“Is this the day?” Shelomith asks, and I tell her, as she washes at the alabaster laver I had carved in Antioch, that in my judgment the king must surely be dead by now—he could not have lived much longer, not possibly—and that before the day is out the messengers must arrive with the news that will set the soldiers upon us with their swords at the ready.
Some eleven times in my life I have seen the king’s mercenaries turned loose upon prisoners. It was a favorite trick of the king’s, to have his enemies enclosed in a narrow space, unarmed, and to send roaring through the doors his legionnaires in battle dress, wearing shields and short swords. Why the soldiers obeyed him I never understood, for the slaughter was hideous to watch, and it must have been equally repulsive to those who performed it. But always the soldiers were obedient, and their short swords flashed until their military tunics were red with blood; and almost never was any victim killed by a simple thrust. He was always hacked to death, with ears sliced off and legs cut away at the ankle until the carnage was more than I could bear. But the king would stand and watch, his gray-white tongue licking his lips, his fat hands clasping and unclasping in fury as he cried, “Death to them all, for they have opposed me.”
I first met Herod forty-five years ago at the zigzag gate of Makor. He was twenty-five years old then, and I nineteen. He was the glamorous, daring son of the Idumaean manipulator who was trying to win the kingdom of the Jews away from the rightful heirs of Judah the Maccabee. It seemed impossible to us then that a non-Jew could win the throne, and we who were young did not join Herod because we hoped for preferment if he became our king; we rallied to him, I think, because he was handsome and commanding. In those days there were bandits in Galilee who called themselves patriots, and we wished an end to them. Herod told us, “If we attack relentlessly we can conquer them. You shall have peace, and I shall have”—he hesitated, then added—“my reward.”
At different points near Makor we rounded up large numbers of the bandits, whom not even Rome had been able to subdue, but whom Herod terrified. At two of the general killings I was present; I carried my short sword among the unarmed prisoners and helped hack them to death. How many did we slay in those first campaigns? A thousand … four thousand? I swung my arm until it was leaden, and we crushed the bandits. The worst we burned to death. The seconds-in-command we crucified slowly. Herod, conspiring to win the Jewish throne, started by killing thousands upon thousands of Jews.
Herod chose me as his confidant because at four crises in his life I supported him when others feared to do so. I formed this habit in those early years, when the Jews rose against their tormentor and when it seemed, twice running, that he was doomed. In Jerusalem the leaders of the Jews pointed to his massacres in Galilee and said that he had acted outside the Jewish law, which was true. He had ignored it and had willfully perverted it, killing without trial or judgment, crucifying and burning; so he himself was hauled to trial, and on the evening before the tribunal convened, to sentence him to certain death, he asked me if I was as courageous in the law as I had been on the battlefield, and I said, “Yes.” So when the austere court of bearded elders assembled to condemn him, I marched my soldiers into the court and threatened to kill any Jew who voted against my general. The judges panicked and Herod was set free.
The second time I supported him was when the Jews, still hoping to keep him from the crown, sought to poison the mind of Antony, who had followed the greater Caesar in the bed of Cleopatra, our southern neighbor. I went to Antony, who ruled our areas, and spoke on Herod’s behalf; and partly because of my pleading Antony accepted Herod as his regent for the Jews, and in this manner my red-cheeked young general attained the highest power. I must say that he did not forget the assistance I rendered him in those first two tests.
Timon Myrmex he called me, for when we spoke together we used Greek, and when he saw my love for building he sent me from one city to the next, but our principal joy came when he summoned me to Caesarea, then an open sand dune behind Straton’s Tower, where together we planned one of the world’s great cities. “This is my Timon Myrmex,” he announced to his generals, “my digging ant. He is to do the building,” and never did he stint in his support. When I warned him that the Caesarea we had planned would absorb the revenues of his kingdom for ten years, he spurred me on, and later when I calculated that to rebuild the temple at Jerusalem along the plans he wished would cost an equal amount, he encouraged me to go ahead. If when I die tonight, with the soldiers hacking at me, I leave behind a Judaea more beautiful than it was before, it is not because I was a master builder, for in Antioch or Jericho there were men more capable; Judaea is a locus of the magnificent principally because King Herod had an unfaltering sense of beauty.
