by Stacy Schiff
For Cleopatra’s visit we have only one source, hostile to his native East, much taken with Rome, working at least partially from Herod’s account. The Jewish historian Josephus obscures but cannot entirely camouflage what transpired: Herod and Cleopatra spent some intensive time in each other’s company, part of it hammering out the details of his obligations. Antony had granted Cleopatra the exclusive right to the Dead Sea bitumen, or asphalt, glutinous lumps of which floated to the surface of the lake. Bitumen was essential to mortar, incense, and insecticide, to embalming and caulking. A reed basket, smeared with asphalt, could hold water. Plastered with it, a boat is waterproof. The concession was a lucrative one. Also Cleopatra’s were the proceeds of Jericho, the popular winter resort, lush with date-palm groves and balsam gardens. Very likely she rode out across a searing desert to inspect those two hundred acres in the Jordan River valley, where Herod had a secondary palace. All other scents paled in comparison to sweet balsam, which grew exclusively in Judaea. The fragrant shrub’s oil, seed, and bark were precious. They constituted the region’s most valuable export. As for Jericho’s dates, they were the finest in the ancient world, the source of its most potent wine. In modern terms, it was as if Cleopatra had been granted no part of Kuwait, only the proceeds of its oil fields.
Herod found the transaction particularly painful as Judaea was a poor country, parched and stony, with few fertile areas, no port, and a rapidly expanding population. His revenues were a risible fraction of Cleopatra’s. At the same time his ambitions exceeded his territory; he had no desire to be “King of a wilderness.” There appears to have been some bickering over terms, in a negotiation that proved Cleopatra more intently focused on bitumen deliveries than seductions. She was relentless and unsparing; the result was highly favorable to her. Herod agreed to lease the Jericho lands for 200 talents annually. He consented as well to guarantee and collect the rent on the bitumen monopoly from his neighbor, the Nabatean king. By agreeing to do so Herod spared himself the company of any of Cleopatra’s agents or soldiers. Otherwise the arrangement worked entirely to her benefit, all the more so as it made both men miserable. It left Herod to extract funds from a sovereign who had denied him refuge during the Parthian invasion, and who made his payments only under duress. Purposely and effectively, Cleopatra set two men who disliked her, a Jew and an Arab, against each other. (Malchus, the Nabatean sovereign, would have his revenge later.) Herod nonetheless upheld his end of the agreement with Cleopatra. He felt that “it would be unsafe to give her any reason to hate him.”
The visit was by all other measures an unsuccessful one. The two inveterate charmers failed entirely to endear themselves to each other. Cleopatra may have patronized her fellow sovereign. As his royal mother-in-law tirelessly reminded him, Herod was a commoner. Nor was he exactly Jewish, given his mother’s religion; in the eyes of the Jews Herod was a gentile, while in all other eyes he was a Jew. He was as a consequence perennially insecure about his throne, a situation not unfamiliar to Cleopatra, who may have exacerbated it. Her Aramaic may have been better than his Greek; several years her senior, Herod was little educated, sorely deficient in history and culture, sensitive on both counts. (It says a good deal that when he decided to remedy the situation years later he hired the finest tutor in the business, one who—in addition to his own literary and musical accomplishments—had the best credential possible: he had been tutor to Cleopatra’s children.) It could not have helped that Herod would have appeared graceless in Cleopatra’s silken presence.
Where passions run high, the reverse of the great foreign policy axiom can also prove true: the friend of one’s friend is one’s enemy. Perhaps Herod felt about Cleopatra the way you inevitably do about someone whose palace puts yours to shame. She may have been too flush with her Antioch success to conciliate; she may well have hinted that she coveted Herod’s land. Debts are difficult to acknowledge, and each owed the other. Cleopatra had underwritten Herod’s flight to Rome. His father had rushed to Caesar’s aid in Alexandria. In any event the famously entertaining Herod had a violent reaction to his visitor. He doubtless arranged a series of royal banquets for Cleopatra. And arguing that he would be providing a community service, he recommended to his council of state that they arrange as well for her murder. It could easily be done, while she was in Jerusalem and at their mercy. He would eliminate a covetous, conniving neighbor, but everyone stood to benefit, Antony most of all. Heatedly Herod explained himself: “In this way, he said, he would rid of many evils all those to whom she had already been vicious or was likely to be in future. At the same time, he argued, this would be a boon to Antony, for not even to him would she show loyalty if some occasion or need should compel him to ask for it.”
