AUGUSTUS AND HEROD
Herod had to back the winner. He offered to join Antony in Greece but instead he was ordered to attack the Arab Nabataeans in today’s Jordan. By the time Herod returned, Octavian and Antony were facing each other at Actium. Antony was no match for Octavian’s commander, Marcus Agrippa. The sea battle was a debacle. Antony and Cleopatra fled back to Egypt. Would Octavian also destroy Antony’s Judaean king?
Herod again prepared for death, leaving his brother Pheroras in charge and, just to be safe, having old Hyrcanus strangled. He placed his mother and sister in Masada while Mariamme and Alexandra were kept in Alexandrium, another mountain fortress. If anything happened to him, he again ordered that Mariamme was to die. Then he sailed for the most important meeting of his life.
Octavian received him in Rhodes. Herod handled the meeting shrewdly and frankly. He humbly laid his diadem crown at Octavian’s feet. Then instead of disowning Antony, he asked Octavian not to consider whose friend he had been but ‘what sort of friend I am’. Octavian restored his crown. Herod returned to Jerusalem in triumph, then followed Octavian down to Egypt, arriving in Alexandria just after Antony and Cleopatra had committed suicide, he by blade, she by asp.
Octavian now emerged as the first Roman emperor, adopting the name Augustus. Still only thirty-three, this punctilious manager, delicate, unemotional and censorious, became Herod’s most loyal patron. Indeed the emperor and his deputy, almost his partner-in-power, the plain-spoken Marcus Agrippa, became so close to Herod that, in Josephus’ expression, ‘Caesar preferred no one to Herod besides Agrippa and Agrippa made no one his greater friend than Herod besides Caesar.’
Augustus increased Herod’s kingdom to include swathes of modern Israel, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. Like Augustus, Herod was an icily competent manager: when famine struck, he sold his own gold and bought Egyptian grain to import, saving the Judaeans from starvation. He presided over a half-Greek, half-Jewish court, serviced by pretty eunuchs and concubines. Many of his entourage were inherited from Cleopatra. His secretary Nikolaus of Damascus had been the tutor to her children,* and his bodyguard of 400 Galatians had been her personal bodyguard: Augustus gave them to Herod as a present and they joined his own Germans and Thracians. These blond barbarians handled torture and murder for this most cosmopolitan king: ‘Herod was Phoenician by descent, Hellenized by culture, Idumean by place of birth, Jewish by religion, Jerusalemite by residence and Roman by citizenship.’
In Jerusalem, he and Mariamme resided at the Antonia Fortress. There he was a Jewish king, reading Deuteronomy every seven years in the Temple and appointing the high priest, whose robes he kept in the Antonia. But outside Jerusalem he was a munificent Greek monarch whose new pagan cities – chiefly Caesarea on the coast and Sebaste (being the Greek for Augustus) on the site of Samaria – were opulent complexes of temples, hippodromes, and palaces. Even in Jerusalem, he built a Greek-style theatre and hippodrome where he presented his Actian Games to celebrate Augustus’ victory. When this pagan spectacle provoked a Jewish conspiracy, the plotters were executed. But his beloved wife did not celebrate his success. The court was poisoned by the struggle between the Maccabean and Herodian princesses.40
MARIAMME: HEROD IN LOVE AND HATRED
While Herod had been away, Mariamme had once again charmed her guardian into revealing her husband’s plans for her if he did not return. Herod found her personally irresistible yet politically toxic: she openly accused him of killing her brother. Sometimes she made it humiliatingly obvious to the entire court that she was denying him sex; at other times they were passionately reconciled. She was the mother of two of his sons, yet she was also planning his destruction. She taunted Salome, Herod’s sister, with her commonness. Herod was ‘entangled between hatred and love’, his obsession all the more intense because it was mixed up with his other reigning passion: power.
His sister Salome ascribed Mariamme’s hold on him to magic. She brought him evidence that the Maccabean had beguiled him with a love-potion. Mariamme’s eunuchs were tortured until they revealed her guilt. The guardian who had watched Mariamme in his absence was killed. Mariamme herself was imprisoned in the Antonia then put on trial. Salome kept up the momentum of revelations, determined that the Maccabean queen should die.
Mariamme was sentenced to death, whereupon her mother Alexandra denounced her, hoping to save her own skin. In response, the crowd booed her. As Mariamme was led to execution, she behaved with astonishing ‘greatness of soul’, saying that it was a shame her mother should expose herself in that way. Probably strangled, Mariamme died like a real Maccabean ‘without changing the colour of her face’, displaying a grace that ‘revealed the nobility of her descent to the spectators’. Herod went berserk with grief, believing that his love for Mariamme was a divine vengeance designed to destroy him. He shrieked for her around the palaces, ordered his servants to find her, and tried to distract himself with banquets. But his parties ended with him weeping for Mariamme. He fell ill and erupted in boils, at which Alexandra made a last bid for power. Herod had her killed, and then murdered four of his most intimate friends who perhaps had been close to the charming queen. He never quite recovered from Mariamme, a curse that was to return to destroy another generation. The Talmud later claimed that Herod preserved Mariamme’s body in honey, and this may have been true – for it was fittingly sweet, suitably macabre.
Soon after her death, Herod started to work on his masterpiece: Jerusalem. The Maccabean Palace opposite the Temple was not grand enough for him. The Antonia must have been haunted by the ghost of Mariamme. In 23 BC, he expanded his western fortifications by building a new towered citadel and palace complex, a Jerusalem-within-Jerusalem. Surrounded by a wall 45 feet high, the Citadel boasted three sentimentally named towers, the highest, the Hippicus (after a youthful friend killed in battle), 128 feet high, its base 45 feet square, the Phasael (after his dead brother) and the Mariamme.* While the Antonia dominated the Temple, this fortress ruled the city.
To the south of the Citadel, Herod built his Palace, a pleasure dome containing two sumptuous apartments named after his patrons, Augustus and Agrippa, with walls of marble, cedarwood beams, elaborate mosaics, gold and silver decorations. Around the palace were constructed courtyards, colonnades and porticoes complete with green lawns, lush groves and cool pools and canals set off by cascades, above which perched dovecotes (Herod probably communicated with his provinces by pigeon post). All this was funded by Herod’s Croesian wealth: he was, after the emperor, the richest man in the Mediterranean † The bustle of the palace, with the trumpets of the Temple and the rumble of the city in the distance, must have been pacified by the cooing of birds and tinkle of fountains.
But his court was anything but tranquil. His brothers were pitiless intriguers: his sister Salome ranks as a peerless monstress and his own harem of women were all apparently as ambitious and as paranoid as the king himself. Herod’s priapic tastes complicated the politics – he was, wrote Josephus, ‘a man of appetites’. He had married one wife, Doris, before Mariamme; and, after her, he married at least another eight, choosing beauties for love or lust, never again for their pedigree. As well as his 500-strong harem, his Greek tastes extended to the pages and eunuchs of his household. But his burgeoning family of half-spoiled, half-neglected sons, each backed by a power-hungry mother, became a devil’s brood. Even the masterful puppeteer himself struggled to manage all this hatred and jealousy. Yet the court did not distract him from his most cherished project. Knowing that the prestige of Jerusalem was linked to his own, Herod decided to equal Solomon.41