There are many—I have heard them in Athens and Rome—who ridicule the Jews and charge them with having no sense of beauty. They point to the ugly synagogues of the Jews as compared with a jeweled temple like the one I am in at this moment. Or they compare the ugliness of Jewish worship with the stately intonations of the priests of Jupiter. Or they ask where the Jewish statues and the Jewish architecture are. Or the beautiful songs that mark even a seaport like Ptolemais, where the Greek ships come. And it is widely held that the Jews do not know beauty. But for a while the Jews had a king who knew what grandeur was. My wife condemns him as a non-Jew and will not accept my praise; if I understand correctly he was a half-Jew, but he led his people to beautify their land as none other in my experience is beautified.
I remember when we first started building—at Jericho it was—long before Caesarea had been dreamed of, and we were watching slaves dress large chunks of granite for a wall, and Herod took a chisel and demonstrated an idea he had spoken of some days before. “If on every stone you leave the central part protruding, but cut the edges back to a uniform depth and uniform width, like this …” He directed the masons to cut a huge stone as he directed, and when it was done he had slaves twist and turn the stone in the sunlight, and when I saw the fascinating play of light and shadow across the uneven stone, I understood what he had visualized, and we built that wall as he suggested. And when it was finished the sun reflected from its curious rocks as it never had done before from any wall, and throughout the kingdom we set our slaves to cutting rocks in the Herodian fashion.
How many did we cut in those years? It must have been nearly a million. Whole armies of slaves spent their lives cutting away the edges of rocks so that the diamond-like stones could be fitted into perfect walls, with each stone uneven and projecting in the center, but perfectly aligned along the beveled edges. A million such stones? It must have been more like a score of million.
Have you ever seen the largest rocks in the walls of the temple at Jerusalem? Some are three times as long as a man’s height and proportionately huge in their other dimensions. It required two hundred men to move them from the quarries great distances away, but each monstrous stone fitted into its proper place, and each had its edges cut as Herod had determined.
He loved me not only because I stood by him in his four great crises, but also because I was his boon companion in the years when he knew Mariamne. She was a princess of the Maccabean line, and if he could marry her, he would through her royal blood gain an extra claim to the Jewish throne; but he loved her I know for much different reasons than dynastic ones. She was exciting, marvelously beautiful, witty and well skilled in love. I remember one day when her friend Shelomith walked with her through Makor; Mariamne clung to the right arm of the young king and Shelomith to the left, and they were a handsome trio. The four of us were much together in those days, laughing and talking in Greek, and then one night in Jericho I asked Herod if he thought it proper for me to marry a Jewish girl and he said that he intended doing so. There have been questions in recent years as to whether Herod loved this exquisite Jewish princess, or whether he married her to insure his claim to the throne of Judaea, but Shelomith and I know. We were with them in those early years, when Herod’s love for Mariamne so f
ar excelled my love for Shelomith as to make me wonder if I were a normal man. He doted upon her and was enraptured when she presented him with two strong sons, Alexander and Aristobolus. I was present when the boys were named and I know the love that surged between the parents.
I could understand, even then, why Herod loved his slim Jewish princess. She was truly radiant as she moved about the kingdom, bringing to herself and her husband the love of the Jewish people. Even Shelomith forgot in those happy years that her king was not Jewish and that he had usurped the throne through guile, for those whom he had dispossessed were now repossessed in the person of Mariamne; and during those excellent years the executions ceased, and the soldiers with their short swords were not turned loose upon the Jews, neither in Jerusalem nor elsewhere in the kingdom. Herod and Mariamne were destined to become the fortunate lovers of ballads, and if Shelomith and I have developed between ourselves a profoundly satisfying love, I think it is partly because we shared with Herod and Mariamne their unparalleled affection.
“What is your most persistent memory of the lovers?” I ask my wife as she joins me at breakfast on this last day.
