What this song renders
Aurelian — exceptionally — did not execute her. Her advisor Cassius Longinus was beheaded after Palmyra fell. Other Palmyrene leaders were killed. But the queen herself was given a villa near Tibur (modern Tivoli), about thirty kilometres from Rome. The Historia Augusta reports she married a Roman senator and her descendants reached the highest Roman nobility. Other late sources are vaguer or contradictory; some hint she may have died of grief or starvation on the road. The truth lies somewhere between the HA's serene retirement and Zosimus's darker possibilities.
The hinge moment of the song is real history. In autumn 275 AD, Aurelian was assassinated near Caenophrurium in Thrace by a group of his own officers. His secretary Eros, fearful of being executed for petty corruption, forged a list of officers Aurelian supposedly planned to kill; they killed him first. He died at sixty. Zenobia, alive in her villa, outlived the man who had defeated her by years — possibly decades.
Whether she won or survived is the song's question, and history's. The HA's portrait of late-life writing, philosophical retirement, and prominent descendants is plausible and uncorroborated — the kind of detail HA loves and the kind of detail HA invents. The album holds both possibilities open. What is documented is the larger arc: the man who put her in chains died first.
Aurelian sparing her is well-documented across the late Roman tradition. Aurelian's assassination in 275 is well-documented. The specific shape of her retirement (Tivoli villa, Roman marriage, illustrious descendants) comes mostly from Historia Augusta and varies between sources. The hinge of the song — that the emperor died first — is not in dispute.