Source

by James A. Michener

  Then he came to me, whispering again, “They are plotting against me.” And this time it was his own children, the sons of Mariamne whom Shelomith and I had helped name. We had been present at their circumcisions, and now they were accused of attempting to poison their father. This time, praised be the gods, Caesar Augustus intervened to warn Herod that he must not kill his own sons, and there was a pathetic reconciliation in which Alexander and Aristobolus—the latter had been named for his uncle whom I had helped drown—tearfully swore filial love for their demented father and promised him their loyalty.

  But within a short time he came to me once more: “The fiends are still planning to kill me,” and this time he brought me proof of their guilt. I therefore accompanied him to Berytus, the city that Caesar Augustus had appointed for the trial, and on behalf of my king I made an impassioned plea before the judges. Herod himself followed with a hideous series of charges and at last the court gave him reluctant permission to kill his sons, should he upon reconsideration wish to do so. Clutching the permissive papers like a maniac, Herod returned to Judaea with a list of three hundred principal citizens who were suspected of being involved in the plot, and when I saw the names I realized that many of the victims could not possibly have been implicated and I started to argue with him, but he shrieked, “They have conspired against me and they shall die.”

  For some time Herod shivered alone in his palace in Caesarea, undecided as to whether or not he should murder Mariamne’s sons, and Shelomith and I tried to persuade him not to do so, but whenever he looked at my wife waves of regret swept over him and he would subside into tears, bewailing his lost princess and his queen; but when this sorrow overtook him it served only to intensify his determination to kill her sons as well, so I forbade my wife to see him again, trusting that by myself I could restrain his vengeance.

  “Turn your sons loose,” I pleaded. “Release the three hundred Jews.”

  I might have succeeded except for an old soldier who frequented the palace. Herod gave him trivial jobs out of gratitude for the old man’s help in earlier campaigns, and this veteran grew bold enough to warn Herod face-to-face against his plan for murdering his sons: “Take care! The army hates your cruelty. There isn’t a private who doesn’t side with your sons. And many of the officers openly curse you.”

  “Which ones would dare?” Herod cried, and the foolish old man rattled off their names.

  When this occurred I lost all chance of controlling the king. He dispatched his bodyguard to arrest everyone named, then threw the old soldier upon the rack, torturing him beyond endurance, twisting and turning his body, jerking him until his joints came apart and bones cracked. The veteran made confessions that were valueless, but Herod accepted them. Assembling a mob he had the accused officers brought before him. In a wild speech, bursting with passion and lust, he built up a story of conspiracy and guilt that terrified the populace. “Your kingdom is threatened,” he told them, and at the height of his oratory he screamed, “These are the guilty ones. Slay them!” And the mob swept in with clubs and wrenching hands. Dozens who knew no guilt of any kind were torn apart that day, their heads crushed while their king danced up and down, screaming, “Kill them! Kill them!”

  How many Jews did Herod slay in his years of madness? How many columns did he erect during his years of greatness? Neither number can be identified. I, who attended only a few of the massive slaughters, must have witnessed with my own eyes six or eight thousand of the kingdom’s best people hacked to death. One senseless incident: a woman getting her hair curled by slaves spoke against the massacres. A maid reported her and she was put to the torture. She spewed out the names of sixty accomplices, to what, no one ever knew. These in turn were tortured upon the rack, with African and German soldiers leaning on the screws, and they implicated hundreds of others. So all were slain without trial for a crime that had not even been contemplated or named. Their wealth went into the coffers of the king, for their families even down to children two months old were also slain.

  How many Jews did Herod slay? How many great minds did he drive to oblivion? How much of the power of our kingdom was destroyed? I could not even guess, but the slain great ones are not to be numbered in thousands. We must think, rather, of tens of thousands, and always the best men and the best women of our nation. I am amazed that the Jews still have persons capable of collecting taxes or drafting laws, but I am not amazed that Shelomith and I have finally been caught in Herod’s web. Who informed upon us? I cannot guess. What was our crime? It’s impossible even to speculate. Perhaps a woman grew tired of her lover, and on the rack, as the Circassians bore down upon her, she uttered names from some distant recollection. I ask Shelomith what she thinks of this theory and she replies, “It’s as good as any other we’ve proposed.”

