The Source: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  “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.

  “Myrmex, you shall die. Why should you be tall and slim while I am gross? Why should you have your teeth and your hair while your king has nothing but a rotting body? Why should you still have Shelomith while the only woman I ever loved has been taken from me? You shall die. All of you shall die.”

  As the soldiers moved in to arrest me he wept on his couch, and I thought of the ancient poem of King David’s which Shelomith had often sung to me:

  Each night I make my bed swim.

  I drench my couch with my tears.

  My eye has wasted away from grief …

  Herod was the legal successor to King David, so it was proper to compare them, but as I stood a prisoner before him I thought of how the earlier king of the Jews had wept for the great sins he had committed, finding consolation in the forgiveness of the Hebrew god whom he had tried to serve in his fumbling way; but Herod wept only for his personal misery, throwing himself upon the mercy of no god, and he found no consolation.

  From his bed he shrieked the last words I would hear from this old friend: “When I die the Jews may not mourn for me. But by the gods they will mourn.” And I was led away.

  Under guard I was brought to Makor. I marched, a prisoner, through Sebaste, which I had rebuilt into a city of magnificence, renaming it for the wife of Augustus. With fetters about my wrists I marched to Nazareth and Cana and Jotapata. With the guards behind me I penetrated the swamp and marched through my own olive grove and up to the gates which I had rebuilt in the Roman image. Desperately I wanted to cry out a warning to Shelomith, telling her to flee, but the soldiers had rushed into the town and taken her prisoner. We met in shackles, in the forum I had built, and she was beautiful as on the day Herod had brought her to me. She did not wail nor did she berate me for the errors which had led us to this conclusion. When the soldier-captain read the proclamation, that Timon Myrmex and his wife Shelomith were to be arrested and kept in a public prison where the citizens could see them, and that on word of the death of Herod armed soldiers were to be set loose upon them, she smiled.

  “Tell King Herod,” she told the soldiers, “that I am sorry he murdered Mariamne.” In those few words she summarized the mad misery of the man.

  That was three days ago. In the interval the citizens of our little town have reacted as Herod foresaw. Non-Jews come to the steps of the temple to bemoan my fate, and I advise them that as a Roman I am prepared to die. Jews come to visit Shelomith, for her father was a man of dignity and is well remembered in Galilee, and with equal resignation she assures them that she has lived a good life and a long one and that the ignominy of execution does not humiliate her. My people offer arguments and her people utter prayers, and it almost seems as if Shelomith and I must console the living rather than accept their weeping on our behalf.

  But I must not create the impression that we are stoics. Yesterday I came upon my wife as she rubbed her tired face with a sweet oil which she keeps in a small phial: she had before her a tray of these bottles which Herod had given her years ago when we stayed with him at Caesarea, and she was so exquisite as she lifted first one little phial and then the other, creating beauty from them as if we were going to a dinner, that I sobbed, and she put down the tray and took my hand.

  “We must not berate ourselves for having served Herod,” she whispered.

  “You don’t accuse me … for having intertwined our lives with his?”

  “Of course not! Apart from these last insane years he did far more good than evil. He gave us a harsh administration, but he gave us peace.”

  “Why do you Jews always seek out kings like Herod?” I asked.

  “We? Rome gave us Herod. We had no voice in choosing him.”

  “I meant that if your people had rallied about the Maccabees there would have been no opening for Herod.”

  She considered t
his and replied slowly, “We Jews always find it difficult to support our own people. We seem to prefer being governed by others.” Then she added, “It’s something you won’t understand. But we cannot believe in any kingdom, neither of our own making nor of Rome’s. We hold that the true kingdom is of God and will come only with the Messiah, so even if Herod had been Jewish we wouldn’t have accepted him. There will never again be a Jewish state in Israel, for we are destined to live under the yoke of others, offering our testimony not to principalities but to God.”

  I was unwilling to follow her in these philosophical discussions, so I turned the talk to happier days. “I am nineteen again and you are a child living near the synagogue of Makor. A small ship sails into Ptolemais bearing a powerful young man named Herod who steps down to say, ‘I have come to pacify the Galilee.’ If we were to live those years again, would you advise me to stand with him? Defend him before Octavian?”

