Claudius the God (8 page)

This happy pair, then, Herod and Cypros, reunited once more, and accompanied as usual by Silas, sailed to Egypt on their way to Bashan. At Alexandria they disembarked, to pay their respects to the Alabarch. Herod intended to enter the city with as little ostentation as possible, not wishing to be the cause of any disturbances between the Jews and Greeks; but the Jews were overjoyed at the visit of a Jewish king, and one so high in. the Emperor’s favour. They met him at the docks, many thousands strong, in holiday dress, crying ‘Hosanna, hosanna!’ and singing songs of rejoicing, and so escorted him to their quarter of the city, which is called ‘The Delta’. Herod did his best to calm popular enthusiasm, but Cypros found the contrast between this arrival in Alexandria and their former one so delightful that for her sake he let many extravagances go by. The Alexandrian. Greeks were angry and jealous. They dressed up in mock-royal state a well-known idiot of the city, or pretended idiot rather, Baba by name, who used to go begging around the principal squares and raising laughs and coppers by his clowning. They provided this Baba with a grotesque guard of soldiers armed with sausage swords, pork shields, and pig’s-head helmets and paraded him through ‘The Delta’. The crowd shouted Marin! Marin! which means King! King!’ They made a demonstration outside the Alabarch’s house and another outside the. house of his brother Philo. Herod visited two of the leading Greeks and lodged a protest. He said no more than, ‘I shall not forget to-day’s performance and I think that one day you’ll regret it.’

From Alexandria Herod and Cypros continued their voyage to the port of Jaffa. From Jaffa they went to Jerusalem to visit their children, there and to stay in the Temple precincts as guests of the High Priest, with whom it was important for Herod to arrive at an understanding. He created an excellent impression by dedicating his iron prison-chain to the Jewish God, hanging it up on the wall of the Temple Treasury. Then they passed through Samaria and the borders of Galilee - without, however, sending any complimentary message to Antipas and Herodias - and so came to their new home at Caesarea Philippi, the lovely city-built by Philip as, his capital on the southern slopes of Mount Hermon. There they collected the accumulated revenues laid up for them since Philip’s death. Salome, Philip’s widow, made a set at Herod and tried all her most captivating arts on him, but it was no use. He told her: ‘You are certainly very good looking and very gracious and very witty; but you must remember the proverb: “Move into a new house, but take the old earth with you.” The only possible queen for Bashan is my dear Cypros.’

You can imagine that when Herodias heard of Herod’s good fortune she was wild with jealousy. Cypros was now a Queen, while she herself was the wife of a mere Tetrarch. She tried to rouse Antipas into feeling the. same as she did; but Antipas, an indolent old man, was perfectly satisfied with his position; though he was only a Tetrarch, he was a very rich one and it was a matter of very little importance to him by what title or titles he was known. Herodias called him a pitiful fellow - how could he expect her to have any further respect for him? ‘To think,’ she said, ‘that my brother, Herod Agrippa, who came here not so long ago as a penniless refugee, dependent on your charity for the very bread that he ate, and then grossly insulted us and fled to Syria, and was hounded out of Syria for corruption, and was nearly arrested at Anthedon for debt, and then went to Rome and was imprisoned for treason to the Emperor - to think that a man with such a record, a spendthrift who has left a trail of unpaid bills behind him wherever he has gone, should now be a King and in a position to insult us! It is unbearable. I insist that you go to Rome at once and force the new Emperor to give you at least equal honours with Herod.’

Antipas answered: ‘My dear Herodias, you are not talking wisely. We are very well off here, you know, and if we tried to improve our position it might bring us bad luck. Rome has never been a safe place to visit since Augustus died.’

‘I won’t speak to you or sleep with you again,’ said Herodias, ‘until you give me your word that you will go.’

Herod heard of this scene from one of his agents at Antipas’s court; and when, shortly, after, Antipas started out for Rome he sent a letter to Caligula by a fast vessel, offering the captain a very large reward if he reached Rome before Antipas did. The captain cracked on as much sail as he dared and just managed to win the money. When Antipas presented himself before Caligula, Caligula already had Herod’s letter in his hand. It was to the effect that Herod while staying in Jerusalem had heard grave charges against his uncle Herod Antipas, which he had not at first credited, but which had on investigation proved true. Not only had his uncle been. engaged in treasonable correspondence with Sejanus at the time that Sejanus and Livilla were plotting to usurp the monarchy - that was an old story - but he had lately been exchanging letters with the King of Parthia, planning with his help to organize a widespread revolt against Rome in the Near East. The King of Parthia had undertaken to give him Samaria, Judaea, and Herod’s own kingdom of Bashan as a reward for his disloyalty. As a proof of this accusation, Herod mentioned that Antipas had 70,000 complete suits of armour in his palace armoury. What, otherwise, was the meaning of these secret preparations for war? His uncle’s standing army numbered only a few hundred men, a mere guard of honour. The armour was certainly not intended for arming Roman troops.

