On the Destruction of Jerusalem 1.42–1.43

Alexander and Aristobulus, sent to the city of Sebaste, not far from the city of Caesarea, were strangled at their father's command. This was the end of Mariamne's sons. Antipater did not rejoice long at their death, though, with them removed, he no doubt flattered himself with the succession; but soon no light hatred of the whole nation blazed up against him, because it was plain to all that the brothers had fallen through his faction. No small fear also followed as he considered how numerous the offspring of the slain was growing day by day: for Alexander had left two sons born to him of Glaphyra, Tigranes and Alexander; and to Aristobulus, by Berenice, Salome's daughter, there survived Herod, Agrippa, and Aristobulus; and the daughters Herodias and Mariamne, whom their sex would not prevent from being stirred by desire for the kingdom. Terrified by this, Antipater placed his hope in fraud and cunning, and tried to pledge each one more and more to himself with gifts and presents, and even to entice with money Caesar's friends and household to favor him. But on the other side even the things at home sat against him. For the king, with the passage of time, was gradually softening toward his grandsons, the children of Alexander and Aristobulus, and showed repentance for what he had done, since he pitied those whose parents he had killed. In the end, gathering his friends and relatives one day, his face bathed in tears, he said to them: “I see that my age is advancing, and I cannot look without tears on these little ones, the offspring of unhappy fathers, to whom I am the author of grief, lest I leave them in a worse condition than the parents I took from them. But a certain misfortune snatched those from me; these nature and pity commend to me more and more—the one because they are my grandsons, the other because they are bereft of parents. The sons went wrong against their father; what have the grandsons done to their grandfather? I have been unhappy enough as a father; I ought to be a more careful grandfather. I shall try to provide for my grandsons after me—would that I had also provided for myself in my sons! But against them the fraudulence of a common foe and enemies crept in. We must also take care that the dangers of their fathers do not involve these, and that by one wound I do not lose my sons and destroy my grandsons together. Let us provide defenders for those from whom we have taken them. So I shall betroth your daughter, my Pheroras, to the elder of Alexander's sons, and I shall make you a father to him; and to your son, Antipater, the daughter of Aristobulus, so that in this way you become a father to the orphan girl. Her sister my Herod shall receive, the son I had by Mariamne, daughter of Hyrcanus. This,” he said, “is my decision: that the successions of my posterity be joined to one another by marriage bonds, so that no one may be suspect to another, and I myself may see my grandsons with calmer eyes than I saw their parents.” With these words he joined the right hands of those named and, kissing each, wept. Antipater took this so hard, while the others rejoiced, that he at once betrayed his grief even in his face, gripped by no small anxiety, because he saw that the support of King Archelaus and of Pheroras, who held a tetrarchy, was available to Alexander's sons and was stronger than the rest. He noticed that hatred of himself was growing and pity favored the grandsons. Nor could he receive Aristobulus's daughter into his house, lest he be offended by the constant sight of her as evidence of his crime. He did not dare approach his father, lest he stir up a man easily moved to every suspicion if he thought the arranged marriage contracts should be dissolved. Yet he subtly ventured to beg his father to provide for him, so that he would not be exposed, powerless with the bare name of kingship, against the resources of two powerful men, a king and a tetrarch; let him favor rather the honor of the one whom he judged fit to ally with his son, so that the appearance of kingship would not come to him and the power to them. Nor did he hold only the sons of Alexander and Aristobulus suspect; he thought all stood in his way—whoever, from Herod's various wives, seemed even silently to have a claim to succeed to the kingdom, and their number was large. For nine women enjoyed royal marriage, of whom only two were without children; the others had offspring. Antipater exalted Doris as his mother, Herod Mariamne; Antipas and Archelaus were sons of Malthace the Samaritan, as was a daughter Olympias, who was joined in marriage to Joseph. Cleopatra of Jerusalem had borne Herod and Philip to Herod; Pallas, Phasael. There were also other daughters of the king, Roxane and Salome, of whom Phaedra was mother to one and Elpis to the other. There also survived the full sisters of Alexander and Aristobulus, whom Mariamne had borne to Herod, as we mentioned above. Fearing Herod's numerous progeny, Antipater—though with difficulty, and with the king much moved at his first attempts, because he seemed to begrudge his grandsons, bereft of their father's help, the marriages arranged for them—at last achieved this much: that Aristobulus's daughter was joined to himself, and his son to the daughter of Pheroras; so much could flattery do that it even dissolved arranged marriages. Salome, on the other hand, when she wished to marry Syllaeus, could not obtain it from her brother even with the support