Caesar soon found himself trapped in Alexandria as the Egyptians rose against Cleopatra and her Roman patron. Meanwhile in Jerusalem, Antipater, Pompey’s ally, saw a chance of redeeming himself with Caesar. He marched on Egypt with 3,000 Jewish troops, persuaded the Egyptian Jews to back him, and attacked Caesar’s opponents. Caesar triumphed and restored Cleopatra. Before returning to Rome, the grateful Caesar reappointed Hyrcanus as high priest and ethnarch—ruler—of the Jews and let him repair Jerusalem’s walls, but he granted all the power to Antipater as procurator of Judaea with his sons as the local tetrarchs: the elder one, Phasael, ran Jerusalem; the younger, Herod, got Galilee.
Herod, aged just fifteen, immediately showed his mettle when he hunted down and killed a band of fanatical religious Jews. In Jerusalem, the Sanhedrin were incensed by young Herod’s unauthorized killings and summoned him for trial. However, the Romans appreciated that Antipater and his sons were the sort of allies required to govern this turbulent people. The Roman governor of Syria ordered Herod’s acquittal and awarded him greater powers.
Herod was already exceptional. He was, wrote Josephus, “blessed with every gift of looks, body and mind.” Named to be a hero, he was sophisticated enough to charm and impress the pre-eminent Romans of the era. He was sexually voracious—or, as Josephus put it, “slave to his passions”—yet he was not crude. He had taste in architecture, was highly educated in Greek, Latin and Jewish culture and, when not busy with politics and pleasure, he enjoyed debates on history and philosophy. Yet power always came first and this craving would poison every relationship he had. Son of a second-generation Idumean convert to Judaism and an Arab mother (hence his brother was called Phasael—Faisal), Herod was a cosmopolitan who could play the Roman and the Greek and the Jew. But the Jews never quite forgave his mongrel origins. Raised in a rich but vigilant and ruthless household, he would see the destruction of his closest family and sense the fragility of power and the facility of terror. He grew up using death as a political tool: paranoid, over-sensitive, almost hysterical, this tough teenager, a “man of great barbarity” as well as sensitivity, played to survive and dominate at all costs.
After Caesar was assassinated in 44, Cassius (who was one of his killers) arrived to govern Syria. Herod’s father Antipater switched sides. But the somersaults of intrigue finally caught up with him, and he was poisoned by a rival, who managed to occupy Jerusalem—until Herod had him murdered. Soon afterwards, Cassius and his fellow assassin Brutus were defeated at Philippi. The victors were Caesar’s great-nephew and adopted son Octavian, twenty-two years old, and the swashbuckling general Mark Antony. They split the empire, Antony receiving the East. As Antony processed towards Syria, two young potentates, with radically opposite interests, rushed to meet the Roman strongman. One wanted to restore the Jewish kingdom, the other to swallow it into her ancestral empire.36
ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA
Cleopatra came to Antony, as a queen at the height of her charisma, scion of the Ptolemies, the most prestigious dynasty in the known world, and as Isis-Aphrodite to meet her Dionysus who could grant her the provinces of her forefathers.
Their meeting was fateful for both. Antony was fourteen years older than her but in his prime: he was hard-drinking, thick-necked, barrel-chested, lantern-jawed and prided himself on his muscular legs. He was dazzled by Cleopatra and keen to embrace the Greek culture and sybaritic splendour of the East, seeing himself as the heir of Alexander, descendant of Hercules—and Dionysus of course. But he also required Egyptian money and provisions for his planned Parthian invasion. Thus they needed each other, and necessity is so often the mother of romance. Antony and Cleopatra celebrated their alliance and affair by murdering Cleopatra’s sister (she had already murdered her brother).
Herod, too, had ridden hastily to Antony. As a young cavalry commander in Egypt, the general had been cultivated by Herod’s father. He therefore appointed Herod and his brother as the real rulers of Judaea with High Priest Hyrcanus as the figurehead. Herod celebrated his rising power with a royal engagement. His fiancée was Mariamme, a Maccabean princess who, by family intermarriage, was the granddaughter of two kings. Her body, wrote Josephus, was as beautiful as her face. This relationship, played out in Jerusalem, would be passionately destructive.