Herod buttressed his case in the usual way; as ever, the diabolical woman was the sexual one. In addition to all else, he explained to his advisers, the Egyptian hussy had “laid a treacherous snare for him”! Declaring herself overcome with love, she had attempted to force herself upon him, “for she was by nature used to enjoying this kind of pleasure without disguise.” Herod had as much reason as anyone to observe that Cleopatra was a tough negotiator. And if you are being taken advantage of by a woman, it is convenient to turn that woman into a sexual predator, capable of unspeakable depravity, “a slave to her lusts.” (It was not such a great leap. “Cupidity” and “concupiscence” have the same Latin root.) Having managed to evade her unblushing proposals, Herod took his offended sensibilities to his council. The woman’s lewdness was an outrage.
Herod’s advisers begged him to reconsider. He was being rash. The risks were too great, as Cleopatra herself—closely guarded, well surrounded, and surely more astute about the political ramifications—surely knew. His council offered Herod a little lesson in the perverse dynamics of affection, one that might have come in handy later. In the first place, Antony would fail to appreciate Cleopatra’s murder even were its advantages pointed out to him. Second, “his love would flame up the more fiercely if he thought that she had been taken from him by violence and treachery.” He would emerge a man obsessed. Herod would be roundly condemned. He was, Herod’s advisers emphasized, out of his league with this woman, the most influential of the day. Could he not bring himself to take the high road?
Cleopatra was of course far too smart to seduce—or attempt to seduce—a small-time sovereign. She had nothing to gain by trapping Herod in such a way. It was unlikely that she would seduce a subordinate of her patron, especially improbable that she would fling herself into Herod’s arms at a time when she was—by now quite visibly; it was nearly summer—pregnant with Antony’s child. A Roman legion was stationed in Jerusalem to secure Herod’s throne. Those men were unlikely to remain silent. Artful though he was, Herod had, as later events would reveal, a limited understanding of the human heart. With difficulty, his council dissuaded him from any assassination attempts. He would have no defense, the plot “being against such a woman as was of the highest dignity of any of her sex at that time in the world.” Herod could afford neither to offend Cleopatra nor allow her any reason whatever to hate him. Surely he could bring himself to shrug off the dishonor her brazen advances had caused him?*
Assuming these deliberations reached Cleopatra’s ears, it is difficult not to hear her cackling with delight. She had and knew she had Antony’s loyalty. She had better reason to consider disposing of Herod, who alone stood between her and full possession of the eastern coastline. As she well knew, his land had at several junctures belonged to the Ptolemies. In the end Herod’s council calmed him. Respectfully and politely, he escorted his visitor through the blazing heat of the Sinai to the Egyptian border. If Cleopatra knew of the discussions—and it is difficult to believe that she did not—theirs must have been a charged, tedious trip over molten sand. Surely it was so for the resentful Judaean king. At Pelusium he sent Cleopatra off, heavily pregnant and laden with gifts, a very different return than the furtive one she had made from that outpost in 48.
Earl
y in the fall, one blessed with a copious flood, she gave birth to her fourth child. In the ancient world perhaps more than in any other there was a good deal in a name; she called her new son Ptolemy Philadelphus, baldly evoking the glory days of the third century, the last time her family had reigned over as great an empire as did Cleopatra, the Goddess, the Younger, Father-Loving and Fatherland-Loving, in 36.
