A long pause descended on the conversation, which had nearly degenerated into a family squabble.
“Uncle Antipas,” Salome suddenly chirped, “do you suppose you’ll ever become king instead of tetrarch?”
Silence virtually thundered at the ingenuous query. Antipas reddened.
“My, how you prattle, child!” Herodias covered.
“I’ll tell you when Antipas will become king!” Herod-Philip called out, a little unsteadily from drink.
“When?” Herodias snapped.
“The first.”
“The first of what?” she snarled.
“The first chance he gets!” tittered Herod-Philip, until he discovered that he was laughing alone. Then another deadly silence descended.
“Salome, why don’t you play the lyre for us like a good daughter,” Herodias urged.
“Oh yes, please do, Salome,” Procula added.
“Must I, Mother?”
In a pleasant singsong voice which only barely disguised the urgency, Herodias said, “You must.”
Pouting, Salome moved to her task. While the performance would have won no trophies at the Panathenaea festival, it did serve Herodias’s purpose in changing the mood and direction of the dinner party. At one point, Pilate almost thought he saw Antipas giving his brother a brief jab in the shin as they reclined to listen to the recital.
Later that night, after the guests had gone, host and hostess were reviewing the evening, their usual after-party hobby. “I begin to understand Herod-Philip,” said Procula. “With a wife like that, one who delights in humiliating him publicly, small wonder he cuddled his wine goblet as his dearest friend.”
“True, though he certainly did his own bit to exhibit the soiled family laundry. And wasn’t it surprising how Antipas revealed his blunder at Tiberias?”
“And what about Salome’s innocent question?”
“And Antipas’s reaction? Wonderful!” They laughed.
“Pilate,” Procula asked in a more serious tone, “how did you manage to stay in such good control of yourself all evening while they were all getting drunk and loose-lipped?”
“Not too difficult,” he replied grandly, as if he had been waiting all evening for that question. Walking over to a cabinet, he pulled out a large, silver wine flagon which his steward had used earlier that evening to keep all goblets brimming. “Look closely into the neck of the flagon. See its double throat? The larger passage leads to a main reservoir, which was filled with the strongest vintage I could find in the palace wine cellar. The other leads to a smaller chamber, which contained a color-matched grape juice. See this valve? One flick and it opens one throat while closing the other, and vice versa, with no one the wiser.”
“Pilate, you didn’t…”
“Precisely. Now, you know I love my wine, but this evening we had a little work to do. So, with the steward’s deft hand, it was wine for everyone, grape juice for me. They had the loose tongues; I had the information.”
“Why did you let me have wine, then?”
“My pet, you drink like a sparrow.”
“Well, we do know a good deal more about our friends, the Herods…Something else struck me about Antipas. Did you notice it, too?”
“Yes, if we’re thinking about the same thing.”
“The way his eyes fastened on Herodias?”
“And hers on his.”
“It was almost indecent.”
“It was indecent.”
They prepared for bed; but, before falling asleep, Procula offered a final comment. “Pilate, you don’t have portraits of Sejanus on any of your regimental standards, do you?”
“No.”
“Well, why did you tell Antipas you did?”
“You’ll find out shortly.”
That interim proved to be two months, when another letter arrived from Sejanus. Pilate seized on the following and read it jubilantly to his wife:
…The Jews, as you know, do not wish me well, so it is doubly appropriate that you are flying my medallion in Judea as an object lesson…
“I never wrote Sejanus about posting his standards. It seems we’ve authenticated our suspected channel of information.”
“But what if Sejanus checks on whether his medallion really is hanging from your ensigns?”
“He won’t. Why should he? But if it comes to that, we can fall back on the governor’s pennant he gave me. Antipas will just have gotten his facts garbled about the image.”
One day, soon after Antipas’s return from Rome, the scandal broke across Palestine in fury, horrifying the orthodox and scandalizing even liberals. Antipas had fallen hopelessly in love with Herodias, and she, fired by ambition, reciprocated. In flagrant violation of Jewish law, she divorced her husband, and Antipas his Arabian wife; they then married each other. Hebrew scripture also forbade marrying a brother’s wife, and, to compound the scandal, Herodias was also Antipas’s niece. While marriage of uncle and niece was actually permissible under Jewish law—Herodias had taken the same route with her first husband—such a union was thought incestuous by Antipas’s gentile subjects.
In the settlement, Salome would live with her mother at Tiberias, though she could visit her father periodically at Caesarea. Herod-Philip was too disgusted to contest the affair. Apparently, he despised Antipas with all the enthusiasm that only Herodian siblings could generate. Other rumors had it that he was in fact relieved to be rid of Herodias.
The only person to emerge from the sordid affair with personal honor intact was the innocent wife of Antipas, princess-daughter of the Arabian King Aretas. She had learned of her husband’s plans with Herodias almost as soon as they were contrived. Instead of making a scene, she adroitly asked if she might not spend a brief vacation at Machaerus, a palace-fortress overlooking the Dead Sea. Unaware that she knew his intentions, Antipas readily agreed. But since Machaerus lay on the border between his domains and those of her father, it was simple work for one of Aretas’s officers to spirit the princess away from the castle and back to the safety of her childhood home at Petra.
The old hostility between King Aretas and the House of Herod now blazed anew. With a righteously angry father determined to avenge his daughter’s honor, bloodshed seemed inevitable.
In the duel for respectability and leadership in Palestine, the prefect of Judea was now clearly ahead of the tetrarch of Galilee and Perea. And Pilate had several plans for remaining in front. By blending firmness with conciliation, he would try again to win the people of Judea for his cherished program of Romanizing Palestine.
* This inscription is authentic. In the summer of 1961, an Italian archaeological expedition found a two-by-three-foot stone with this enormously important inscription while excavating at Caesarea—the first epigraphic evidence of the existence of Pilate to be discovered. For further discussion, see the Notes.
Chapter 8
Late in the summer of A.D. 28, Pilate took Procula on the sixty-mile trip to Jerusalem. For her first visit, he intentionally avoided a Jewish festival, so that she would have a chance to see the city rather than milling masses of people.
Their route led south along the fertile Plain of Sharon to Lydda, then diagonally southeast up through winding hills toward Jerusalem. Only a small cavalry escort accompanied them, since this visit was to be unofficial, and, hopefully, unobtrusive. Pilate’s fiscal officer and a small committee of city engineers from Caesarea were part of the entourage.
Hardly a cloud was overhead, a vast blue purchased at the expense of a parched countryside. No rain fell in Palestine during the summer months, and Judea demonstrated the result. Its pinkish-beige soil had turned to powder, and the only remaining green in the landscape was furnished by the hearty pine, a drab and very thirsty green. Sheep, goats, and other livestock clustered at waterholes which had shrunk to muddy saucer-shaped depressions.