“That morning in Ptolemais,” she replies without considering any other. Herod had been to see Cleopatra in Egypt and had sailed back to Ptolemais, which was not even in his kingdom, for Caesarea was not then built and we had to use an alien seaport, and we three went to greet him. “I see him as he came running down the wooden pathway from the ship, leaping over bales of cotton and greeting his queen as if he were a boy. It was spontaneous, an act of love, and I have forgiven him many things because of the honesty he showed that day. How long ago was it, Timon?”
I cannot remember the years accurately, but we four were together again, here in Makor, on the eve of the gravest test, when the world of Herod hung in the balance. In the terrible struggle between Antony and Octavian we had sided with the former, principally because we were closer to Egypt and knew Cleopatra and her power. But at the battle of Actium, Antony lost, and it was rumored on good suspicion that Octavian would send a Roman army against Herod, dispossessing him of the kingdom and dragging him off to Rome for execution.
“I am sailing to Rhodes in the morning,” Herod informed us. “Timon Myrmex shall come with me and I will throw myself on the ground at Octavian’s feet. I shall plead with him for mercy as no man has ever pleaded before.”
That night we prayed at the old Greek temple over there, then walked to Ptolemais and boarded a small boat which took us to Rhodes. There, with a few of us at his side, Herod marched to face Octavian, the solitary inheritor of Julius Caesar, the man who had driven both Antony and Cleopatra to suicide, and in a few fateful sentences which were to determine the history of Judaea for generations, Herod said manfully, “It was Antony who set me on my throne, and I freely admit that to him I have rendered every possible service. Not even after his defeat at Actium did I desert him, for he was my benefactor. I gave him the best possible advice and told him there was only one way of retrieving his disasters. Kill Cleopatra. If he would only kill this woman I would give him money, protection of my walls, an army, and my active help in waging war against you. But there it is! His ears were stopped by his insane passion for Cleopatra. With Antony, I also am defeated. With his fall I lay aside my crown, for it is yours, Octavian, and not mine. I come to you placing all my hope in my unblemished character, for I know that you will not ask whose friend I was but what sort of friend I can be.”
Octavian, whom now we worship as Caesar Augustus, watched with fascination as Herod prostrated himself, uncrowned and with no mark of dignity upon him, and on impulse the victorious emperor of the known world caused him to be raised up, saying, “It was a very good thing for me that Antony listened to Cleopatra’s advice and not yours. Through his folly I have gained your friendship. Henceforth you shall be my king of the Jews.” Thus Herod, with a bravery not equaled in my lifetime, regained his throne from an enemy who normally should have slain him.
As in so much that he has done, Caesar Augustus acted wisely, for Herod has proved one of the great kings of the Roman provinces. I’ve worked for the proconsuls of Antioch and Spain, and they did not compare in either character or energy with our king Herod. He has kept peace in his part of the empire while extending our borders to their natural limits. To the Jewish kingdom, which had known war and desolation under the later Maccabees, he has brought tranquillity if not acceptance; during his reign no bandits and no extremists have plagued our land, and some years ago when I stopped off in Rome on my return from Spain, Augustus himself told me, “I remember that day when you came to Rhodes with Herod. It was an impudent gesture he made, but I wish I had always chosen my kings so wisely.”
How then, in spite of these successes, has Herod degenerated so miserably? Was he haunted by some evil spirit determined to destroy his grandeur? Or did his hatred and suspicion of the Jews slowly derange his mind? Some say that a snake wormed its way into his belly, gnawing at his vitals, but Shelomith and her Jews claim that their god has placed a special curse upon him for having usurped the throne of David. I have my own theory.
I should have foreseen that these things might happen, for thirty-one years ago he came to my quarters in Jericho, where I was building him a temple, and threw himself upon my couch, whispering with horror, “Myrmex! You must kill a man! I have proof that Aristobolus has conspired against me.” I drew back in surprise, for Mariamne’s brother was only seventeen and the darling of the Jews, for in him they saw a prospect for the re-establishment of Maccabean rule.