Antony followed Cleopatra, now pregnant with his twins, to her capital, Alexandria. But, just as it appeared that Herod’s rise was assured, the Parthians invaded Syria. Antigonos, a Maccabean prince who was Hyrcanus’ nephew, offered the Parthians 1,000 talents and a harem of 500 girls in exchange for Jerusalem.
PACORUS: PARTHIAN SHOT
The Jewish city rose against the Roman puppets Herod and his brother Phasael. Besieged in the royal palace opposite the Temple, the brothers defeated the rebellion—but the Parthians were a different matter. Jerusalem was crowded with pilgrims—it was the Feast of Weeks—as Maccabean supporters opened the gates for the Parthian prince Pacorusb and his protégé Antigonos. Jerusalem celebrated the return of the Maccabees.
The Parthians pretended to play the honest broker between Herod and Antigonos. Instead they lured Herod’s brother Phasael into a trap. Herod faced elimination as the Parthians looted the city and then handed power to Antigonos as king of Judaea and high priest.c He mutilated his uncle Hyrcanus, cutting off his ears, to disqualify him from the high priesthood. As for Herod’s brother Phasael, he was either murdered or dashed out his own brains.
Herod had lost Jerusalem and his brother. He had backed the Romans, but it was the Parthians who had conquered the Middle East. A mercurial man, he was surely cyclothymic, if not a manic depressive. But his will to power, pungent intelligence, greed for life and instinct for survival were ferocious. He almost cracked up, but he overcame his nerves. By night, he gathered his entourage for a desperate escape, and a bid for power.
HEROD: ESCAPE TO CLEOPATRA
Herod, accompanied by his retinue—500 concubines, his mother, sister, and, most importantly, his fiancée, the Maccabee princess Mariamme—galloped out of Jerusalem into the barren Judaean hills. King Antigonos, furious that Herod had escaped with his concubines (clearly the harem offered as payment to the Parthians) sent his cavalry in pursuit. As he fled through the hills, Herod again broke down and tried to commit suicide, but his guards snatched his raised sword. Soon afterwards Antigonos’ horsemen caught up with his caravan. Herod recovered his confidence and defeated them. Leaving his entourage in the impregnable mountain fortress of Masada, he himself escaped to Egypt.
Antony had already left for Rome, but Herod was welcomed by Queen Cleopatra, who offered him employment in a bid to keep him in Alexandria. Instead Herod sailed for Rome, accompanied by his fiancée’s little brother, Jonathan, a Maccabean prince who was his candidate for the Judaean throne. But Antony, who was now planning a war to expel the Parthians, realized that this was no job for a child; it would require Herod’s ruthless competence.
Antony and Octavian, his partner in ruling the empire, escorted Herod to the Senate where he was declared king of Judaea and Roman ally: rex socius et amicus populi Romani. The newly minted King Herod walked out of the Senate flanked by Octavian and Antony, the two pillars of the world, quite a moment for a half-Jew half-Arab from the mountains of Edom. His relationship with these two men would be the foundation of his forty-year reign of terror and magnificence. However, he was a long way from ruling a kingdom: the Parthians still occupied the east; Antigonos reigned in Jerusalem. To the Jews, Herod was a Roman stooge and Idumean mongrel. He would have to fight for every inch of his kingdom, and then Jerusalem.37
a The Idumeans, the biblical Edomites, tough pagan warriors based to the south of Jerusalem, had been converted en masse to Judaism by John Hyrcanus. Antipater was the son of a convert to Judaism who had been appointed Governor of Edom by King Alexander, though the family originated from the Phoenician coastal cities.
b Pacorus was the son and heir-apparent of the Arsacid King of Kings, Orad II, who had defeated Crassus. The Parthians
had expanded from their homeland east of the Caspian, breaking away from the Seleucids around 250 BC, to create a new empire that challenged Roman power. Pacorus’ army was spearheaded by his Pahlavan knights, who wore heavy armour and loose trousers and wielded 12-foot lances, axes and maces. Charging at full tilt, these cataphracts had smashed the Roman legions at Carrhae. They were supported by mounted archers famous for the speed and accuracy of their over-the-shoulder marksmanship—the “Parthian shot.” But Parthia had a feudal flaw: its kings were often at the mercy of its overmighty, insubordinate nobles.
c Antigonos, son of the late king Aristobulos II, used Greek and Hebrew names. His coins show the Temple menorah—the candelabra, his family’s symbol—with “King Antigonos” in Greek; the reverse has the Temple shewbread table with “Mattathias the High Priest” in Hebrew.