of Livia, Caesar's wife, but against her will was married to Alexas, one of the king's friends. So, with the king's arrangements overturned, Antipater, as if he had provided for himself as he wished, exulted in spirit and surpassed everyone in cunning. Yet he could in no way suppress hatred, but inflamed it, since he aimed to build a defense for himself by terror. He had joined to himself as a fellow worker in his factions Pheroras, his father's brother, whom Herod not long after, when he refused, tried to separate from his own wife; Pheroras was held the more hostile because of the injuries this woman had done to Doris's sons' mother—Herod's wife—and Herod expelled him from the house. Pheroras, embracing the injury, withdrew to his own territories, over which he presided as tetrarch, with the firm intention of never returning to Herod while he lived. Indeed, not even when he learned that Herod was afflicted with a serious illness and was often begging him to come, because he thought certain things should be entrusted to him as one about to die, did he think he should visit him. Though stung by this injury, when the king, contrary to hope, had shaken off his illness, he nevertheless came to him with brotherly affection when he learned that he was ill, sympathized with him earnestly, brought him to Jerusalem when he died, and saw to his funeral with great weeping and a crowded procession. Yet by these signs of earnest love he did not shut out the opinion he had formed that his brother had sought his life by poison. So cruel was he even toward his own; nor was it hard to believe that one who had killed his sons could have killed his brother.

So this man, one of the slayers of Alexander and Aristobulus, found the end of his wickedness; and the punishment, beginning from him, passed on to Antipater, the author of the crime. For Herod, spurred on by the complaints of freedmen who asserted that their patron had been killed by poison, while he inquired more carefully, learned that the cup that was thought to be a love potion—Pheroras had received it from his wife, made from Arabian juices—had been poison, handed over through the efforts of Syllaeus and at once turned into a plague; and he proceeded to the interrogation of many. Hence one of the slave girls cried out under torture that God almighty should transfer all the torments onto Antipater's mother, the arbiter of all the crimes: through her, she said, the secret meetings of Antipater and Pheroras had been held, and drinking bouts day and night to the point of drunkenness, so that, when they withdrew from the king's banquet, they would drink whole nights through. This was justly suspected as neither idle nor free of conspiratorial attempts, especially as the slaves and servants were sent away; and to kings a great bond of connection and evidence of conspiracy is the long lingering in solitude, in secret and in the silence of the night. There it was agreed that Antipater should go to Rome and Pheroras to Petra; they were reported to have often discussed among themselves that after Alexander and Aristobulus, Herod would turn to their own deaths; they were wretched, they had said, to have thought that Herod hated parricidal thoughts in those sons, he who persecuted the heirs of the kingdom; those removed had not been rivals for power but partners in misery; the danger and hatred of all had passed onto themselves; he would not spare even the women, he who had not spared his beloved Mariamne and her sons. There was no other remedy for them but to withdraw somewhere far off, to escape by flight the fury of so great a beast. To this were added Antipater's frequent complaints before his mother, lamenting that he was burning with envy of the royal succession, since the savagery of the reign weighed especially on him, so that he could no longer bear it, given over to excessive services and pressed by extreme dangers. Not only had the right to reign perished for him, but the course of his life too had been rolled up in the passage of time. His age was riper, he had already gone gray; his father, on the other hand, was growing young again; it was vain to hope for the inheritance of one who might perhaps be kept so long as to survive his heir. And what profit would the succession be to a long-lived heir, against whom the numerous offspring of Alexander and Aristobulus would sprout again like a hydra, with heads reborn where they had been cut off? By his father's will the common right had already been taken away: having been given the hope of reigning, of which he would be a temporary substitute, he could not maintain any of his own sons in his rule, but must pour the kingdom back to Herod, Mariamne's son. So the hope of the kingdom had been given him not for enjoyment but for danger, that he might be suspect to his predecessor and burdensome to his successor. Finally, the king himself, vigorous in long old age and intent on killing his own people, would be the executor of his own will, so that no one would survive who could succeed; he was carried away by heavy hatred against his sons, and no less against his brother, who had given him a hundred talents—he must not even converse with his uncle. And when Pheroras answered, “In what have we harmed him? Am I too a successor?”, Antipater had replied that he had several causes for offense. Would that, losing everything, one might make one's peace with him! He was a wild beast that could not be sated even by deaths and could not bear any love