TO HEROD’S CHAGRIN, he was not so easily rid of this grasping, business-minded woman. During her stay at the Judaean court Cleopatra had made a few friends, to whom she was about to prove devilishly helpful. Shortly after the return to Egypt, she received word from Alexandra, Herod’s mother-in-law. The Hasmonean princess had found in the Egyptian queen a sympathetic spirit, reason enough for Herod to have resented his royal visitor. He would condemn Cleopatra for having coolly eliminated most of her family—it was a rich accusation, coming from someone who had murdered his way to the throne and would continue his bloody spree for decades—but he had equal reason to envy her for having done so. For the most part, class and religious differences accounted for Herod and Alexandra’s mutual antipathy. Not only was Herod Jewish on the wrong side, but the Idumeans were new converts to Judaism. The Jews had little use for them. Herod’s wife and her family were by contrast noble-born descendants of generations of Jewish high priests, an office said to have originated with Moses’s brother. In 37 Herod ventured outside that family to appoint a new high priest. He did so although there was an obvious and immensely appealing candidate at hand: Mariamme’s sixteen-year-old brother, the tall, disarmingly attractive Aristobulus. Herod preferred an undistinguished official in the lucrative, commanding office; its trappings alone conferred a kind of otherworldly power. Fitted with a gold-embroidered diadem, the high priest ministered to his people in a floor-length, tasseled blue robe, set with precious stones and hung with tinkling golden bells. Two brooches fixed a purple, scarlet, and blue cape, also studded with gems, upon his shoulders. Even on a lesser individual, the accessories were enough “to make one feel that one had come into the presence of a man who belonged to a different world.”
In bypassing his young brother-in-law Herod set off a maelstrom in his household. To Alexandra—daughter of a priest and widow of a prince—the appointment was an “unendurable insult.” With the help of a traveling musician she smuggled word of the indignity to Cleopatra, on whom she felt she could count for female solidarity, especially royal female solidarity. She knew Cleopatra had little patience with Herod and that she had Antony’s ear. Could she not intercede with him, implored Alexandra, to obtain the high priesthood for her son? If Cleopatra did so, Antony appears to have had greater matters on his mind than the domestic affairs in Herod’s household. He made no effort to intervene, although at some later date in 36 the double-jointed Dellius turned up in Jerusalem on unrelated business. Dellius had been the one to lure Cleopatra to Tarsus; the match of the conspiring mother-in-law and the contortionist adviser was almost too perfect. Alexandra’s children were uncommonly handsome, to Dellius’s eye more “the offspring of some god rather than of human beings.” As ever, pulchritude sent his lively mind whirring. He persuaded Alexandra to have portraits painted of Mariamme and Aristobulus and to submit them straightaway to Antony. Were the Roman triumvir to set eyes upon them, promised Dellius, “She would not be denied anything she might ask.”
Alexandra did as Dellius asked, which suggests either naïveté on her part or something more toxic. She could be trusted to detect a plot from one hundred paces away and to supply one, should none be brewing. If Josephus can be taken at his word, Dellius intended to recruit sexual partners of both genders for Antony. In receipt of the portraits Antony hesitated, at least so far as Mariamme was concerned. He knew Cleopatra would be furious. Josephus leaves unclear whether Cleopatra was likely to object on moral grounds or out of jealousy. She would in any event be slow to forgive. Evidently Antony did not hesitate to send for Mariamme’s brother. Here Herod changed his mind. For his part, he deemed it unwise to send the most powerful Roman of his time a striking sixteen-year-old boy, “to use him for erotic purposes.” Instead Herod assembled his council and his family, to complain of Alexandra’s incessant complots. She colluded with Cleopatra to usurp his throne. She schemed to replace him with her son. He would do the right thing and appoint her son to the priesthood. Dellius’s proposition may obliquely have prompted the concession; Aristobulus’s appointment would keep him in Judaea, out of Antony’s clutches and far from Cleopatra’s schemes. Alexandra responded with a flood of tears. She begged her son-in-law for forgiveness. She regretted her “usual outspokenness,” her heavy-handedness, doubtless an unhappy consequence of her rank. She was overcome with gratitude. Henceforth she would be obedient in all ways.
