From all reports, Philip, tetrarch in northeast Palestine, was a rather pleasant fellow, honorable, just, and peaceable. A moderate who had no enemies, Philip was easily the paragon of Herod’s progeny. He quite literally brought justice to the people. As he traveled with friends about the countryside, servants would set up his portable tribunal wherever and whenever adjudication was required.
“How does he feel toward Rome?” Pilate inquired, his consistent, crucial query.
“Romanophile,” was the assuring reply.
That Philip’s sympathies were strongly pro-Roman was evident from the names of two of his cities, Caesarea Philippi and Bethsaida Julias, and from two of his copper coins, which bore images of Augustus and Tiberius. Pilate wished that he had had that information earlier at the time of the standards affair. What were several military medallions compared to whole issues of iconic coinage, minted by a half-Jew? But since most of Philip’s subjects were gentile, they took little offense at the coppers.
With this background, Pilate expected no trouble from Philip. The two had met in Jerusalem and found each other almost congenial. They parted with mutual invitations for state visits to Caesarea and Caesarea Philippi.
Genetics, Pilate decided, were partially responsible for the enormous difference between Philip and Antipas. The two were only half brothers. And unlike Philip, Antipas had had a near taste of royalty in being named heir to the throne in Herod’s third will. The fourth had handed the crown to Archelaus, but now that he was in exile, only Roman Judea interposed between Antipas and most of his father’s former realm.
Antipas’s strategy, Pilate surmised, would be to impress Rome with his administration of Galilee, to discredit the Roman prefects wherever possible, and to conciliate the Judeans as potential subjects. His policies of ingratiating himself with Tiberius and Sejanus, his feverish “Tiberianizing” of capitals, seas, and coinage in his realm, and what must have been his recent report to Sejanus, embarrassing Pilate on the standards episode, all suited this pattern handsomely. He was playing a shrewd waiting game. For thirty-one years now, Antipas had successfully ruled Galilee and the Transjordan, while the government of Judea had changed hands five times. Might Rome not prefer continuity also for Judea? Might Tiberius not finally revert to using a buffer king in the tradition of Herod the Great to cushion the shocks between Roman and Jew? Doubtless, Antipas was grooming himself for such a role…Or was he imputing false motives to the tetrarch, Pilate wondered. He had better test the situation soon.
He discovered that a younger half brother of Antipas named Herod-Philip (not to be confused with the tetrarch Philip) was living in Caesarea as a private citizen. From him, Pilate learned that Antipas was planning to sail to Rome on business. Deciding that it was high time he invited the tetrarch to Caesarea for a friendly visit, Pilate dispatched a letter to the Galilean capital, well-laced with cordiality, inviting Antipas and his wife to dinner at the palace on the eve of his departure, since he would be sailing from Caesarea. The guests would include brother Herod-Philip and his family.
Antipas was pleased to accept, though his wife, the Arabian princess, sent her regrets. “Since I wouldn’t be returning with her,” Antipas explained after his arrival, “she preferred to come another time.”
Herod Antipas seemed older than Pilate had anticipated—he was now in his early fifties—but he looked very much the son of Herod the Great. The Herodian features—rectangular visage, square chin, deep-set eyes—were obviously dominant genes, since his half brother Herod-Philip, born of a different mother, shared them also.
Both were dressed as sophisticates of the Hellenistic East, though purple hems and signet ring betrayed the tetrarch, while Herod-Philip appeared merely the prosperous Levantine businessman which he was. Herod-Philip seemed a trifle uxorious, however, and took elaborate pains to see that his wife, Herodias, as well as their daughter, Salome, were carefully introduced to everyone.
These were the first women of the Herodian clan Pilate and Procula had ever seen, and during the dinner they watched them with curious fascination. Herself a granddaughter of Herod the Great, Herodias showed the family lineaments to good advantage. She was a rather handsome woman, Pilate thought, although Procula later insisted that her lavish makeup and almost male aggressiveness detracted from the impression she tried to make.
About halfway through dinner, Procula came to the shocking realization that the Herod-Philip–Herodias marriage was between uncle and niece, since Herod-Philip was half brother to Herodias’s father. Salome, the product of this demi-incest, was a lissome, precocious sixteen-year-old. Maybe the nub of her firm, Herodian chin projected a shade too far to call the girl beautiful, but there was a sensuality about her that made Pilate almost uncomfortable.
Diplomatic niceties, lubricated by generous supplies of wine, commanded the first half of Pilate’s feast. “How long do you plan to stay in Rome?” he asked Antipas.
“Several months. I need technical advice on several new projects I’ve in mind for Tiberias…And how do you find Judea, Prefect?”
Antipas was edging up to it, so why not plunge in directly? “Except for a little problem about where we can carry Tiberius’s picture and where not—fine!” Pilate smiled.
A round of laughter relieved the tension. The guests seemed grateful that the host himself had brought up the matter of his celebrated blunder.
“Amazing how different Jerusalem and Caesarea are,” Pilate continued. “Here even the images of Sejanus among our standards cause no difficulty.”
“It’s rather easy to run afoul of Jews,” commented Antipas good-naturedly. “My error was worse than yours, Pilate. When I started building Tiberias, everything went fine—stadium, forum, walls—everything, that is, except an oversight by my surveyors which extended the marketplace directly over an ancient cemetery. We had to exhume and transfer the dead.”
“No great error. Why the difficulty?” Pilate inquired.
“For pious Jews, any contact with a cemetery or the dead causes ritual impurity. What I intended was a Jewish capital for Galilee. What I’m building is a forbidden city.”
“How did you ever populate it?” asked Procula.
“I’m still in the process. We’re importing people from the countryside who aren’t so squeamish about evacuated cemeteries. Poorer Jews also seem less concerned.”
“My brother Antipas is also a great emancipator,” Herod-Philip volunteered, with a smirk. “He’s freed droves of bondservants and slaves in order to manufacture townspeople. He even built homes for them in Tiberias…under the condition that they wouldn’t move out of town.”
It was a borderline reference, born of wine running in his veins, which did not please Antipas. Angrily, Herodias went to his defense. “At least,” she bit her words, “Antipas built a city, as tetrarch of Galilee, while you live off the inheritance from your father as a nobody!”
Pilate exchanged a shocked glance with Procula. Herod-Philip, glaring at his wife, took a long draft from his goblet. Then he lowered it slowly and replied, “My inheritance? Oh, yes. But I could have lived much better off my original inheritance.”
“What Father means, Prefect, is that Herod’s first will had named him as successor to the throne,” Salome intruded.
“Only in case your Uncle Antipater died,” Herodias corrected the record.
“You may think it impudent of me to speak of ‘Herod’ rather than ‘Grandfather,’” Salome explained to Pilate, “but, you see, Herod is also my great-grandfather on my mother’s side, so I don’t know which name to—”
“All right, child, all right!” Herodias interrupted.