  How terrible the tragedy became! Of my friends, one in three fell to the tyrant: Antigonus dragged down by the rumor of a fishmonger; Barnabas slain because he held land the king wanted; Shmuel, the uncle of my wife and a trusted Jew, beheaded on the accusation of a drunken Greek sailor; Leonidas, Marcus and Abraham, all dead for no reason that I know; the poet Lycidas and the songwriter Marcellus slain as members of a conspiracy whose outlines were not defined; Isaac and Yokneam dead merely because they owned silver. I could continue but the roll call is meaningless, for any family in Judaea could equal it, with different names sacrificed to different charges.

  Why have the Romans allowed this madman to persecute his own people in this manner? Judaea is far from Rome and of little consequence, really. Years ago with my help Herod charmed Caesar Augustus, and in the intervening decades the Roman emperor has been willing to support Herod so long as the latter maintains discipline along the borders of the empire. Reports filter back to Rome, of course, but they are charges made against a king of the scarlet and lodged before an emperor of the purple, so Augustus always sides with Herod. Once a commissioner sent out to Caesarea confided to me, as a fellow Roman, “Does it really matter, one way or the other, if most of the brilliant Jews are killed off? Won’t it be easier for us to rule if they’re eliminated?” So Herod was not only permitted to destroy the nation but actually encouraged to do so.

  A few weeks ago, however, events took a turn that will probably make even Rome notice the terror that has overtaken its stiff-necked Judaean outpost. Long ago Herod as a gesture of ultimate defiance to the Jews, who hated him as much as he despised them, caused to be erected over the main gate of the temple a wooden image of a Roman eagle, the first statuary that had defiled the temple since the days of Antiochus Epiphanes, and for years the faithful Jews were impotent to do anything about the infuriating symbol. When it was first erected I did not understand Jews as well as I do now, and I did not anticipate their permanent resentment against this affront to their religion; now, thanks to Shelomith, I think I understand.

  At any rate, some days ago two loyal priests harangued their students to the point where a group of young men suspended themselves by ropes from a high point and chopped down the Roman eagle. Throughout Jerusalem the devout began to cheer, and I think there might have been a riot except that Herod’s African and German mercenaries descended upon the mob and arrested the two priests and about forty scholars, who were dragged before the king. His rage was beyond reason, for he saw that what the Jews were doing against him would place them into direct conflict with Rome, and this would put his crown in jeopardy. When that wooden eagle toppled he could feel his crown tottering. In blind fury he struck back. The two priests and the three boys who chopped down the eagle were burned alive before the temple gates. The other forty were to be herded into a small enclosure, where African soldiers were turned upon them until all bodies were hacked apart. The eagle would be replaced with a larger one, Herod informed Augustus, so that Rome need not fear. Herod would kill a million Jews, if it were necessary, to keep Caesar Augustus placated.

  Publicly he bragged to Rome, but secretly he was embittered by the antagonism of his Jews, and he declined
into his fatal illness. Sensing that he was about to die he begged me to accompany him to hot baths on the other side of the Jordan, at a spot where sweet waters issue out of the rocks and flow into the Dead Sea, that lake of bronze. Callirhoe, the place is called, and as our entourage paraded along the bleak, deserted lands east of Jerusalem in search of it, I felt that we were dead men marching across the landscapes of hell, and Herod must have shared my thoughts, for he forced the soldiers to draw the blinds about his litter so that he need not see the desolation which so precisely matched the mourning of his spirit. At night, when our camp was pitched, he talked with me in Greek of the philosophers he had known, of the Greek beauty that had impressed him so deeply throughout his life, and he said with a dry cackle in his throat, “You and I were the best Greeks of all, Myrmex. Rome thinks of us as Romans, but we fooled them. Not even Caesar Augustus could buy my soul, for it is Greek.” I was surprised at his use of the word soul, for this was a Hellenistic word not familiar to Jews, nor was the concept it represented, but it summarized his attitude toward life. Inspired by our hopeful conversations, he gained strength as we marched, but at Callirhoe, that lovely oasis with the musical name, which sick men reach after days in the desert, the local doctors prescribed a hot bath in a tub of almost bubbling oil.