  Again she paused to consider my question, for Shelomith has the Jewish characteristic of looking at life with absolute honesty of purpose, and quietly she said, “Would we not be craven to reject our history now?” She took my hands and said, “We followed Herod, and I suppose we’d do so again. But we should have given some thought, Timon, to the greater king whom we should have served with greater devotion.” Before I could respond, she laughed and asked, “Of all the years we spent together, which were the best? When we were building that beautiful arcaded street in Antioch?”

  “No. Caesarea made anything else insignificant. As long as the earth endures, that city will be the capital of Asia, and to have helped launch it was no mean accomplishment.” We sat in our prison and recalled those majestic rows of columns, the palaces and the gemlike theater nestled beside the blue sea. It was a masterpiece that we built, Herod and I, and it will remain as long as men cherish works of beauty.

  Yesterday Shelomith smiled when I spoke in this manner of Caesarea, and when I asked why, she said, “You are so stubbornly Roman! I should have thought that the temple of Jerusalem would be your permanent satisfaction. Even we Jews are forced to admit that there Herod performed a miracle.”

  I had never spoken to my wife of this matter, but death was upon us and there was no sensible reason to withhold our thoughts, so I said, “The temple I have erased from my mind. For me it does not count.”

  “Why?” Shelomith cried, for like all Jews she kept a deep affection for this ancient building.

  “For a long time I’ve suspected that sooner or later Rome will have to destroy the temple.”

  “But why?”

  “Because imperial Rome and the temple cannot exist together within the same empire.”

  “Timon! You are talking insanely, like the king. Rome is one thing. It lies across the ocean and is very powerful, but the temple exists in a separate world. Its continuation is permanent.”

  “I used to think so,” I said.

  “What changed your mind?”

  “You weren’t in Jerusalem when priests caused the young men to chop down the wooden eagle.”

  “You told me about it,” my wife answered, and her eyes glowed with satisfaction as she recalled the daring escapade.

  “You remember the tearing down,” I said, “but I remember the men who were burned alive. We set up five pillars before the temple and huge piles of brush were placed upon the stones, forming platforms on which the condemned men stood. Herod’s soldiers … they’re always ready to do anything … lit the fires and we expected cries of anguish to come from the pillars.”

  “What happened?”

  “The fires burned unevenly, but as the flames licked about each face, one after the other, the man who was being burned alive cried with his last breath, ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.’ ”

  “At such a moment what else would a man say?”

  I looked at Shelomith and realized, after a lifetime of the most intimate existence with her, that I barely understood her, and she must have recognized this, for she said quietly, “Tomorrow or the next day, when the messenger comes, and the soldiers are sent in to kill us, you will think of Rome and Augustus and the distant buildings you have built. You may even look upon the Augusteana across the way and a marvelous light will go out. Timon, I have loved you so. You have been so brave, so enduring.” She began to weep, not silently but with unstifled sobs that sent tears gushing from her eyes, and as they fell upon her lap she took one of the perfume bottles and with its lip brushed aside the offending tears, so that some fell into the bottle, and she laughed nervously, saying, “Together we have made the perfume of life, tears and roses and the smell of olive trees in the spring. That perfume has been in my nostrils since the first day I met you.”

  She placed the phial on the tray and resumed the line of thinking that the tears had interrupted. “As we die you will look upon the buildings of this world, but I will whisper, ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.’ Herod with all his soldiers, with all his flames, will never be able to silence that cry.”

  “That’s why I say the temple will have to be destroyed. Rome has offered you membership in the world at large. But in your stiff-necked pride you’ve rejected the world and clung to your temple.”

  “Must it perish?” she cried, and we were dealing with such impassioned thoughts that I left her improvised dressing table, so that she might complete her toilet, and went to the entrance of the temple where the guards were waiting for the word to slay us.