CHAPTER 10
The Herods
40 BC–AD 10
THE FALL OF ANTIGONOS: LAST OF THE MACCABEANS
Herod sailed to Ptolemais, mustered an army and started to conquer his kingdom. When rebels held out in impregnable caves in Galilee, he lowered his troops in chests held by chains and, armed with hooks, these soldiers fished out his opponents and sent them hurtling into the canyons below. But Herod needed Antony’s support to take Jerusalem.
The Romans were driving back the Parthians. In 38 BC, Antony himself was besieging a Parthian fortress at Samosata (south-eastern Turkey) when Herod marched north to offer, and ask for, help. The Parthians had ambushed Antony when Herod counter-attacked and saved the baggage-train. The bluff Antony welcomed Herod like an old comrade, affectionately hugging him in front of his army, paraded in honour of the young king of Judaea. The grateful Antony despatched 30,000 infantry and 6,000 cavalry to besiege Jerusalem in Herod’s name. As the Romans pitched camp just north of the Temple, Herod married the seventeen-year-old Mariamme. After a forty-day siege, the Romans stormed the outer wall. Two weeks later, they burst into the Temple, ravaging the city “like a company of madmen,” cutting down the Jerusalemites in the narrow streets. Herod had to bribe the Romans to stop the slaughter—and then sent the captured Antigonos to Antony who solicitously beheaded the last Maccabean king. The Roman strongman then set off to invade Parthia with 100,000 troops. His military prowess was much exaggerated; his expedition was a near-disaster, and he lost a third of his army. The survivors were saved by Cleopatra’s delivery of provisions. Antony’s reputation in Rome never quite recovered.
King Herod celebrated his conquest of Jerusalem by liquidating forty-five of the seventy-one members of the Sanhedrin. Demolishing the Baris Fortress north of the Temple, he built a square fortified tower with four turrets, the Antonia, named after his patron, and colossal enough to dominate the city. Nothing is left of the Antonia except traces of its stone-cut base, but we know what it must have been like because many of Herod’s fortresses survive: each of his mountain strongholds was designed to combine impregnable security with peerless luxury.a Yet he never felt secure, and now he had to defend his kingdom from the intrigues of two queens, his own wife Mariamme—and Cleopatra.38
HEROD AND CLEOPATRA
Herod may have been feared but he himself was wary of the Maccabeans, and the most dangerous of them was in his own bed. The king, now aged thirty-six, had fallen in love with Mariamme, who was cultured, chaste and haughty. But her mother, Alexandra, a real-life version of the stereotype of the mother-in-law from hell, immediately started to conspire with Cleopatra to destroy Herod. The Maccabean women were proud of their lineage and she resented her daughter having married into the mongrel Herodians. Yet Alexandra did not realize that, even by the feral standards of first-century politics, the psychotic Herod was more than a match for her.
Since the mutilated old Hyrcanus could no longer officiate in the Temple, Alexandra wanted her teenaged son Jonathan, Mariamme’s younger brother, to become high priest, an eminence to which Herod, the half-Arab Idumean parvenu, could not aspire. Jonathan happened to be not only the rightful king but also of arresting beauty in an age when appearances were believed to reflect divine favour. He was mobbed wherever he went. Herod feared the teenager and solved this problem by raising an obscure Babylonian Jew to the high priesthood. Alexandra secretly appealed to Cleopatra. Antony had increased Cleopatra’s kingdom with lands in Lebanon, Crete and north Africa and also gave her one of Herod’s most valuable possessions—the balsam and date groves of Jericho.b Herod rented them back from her but it was obvious that she coveted Judaea, the territory of her forefathers.
Dangling the pretty Jonathan like a tasty morsel, Mariamme and her mother Alexandra sent a painting of the boy to Antony who, like most men of his era, appreciated male as much as female beauty. Cleopatra promised to support his claim to be king. So when Antony summoned the boy, Herod was thoroughly alarmed and refused to let him go. Herod placed his mother-in-law under close surveillance in Jerusalem, while Cleopatra offered asylum to her and her son. Alexandra had two coffins made to smuggle them out of the palace.