  I tried the simmering liquid with my fingers and protested that the heat would kill him, but the doctors persisted, and Herod said, “If we have come this far, old friend, let us explore the heat,” and he was lowered into an oily furnace, and I was right. The heat was so tremendous that he fainted. His throat croaked and his eyes turned up in death. I shouted that the doctors were killing him, but they assured me, “The whitened eyes are a good sign,” and after some minutes in the scalding bath the disease-racked body of Herod was hauled out, and as the doctors predicted he revived. Temporarily he was improved by the experience, but after some days under the date palms of Callirhoe he worsened, and ordered, “Take me back to Jericho. I have some urgent business with my son Antipater.” And we returned across the landscape of death.

  I last saw King Herod seven days ago. I described him to my wife, and when she heard of the hideous estate into which he had fallen she wept for our old friend. In size he was gross, laden with fat where once he had been lean and handsome. He was mostly bald and three of his front teeth had broken off without having been replaced. Sickness had spread through his entire body, and his legs were great stumps, half a cubit thick at the ankles. He could not eat without agony throughout his bowels, and a dreadful sickness had attacked his genitals, producing worms that lived in the mortified flesh. He had sores elsewhere in his body, but the worst of his affliction was that his stomach had turned permanently rotten and gave off such a stench that even his bodyguards had to be relieved at intervals lest they collapse from the smell. He was a man of seventy on whose dying body had been visited all the crimes of his former years: Mariamne was revenged in his horrible illness, and his sons, his mother-in-law, and his friends by the score and his subjects in their thousands. He was horrible beyond imagination, but he was a man who had been my friend, my benefactor, and when the others had fled I stayed with him, endeavoring to assuage his final hours.

  “Herod,” I said boldly, “I am your oldest friend and I am no longer afraid. You can do me no harm that I have not done myself through working with you.”

  “What do you mean?” he sputtered, raising himself on one elbow so that his foul breath, like a dozen privies stirred together, swept over me in repulsive force.

  “I helped you drown young Aristobolus …”

  “He was killed by strangling,” the wild king shouted. He could not remember that there had been two victims named Aristobolus—uncle and nephew. He had forgotten the first great crime.

  “I stood by while Mariamne was killed …”

  “No!” he protested, holding aloft his other hand. “Her ghost came here and I am forgiven!” He fell back on the bed, cackling like an idiot. “She has forgiven me, Myrmex! Her ghost comes no more. Oh, Mariamne!” He wept, and as his chest contracted, waves of incredibly putrid air reached me from the corruption of his body, and I was forced to withdraw from his bedside.

  “Don’t leave me!” he pleaded. “You are the only friend I can trust.” He spoke with childish longing of the good days we had known together and asked me if I would accompany him again to the northern provinces. “The Galilee is the only part of my kingdom where people truly love me,” he whimpered. “I should like to see Makor again with you.” He recalled how he had started his march to the throne from my little town and asked me if it was still beautiful, with cool breezes coming down the wadi in the hot afternoons. “In Galilee I am still loved,” he told himself.

  Seeing that the dying man clung to his perpetual wish to be loved, I decided to play upon this fancy to advance the cause for which I had come to seek him, and I said, “You will not be loved, Herod, if you proceed with your plans to kill Antipater.” My words revitalized him, as if only hate could activate that disintegrating body.

  “My son is plotting against me,” he roared, rising to a sitting position. “It was his lies that caused me to put to death my other sons. Oh, Alexander and Aristobolus, my true and wonderful sons, why did I murder you so foully?” He fell back upon his cushions and for some moments wept for his vanished sons, but then his bitterness toward his living son returned and he cursed the young man most cruelly, charging him with crimes that were preposterous.

  “Herod!” I reasoned with the insane man. “You know he could not have done these things. Release him and all Judaea will applaud you.”

  “Do you think so?” He sought my reassurance that by such reprieve he might at last win the love of his subjects, and I was about to launch an inspired defense of Antipater, such a one as I had uttered years ago on behalf of Herod himself, but a soldier from the prison interrupted with the news that Antipater, prematurely advised that Herod was dead, was offering to bribe the guards into releasing him so that he might lay claim to the throne.