to remain among his relatives. Would that, losing everything, we might escape him, naked, only alive—but that was impossible. Therefore their conversations were secret for the time; but the time would come when they must use manly vigor of mind, liveliness of counsel, and also the service of an avenging right hand. These things were answered by the slaves under torture, and Herod believed the slave, especially because he had spoken of the hundred talents to Antipater alone, and no one had been present to report his words. So, inflamed with indignation, he dragged many to punishment, even innocent ones, so that none of the guilty might be left. Antipater the Samaritan was brought to the tortures, because he was Antipater's steward, and was tormented in various ways. The examination revealed that poison had been sent from Egypt through a certain companion of Antiphilus, and given by him to Theudion, Antipater's friend, and handed on by him to Pheroras, to whom the king's son Antipater had entrusted its execution, so that his father Herod would be killed while he himself was staying in the city of Rome, at a time when there would be no suspicion of a murder prepared by the absent man. But since Pheroras had at the time entrusted the poison he had received to his own wife, the odium of the poison fell in turn on Pheroras's wife. The king at once ordered Pheroras's wife to bring the poison. The woman went out as if to bring what was asked, and threw herself down from the roof of the buildings, to escape the weight of a double charge and to forestall by death the evidence of the matter and the bitterness of the inquiry. But because the deadly vengeance for the parricide was being hastened for Antipater, she did not fall on the top of her head, by which she would easily have been killed, but fell on another part of her body, so that death was delayed. Yet the woman was stunned and dazed, because she had fallen from a high place. Herod ordered her to be revived a little until she came to herself; he promised pardon if she openly disclosed the course of events: it was not for nothing that she had thrown herself down, he said, but, conscious of a great crime, she had sought a short cut to punishment; all her crimes would go unpunished if she confessed; but if she denied, torments would be heaped up and even burial would be refused her. When she had recovered herself a little, she said: “For whom shall I still keep the silence of secrets, now that Pheroras is dead? For I ought to have kept faith in silence for him, for whom I would not refuse tortures if they were needed. But he is now free from torments, and, if the correction of an error deserves pardon, free from guilt. Why then should I think of wrapping the truth in lies to please Antipater? Shall I spare him and not spare myself? A fine reward we owe the man who has led us all into these torments by his crimes! Hear, O king, with God as witness, who alone is the judge of truth for me—for I have resolved to deceive in nothing. Hear, I say; but first recall how you sat in tears by your brother in his danger, how you fulfilled all the dutiful offices of brotherhood toward Pheroras. Moved by them, as soon as you had left, he called me to him at once and said: ‘Woman, I have strayed not a little from my brother's affection and devotion, I who so hated one who loves me and wished to kill one so unable to bear grief in my dangers. He cannot bear the chance misfortune, while I was pressing an undeserved one on him. I was trapped, I confess, by Antipater's tricks, but I bear the price of his designs. Bring me quickly the poison you have that he left, and pour it out before my eyes, so that I may not take a parricidal spirit even to the dead. Let it count as correction to have repented of having prepared what is criminal. Quickly, woman, I say, so that I may at least forestall death, since I could not forestall guilt.’ Then I brought the poison and emptied it out in his sight; yet I kept a little of it for myself, fearing you, so that I might have a remedy if the poison prepared for this purpose were betrayed.” With these words she produced the box with what was left of the poison. The mother of Antiphilus and his brothers were put to the question; they confessed that Antiphilus had brought from Egypt a box full of poison, which he had received from a brother living at Alexandria under a teacher of medicine. Mariamne, the high priest's daughter, was also detected as privy to the plots being prepared against her husband, and this was made plain when her brothers confessed under torture. Hence the younger Herod paid the price of his mother's daring: his father, who had substituted him for Antipater in the succession to the kingdom, thought he should strike him from the will. And here indeed was no small error of the elder Herod, that when one man had been caught in an outrage, another was punished. Yet the punishment of the younger Herod was not unjust: for it seems to have been divinely foreseen that, though not yet for any deed of his own, he should nevertheless be removed from the kingdom for the price of his future wickedness. For who could have endured as king one who as tetrarch was so insolent that he could not be tolerated? There was added another kind of poisoning, which Bathyllus, Antipater's freedman, brought to Pheroras and his wife, made from the juices of serpents and the venom of asps, so that if the first had not been strong enough for Herod's death, they could use the second.