“The young schemer has plotted to steal my kingdom and must die,” Herod whispered, and when I warned him not to kill the queen’s brother, he cried in a mad frenzy, “Don’t mention their names together. Mariamne’s a goddess and her brother a viper.” Then he added significantly, “This afternoon he goes swimming.” He summoned the captain of his Cilician guard, who explained the plot: “Myrmex, the young man trusts you. When he enters the pool, you move forward to embrace him, but in doing so, grab his arms. My men will swim under water and catch his feet.”
It was a lovely pool, one that I had edged with marble, and I made believe that I was swimming when Aristobolus appeared, moving through the sunlight as if he were a Roman god. “Greetings, Timon,” he called, and when he came down the marble steps I waded forward to embrace him and pinioned his arms, so that when the Cilicians grabbed his feet I could feel the tremor pass through his body. He gave me a wild stare, his eyes less than a cubit from mine, but I set my teeth and brought my hands upward until they grasped his neck, and in this manner we dragged him under the water.
I had nearly forgot that murder of Aristobolus—for dynasties must protect themselves, and the young Maccabean had proved himself too popular with the mob—when Herod climbed the steep path to Massada, where I was converting ruins into a fortress-palace unmatched in the east, and there as we sat like eagles looking down upon the Dead Sea and the hills of Moab he whispered again, “Myrmex, how can I bring myself to do it?” He became a man distraught, almost insane I judged, and when he began moaning like a witch I dismissed my helpers and as they filed down the rocky footpath like ants I asked what he was required to do that so agitated him.
“I must kill Mariamne,” he said, looking up at me like a wild Essene from the desert.
“No. No,” I protested as if he were my brother, but on his mountain peak he ranted on with circumstantial evidence against his blameless wife. He truly intended to kill her, for in some way she had conspired against him. I deafened my ears and said, “Get down from here and tell me no such madness,” and he drew back with fearful suspicion, his hand on his sword, for we were alone at the edge of the cliff, and he cried, “You are in league with her too. Augustus protect me! Myrmex intends murdering me.” I slapped the mad king and led him slowly down from the cliff, saying, “If you cannot trust me, Herod, your world is indeed crumbled.” And when we were on safe ground I said, “Now tell me your fantasies.”
I took him back to Jericho and during each portion of the trip he recited her guilt. He had proof without question, he said, and for three days he raved, unable to bring himself to kill her. But finally he gave the signal and his mercenaries marched implacably to Mariamne’s room—they rarely ran to such assignments—and slaughtered her.
When his faultless wife was dead he loved her more than he had when she was alive. He stormed about his vast palaces, screaming for mercy from the ghosts that haunted him. He would come rushing to my apartment and sit staring at Shelomith, then break into passionate tears, crying, “I killed the fairest Jewish princess the world has known. I am condemned.” In grotesque sequence he married a chain of other women. He had many children who may already have inherited his kingdom, and he stormed among his female slaves, pointing to this girl or that and shouting, “You are not Mariamne,” but he took them nevertheless.
On the ship that brought me back from Spain there had been a wench well used by sailors, an attractive girl whom I in my loneliness fancied, but the captain of the vessel warned me, “She has the seaport sickness,” so I contented myself with watching from afar, but one day as Herod walked along the quays at Caesarea he saw this girl and cried, “You are Mariamne,” and she did indeed look like our dead queen. “Not that one,” I pleaded, but he was obsessed with her regal beauty and had his way, but later when the sickness struck he railed at me, “I told you it was Mariamne! She has come back to curse me,” and he fell ill, but an Egyptian doctor cured him for a while.
When his anguish was greatest, when something reminded him especially of Mariamne, he would come to me distraught and say, “We shall build a superior temple at Antioch,” and for a while his energies would be diverted into this channel. But soon ugly suspicions of other plots against him would develop. One day he ordered thirteen women placed upon the rack for such tortures as no human body could stand, and when in their agony they confessed to fantastic crimes and implicated men they did not even know, the suspected ones were dragged to an arena where the mercenaries were sent among them swinging their short swords, hacking and killing the innocent until we who watched were sickened.
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