I admit I only bought it because of the sexy sheilas on the cover. But it is an exciting and historically accurate (more or less) tale of the battle of strategies and wits between Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra (which was in Syria) and the future Roman Emperor Aurelian, a tough Illyrian (Serbian) peasant who fought his way up through the ranks of the Roman Legions to the top job.
  Although the principles are painted better than usual for such fiction, the best character in the book is the Egyptian whore Philomene who sets up a classy brothel in Rome that evolves into a spy network for Zenobia. Aurelian, Gibbon tells us, after innumerable setbacks at the hands of these wily wenches, finally defeats Zenobia in battle, but it is a very hollow victory indeed. When finally she was the feature of his triumphant parade through Rome, Zenobia did so wearing chains made of gold. The worry of it all kills Aurelian soon after, while the captive Zenobia becomes the unofficial Queen of Rome, dominating the social scene, and Philomene marries its richest citizen.

  The battle scenes are terrific. The incident described above is just the beginning of a long sequence in which the full might of Rome is hurled against Palmyra and in the siege that follows, Aurelian’s men build greater and more fantastic war machines and Zenobia responds with even more extraordinary contrivances to overcome them. And all through, the beautiful queen taunts the Roman soldiers from the wall. After many months, the Romans finally succeed in getting their storm troopers onto Palmyra’s walls, and the city seems theirs at last, when the walls suddenly collapse, destroying Aurelian’s best troops with them. To their horror, they realise that Zenobia had planned it, had undermined her own fortifications to strike this devastating blow, for when the dust clears, behind is the new wall she has built to protect the city, and on which she stands, taunting them still. It’s great stuff.