At last Herod, unable to resist Maccabean popularity and the entreaties of his wife, appointed Jonathan as high priest at the Feast of Tabernacles. When Jonathan went up to the altar in his gorgeous robes and royal-priestly headdress, the Jerusalemites loudly praised him. Herod solved his problem in Herodian style: he invited the high priest to join him at his sumptuous palace in Jericho. Herod was alarmingly kind; the night was steamy; Jonathan was encouraged to swim. In the pleasure pools, Herod’s henchmen held him under water, and his body was found floating there in the morning. Mariamme and her mother were heartbroken and outraged; Jerusalem grieved. At Jonathan’s funeral, Herod himself broke down in tears.
Alexandra reported the murder to Cleopatra, whose sympathy was purely political: she had killed at least two and probably three of her own siblings. She persuaded Antony to summon Herod to Syria. If Cleopatra got her way, he would not return. Herod prepared for this risky encounter—and showed his love for Mariamme in his own sinister way: he placed her under the guardianship of his uncle Joseph, viceroy in his absence, but ordered that if he was executed by Antony, Mariamme must be instantly put to death. When Herod was gone, Joseph repeatedly told Mariamme how much the king loved her, so much, he added, that he would rather kill her than let her live without him. Mariamme was shocked. Jerusalem seethed with rumours that Herod was dead. In Herod’s absence, Mariamme lorded it over the king’s sister, Salome, one of the most vicious players in a viperous court.
In Laodicea, Herod, that expert at handling Roman potentates, charmed Antony who forgave him; the two banqueted together day and night. On Herod’s return Salome told her brother how their uncle Joseph had seduced Mariamme while his mother-in-law was planning rebellion. Somehow Herod and Mariamme were reconciled. He now declared his love for her. “They both fell into tears and embraced”—until she let on that she knew about his plan to execute her. Herod, tormented with jealousy, placed Mariamme under house arrest and executed his uncle Joseph.
In 34 BC, Antony reasserted Roman power, after his early bungled expedition, by successfully invading Parthian Armenia. Cleopatra accompanied him to the Euphrates and, on the way home, visited Herod. These two beguiling monsters spent days together, flirting and considering how to kill one another. Herod claimed that Cleopatra tried to seduce him: this was probably her usual manner with any man who could do something for her. It was also a deadly snare. Herod resisted and decided to kill the serpent of old Nile, but his counsellors advised strongly against it.
The Egyptian queen progressed home to Alexandria. There Antony, in a spectacular ceremony, raised Cleopatra to “Queen of Kings.” Caesarion, her son by Caesar, now thirteen years old, became her co-pharaoh, while her three children by Antony became kings of Armenia, Phoenicia and Cyrene. In Rome, this Oriental posing appeared unRoman, unmanly and unwise. Antony tried to justify his Eastern wassails by writing his only known work of literature entitled “On His Drinking”—and he wrote to Octavian, “Why have you changed? Is it be
cause I’m screwing the queen? Does it really matter where or in whom you dip your wick?” But it did matter. Cleopatra was seen as a fatale monstrum. Octavian was becoming ever stronger as their partnership fell apart. In 32 BC, the Senate revoked Antony’s imperium. Next Octavian declared war on Cleopatra. The two sides met in Greece: Antony and Cleopatra mustered his army and her Egyptian-Phoenician fleet. It was a war for the world.39
AUGUSTUS AND HEROD
Herod had to back the winner. He offered to join Antony in Greece but instead he was ordered to attack the Arab Nabataeans in today’s Jordan. By the time Herod returned, Octavian and Antony were facing each other at Actium. Antony was no match for Octavian’s commander, Marcus Agrippa. The sea battle was a debacle. Antony and Cleopatra fled back to Egypt. Would Octavian also destroy Antony’s Judaean king?
Herod again prepared for death, leaving his brother Pheroras in charge and, just to be safe, having old Hyrcanus strangled. He placed his mother and sister in Masada while Mariamme and Alexandra were kept in Alexandrium, another mountain fortress. If anything happened to him, he again ordered that Mariamme was to die. Then he sailed for the most important meeting of his life.
Octavian received him in Rhodes. Herod handled the meeting shrewdly and frankly. He humbly laid his diadem crown at Octavian’s feet. Then instead of disowning Antony, he asked Octavian not to consider whose friend he had been but “what sort of friend I am.” Octavian restored his crown. Herod returned to Jerusalem in triumph, then followed Octavian down to Egypt, arriving in Alexandria just after Antony and Cleopatra had committed suicide, he by blade, she by asp.
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