  “Kill him,” the putrid man shouted from his deathbed, and a detachment of his guard marched off obediently, their short swords bared for the fifth member of the king’s family, and I recalled the bitter jest of Augustus: “I would rather be Herod’s swine than his family, for the pigs have a chance of living.”

  “You foolish man!” I yelled. “The kingdom needs Antipater.”

  “I don’t,” the old king shouted defiantly. His activity caused him to cough, great convulsions which filled the room with odors, and the ensuing pain affected his mind, for when the spasm ended he lay back exhausted. For a while he wept for the son who was being murdered at that moment, and several times he whispered the name of Mariamne. “Will she be waiting for me when I die?” he asked pathetically. Before I could reply he continued, “You were the lucky one, Myrmex, you and Shelomith.” He smiled at me as if I were his brother, and he saw with satisfaction the tears that came involuntarily to my eyes. “Are any women in the world so beautiful as the young Jewesses we knew? Cleopatra, Sebaste, I saw all the others but there was never one like Mariamne. Why was she taken from me?” He spoke of her as if she had been carried off by some unexpected illness for which he shared no responsibility; then, feeling himself threatened from a new quarter, he whispered to me, “Have you heard the rumors, Timon? That a true king of the Jews has been born?” When I could not respond to rumors which had not reached me, he called me closer to the bed and whispered in an even lower voice, “They say it was in Bethlehem. I’ve sent soldiers to investigate.”

  There was nothing I could reply to this latest of his fears, so I remained silent, but of a sudden he rose, left his bed and with his great, stumpy feet puffed out like a corpse three days dead, moved about the room, clutching at imaginary shadows. “Why have the Jews hated me? Timon Myrmex, you’re married to one. You tell me. Why have the Jews hated me?” Spreading his legs far apart to lend himself balance, he stood before me in his nightclothes, shouting, “I’ve been
a good king for the Jews. I brought peace and justice to their land. Think of the temple we built for them, but they treat me coldly. They call me the Idumaean and say I’m not a Jew. Myrmex, you know that my one desire has been to serve the Jews.” Clutching suddenly at my arm, lest he fall, he cried, “Shelomith loves me, doesn’t she?”

  I assured him that she did, and he whimpered like an apprehensive boy, “She’s the only one who does.” Clutching me anew he confided, “You know that Mariamne never loved me. She held me in contempt … said I was no real king.” He looked about suspiciously and whispered, “I think she had a lover. A man who cut hair in the palace.”

  To halt this blasphemy I said, as if he were a child to be got back into bed, “Only last week Shelomith told me she loved you. However, if you continue killing Jews even she will grow to hate you.”

  He stared at me in horror, grasping at his throat. “Shelomith would hate me? Doesn’t she know that everything I’ve done has been intended to help her Jews? Myrmex, tell me honestly, when I die the Jews will mourn for me, won’t they?”

  Why did I say it? Why could I not have supported this crazy old man as I had done so often in the years before? What did it matter to me whether the Jews mourned for him or not? But I told him, “Herod, if you continue to kill, no one will mourn you.”

  He staggered back as if I had struck him. He choked on my words, and waves of putrescence flowed from his crumbling body, so that I looked at him with disgust. This infuriated him and he began shouting, “You are wrong, Myrmex, by the gods you are wrong. The Jews will mourn me as they have never mourned before.” He called for his mercenaries—Africans, Cilicians, Egyptians, Germans, Persians—the men who had coldly killed off the leaders of Judaism, and screamed at them in jumbled, frenzied sentences: “Go to every city in Judaea. Arrest the leading citizens. Put them in jail and guard them well. Feed them luxuriously. Let them have all comforts. And on the day I die, kill them.” The soldiers were stunned, but Herod continued: “Go now to every city. None is too small. Go even to Makor. And start by arresting this man!” He pointed at me with a trembling finger. “He and his wife shall die. Kill them as I have directed you in the past.” He strode about, hacking and thrusting with his right arm. Wrenching a short sword from one of his Germans he slashed it through the air not far from my face, “Hack him to death. Kill all the great men in the kingdom.” Exhausted, he fell back upon the fetid sheets and grinned at me, his broken teeth making his face grotesque.