  Two were Egyptian and two were German, and I asked them how they had entered the service of Herod. The Egyptians had been given him by Caesar Augustus when he dissipated Cleopatra’s power, and the Germans had been brought to Judaea as slaves, progressing by one chance or another to responsible positions in the army. “How many Jews have you slain?” I asked the men. They shrugged their shoulders. “We do what we’re told,” they replied.

  “Well, how many?” I insisted. “We haven’t had any foreign wars, so all your activity has been against the Jews. How many would you guess?” And they began recalling their various expeditions against Jerusalem, when there was trouble there, and Samaria before the name was changed to Sebaste, and the trouble in Gaza. Slowly the figures mounted until these four chance soldiers, operating in different areas, found that they had slain more than a thousand leading Jews.

  “When the orders come to kill my wife and me … won’t you wonder what it’s about?”

  “Orders come and we obey them,” one of the Germans replied. His sharp, dreadful sword hung easily from his left hip.

  “But you’ve known that Herod was insane.”

  “Don’t speak against the king,” the soldier warned me.

  “But he’s dead. We’re merely awaiting confirmation.”

  “I should think you’d want him to live,” the German argued, speaking a colloquial Greek.

  “You haven’t answered my question. Why would you obey the orders of a dead man?”

  “Because if you don’t have one king, you have another,” the German explained. “If Herod is dead, as you say, there’s another king in Antioch to give orders and above him there’s the emperor in Rome, and it doesn’t matter very much who tells us to do what. There’s always a king somewhere.”

  Jews came to pray with Shelomith, and in their bearded faces, obdurate as iron, I found my solution to the behavior of the Herodian soldiers. On earth there was always a king giving orders, and frequently they were contradictory or even inhuman, as in the case of a putrefying Herod, but above them there had to be a true king who judged things honestly and who, when the time came, corrected the mistakes of the earthly sovereigns. If there were not such a system, the behavior of a mortal like Herod would be incomprehensible.

  I looked at the Jews, whom I had never understood, for they were always a withdrawn race who showed neither love nor toleration for the Romans, and I realized that it was not through the friends of Herod but through these bearded, intransigent men that Judaea and perhaps the whole emp
ire would find its moral stability. Between the Jews and the Romans there would be war—of that I was increasingly convinced—and doubtless the temple as a symbol of Judaism would have to vanish; but the principles these men stood for, the rectitude I saw in their faces, must ultimately triumph. For the first time I was sorry to be dying, for I wanted to witness this great confrontation. For me, Herod had terminated any belief in Rome as a permanent master. There would have to be something else, some force that could control insane men. Why, he had even intimated that if the rumors were true, if an honest king of the Jews had been born in Bethlehem, all Jewish babies in that district must be slaughtered, but from this hideous act he had drawn back. It was essential that some superior power be called into existence to force such men to draw back from their other insanities, and I wished that I could be on hand to greet the messengers of that power when they arrived.

  Shelomith and I talked of these things for many hours yesterday and I went to bed with increased respect for her religion, which I had not deeply investigated before. I say, “I went to bed,” as if this day had merely been another in a long sequence of routine days, but it was not. We shall probably never go to bed again. I shall never again see her rise like a flower coming to bloom in the spring, and in the nothingness of death, if I am permitted memory, I shall miss her more than I can say. My three sons, one in Antioch, one in Athens and one in Rhodes, will look like her until they die, some years from now, and then her lovely image will be forgotten. Being a Jewess, she never allowed me to have her portrait made, for like the brave men who chopped down the Roman eagle and who were burned alive for their audacity, she considered portraits blasphemy. Something Moses had told his Jews prevented them from having any likeness made; but I smile, for as long as Makor stands, the eight perfect columns will serve as her memorial. They are closer to her reality than a painting of her face could ever be, for they reproduce her essence: tall, flawlessly proportioned, austere, yet molded to the requirements of her position. Like her columns she stands with her head unadorned, and bearing nothing, for she is a free woman. Only the Jews know how to produce such women, and I have known two of them—Shelomith and Mariamne. Had the queen lived she would have kept Herod sane, but she died prematurely and he died with her.