Aristobulus had barely donned the brilliant robes of the priesthood when Alexandra found herself under house arrest, with round-the-clock surveillance. Herod continued to suspect his mother-in-law of treachery. Alexandra exploded with rage. She had no intention of living out her life “in slavery and fear” and turned to the obvious address. To Cleopatra went “a long sustained lament about the state in which she found herself, and urging her to give her as much help as she possibly could.” Again taking a page from Euripides—“it is right for women to stand by a woman’s cause”—Cleopatra contrived an ingenious escape. She sent a ship to convey Alexandra and Aristobulus to safety. She would provide asylum for them both. It was now that—either on Cleopatra’s counsel or her own initiative—Alexandra arranged for two coffins to be built. With her servants’ assistance, she and Aristobulus climbed inside, to be carried from Jerusalem to the coast, where Cleopatra’s ship waited. Unfortunately, one of the servants betrayed Alexandra; as the fugitives were conveyed from the palace, Herod stepped from the darkness to surprise them. Though he yearned to do so he did not dare punish Alexandra, for fear of inciting Cleopatra. Instead he made a great show of forgiveness, while quietly vowing revenge.
By October 35 Herod was at his wits’ end with his wife and her family. His mother-in-law was in league with his greatest rival. With a far more legitimate claim to the throne, his brother-in-law commanded a dangerous degree of popular devotion. For Herod, the sight of the young man, with his noble bearing and his impeccable good looks, in his majestic robes and golden headdress, presiding at the altar over the Sukkoth festivities, was unbearable. In his subjects’ affection for the high priest he read a rebuke to his kingship. Meanwhile Herod was undone in the intimacy of his home by his wife, whose “hatred of him was as great as was his love of her.” She manifested little of the lewdness Herod condemned in Cleopatra and had taken to groaning aloud at his embrace. He could not retaliate, even indirectly, against his mother-in-law, too closely bound to Cleopatra. He could neutralize his overly promising brother-in-law, however. In the course of the unseasonably hot fall, Herod invited Aristobulus to join him at Jericho for a swim in the palace pool, nestled amid formal gardens. With friends and servants, the two roughhoused in the cool water at dusk. By nightfall, the seventeen-year-old Aristobulus had—amid the merrymaking—been held underwater a little too long. The high priest was dead.
Grand shows of counterfeit emotion followed on both sides. Herod arranged for an expensive, incense-heavy funeral, shed abundant tears, and mourned loudly. Alexandra bore up bravely and quietly, the better to avenge her son’s murder later. (Only Mariamme was candid. She denounced both her husband and his uncouth mother and sister.) In no way deceived by Herod’s account of the accident, Alexandra wrote again to Cleopatra, who commiserated with her. The loss was tragic and unnecessary. Alexandra could entrust the unseemly matter to her; she would take it up with Antony. On his return from Parthia Cleopatra urged him to punish Aristobulus’s murderer. Surely it was not right, she contended hotly, “that Herod, who had been appointed by him as king of a country which he had no claim to rule, should have exhibited such lawlessness toward those who were the real kings.” Hers was a petition in favor of proper convention, of knowing on
e’s station, for the rights of sovereigns. Antony agreed she had a point.
Herod’s fears of Cleopatra’s influence were well founded. A summons arrived in due course from the Syrian coast; he was to explain himself to Antony. Having proceeded thus far by bribery and bravado, Herod was not generally cowed by authority. He tended rather to merry displays of presumption. And though he was said to have headed off timidly, he proved as adept at defusing the situation as had Cleopatra, six years earlier, in Tarsus, which was another way of saying either that Mark Antony had no great gift for calling client kings to account, or that he was powerless in the presence of a master sycophant. The visit does reveal Antony to have been in no way putty in Cleopatra’s hands. Herod arrived with lavish gifts and equally lavish explanations. He handily neutralized Cleopatra’s arguments. Surely, Antony assured him, “it was improper to demand an accounting of his reign from a king, since in that case he would not be a king at all, and those who had given a man this office and conferred authority upon him should permit him to exercise it.” He purportedly said the same to Cleopatra, who would do well to concern herself less with Herod’s affairs—or so Herod claimed, while boasting of the many honors Antony had shown him. The two dined together daily. Antony invited Herod to accompany him as he transacted business. And all this “in spite of Cleopatra’s bitter charges.” There was nothing but goodwill between the two men; the Judaean king reported that he was safe from that “wicked woman” and her insatiable greed.