Herod was very sly. He knew perfectly well that Antipas had no warlike intentions whatsoever and that it was merely his fondness for display that had led him to stock his armoury in this lavish style. The revenues from Galilee and Gilead were rich, and Antipas, though stingy, in his hospitality, liked to spend money on costly objects: he collected suits of armour as rich men at Rome collect statues, pictures, and inlaid furniture. But Herod knew that this explanation would not occur to Caligula, whom he had often told about Antipas’s miserliness. So when Antipas came. to the Palace and saluted Caligula, congratulating him on his accession, Caligula greeted him coldly and asked him at once: ‘Is it true, Tetrarch, that you have seventy thousand suits-of armour in your. palace armoury?’ Antipas was startled and could not deny it: for Herod had been careful not to exaggerate. He muttered something about the armour being intended for his own personal pleasure.

Caligula said: ‘This audience is already over. Don’t make feeble excuses. I shall consider what to do with you tomorrow.’ Antipas had to retire, abashed and anxious.

That evening Caligula asked me at dinner: ‘Where was it that you were born, Uncle Claudius?’

‘Lyons,’ I answered.

‘An unhealthy sort of place, isn’t it?’ asked Caligula, twiddling a gold wine-cup in his fingers.

‘Yes,’ I answered. ‘It. has the reputation of being one of the most unhealthy places in your dominions. I blame the climate of Lyons for having condemned me, while still an infant, to my present useless and inactive life.’

‘Yes, I thought I had once heard you say that,’ said Caligula.’

‘We’ll send Antipas there. The change of climate may do him good. There’s too much sun in Galilee for a man of his fiery character.’

Next day Caligula told Antipas that he must consider himself degraded from his rank of Tetrarch, and that a vessel was waiting at Ostia to carry him away to exile at Lyons. Antipas took the matter philosophically - exile was better than death - and I will say this much to his credit, that so far as I know he never gave Herodias, who had accompanied him from Galilee, a word of reproach. Caligula wrote to Herod thanking him for his timely warning and awarding him Antipas’s tetrarchy and revenues in recognition of his loyalty. But knowing that Herodias was Herod’s sister, he told her that for her brother’s sake he would allow her to keep any property of her own that she might possess and return to Galilee, if she wished, to live under his protection. Herodias was too proud to accept this and told Caligula that Antipas had always treated her very well and that she would not desert him in the hour of his need. She began a long speech intended to soften Caligula’s heart, but he cut it short. Herodias and Antipas sailed together for Lyons the next morning. They never returned to Palestine.

Herod replied in terms of the most boundless gratitude for Caligula’s gift. Caligula showed me the letter. ‘But what a man! Herod had written. ‘Seventy thousand suits of armour, and all for his own personal pleasure! Two a day for nearly a hundred years! But it seems almost a pity to condemn a man like that to rot away at Lyons.’ You ought to send him out to invade Germany singlehanded. Your father always said that the only way to deal with the Germans was to exterminate them, and here you have the perfect exterminator at your service - such a glutton for combat that he lays in a stock of seventy thousand suits of armour, all made to measure.’ We had a good laugh over that. Herod ended by saying that he must come back at once to Rome to thank Caligula by word of mouth: pen and paper were not sufficient to express what he felt. He would make his brother Aristobulus temporary regent in Galilee and Gilead, with Silas to keep a careful eye on him, and his youngest brother, Herod Pollio, temporary regent of Bashan.

He came back to Rome with Cypros, and paid his creditors every penny of his debts: and went about saying that he never intended to borrow again. For the first year of Caligula’s reign he had no difficulties worth mentioning. Even when Caligula quarrelled with my mother over his murder of Gemellus - from which, you may be sure, Herod had not actively dissuaded him so that, as I described in my previous story, she was forced to commit. suicide, Herod was so sure of Caligula’s continued trust in his loyalty that almost alone of her friends he wore mourning for her sake and attended her funeral. He felt her death pretty keenly, I believe - but the way he put it to Caligula was: ‘ I should be a thankless wretch if I failed to pay my respects to the ghost of my benefactress. That you showed your displeasure at her grandmotherly interference in a matter which did not concern her must have affected the Lady Antonia with the profoundest grief and shame. If I felt that, I earned your displeasure by any similar behaviour - but of course the case is absurd - I should certainly do as she has done. My mourning is a tribute to her courage in leaving a modern world which has superannuated women of her antique sort.’

Caligula took this well enough and said: ‘No, Herod, you have done rightly. The injury she did was to me, not to you.’ But when his brain turned altogether as a result of his illness and he declared his divinity and began cutting off the heads of statues of Gods and substituting his own, Herod began to grow anxious. As ruler of many thousands of Jews he foresaw trouble. The first certain signs of this trouble came from Alexandria, where his enemies, the Greeks, pressed the Governor of Egypt to insist on the erection of the Emperor’s statues in Jewish synagogues as well as in Greek temples, and on the use, by Jews as well as by Greeks, of Caligula’s divine name in the taking of legal oaths. The Governor of Egypt had been an enemy of Agrippina’s and also a partisan of Tiberius Gemellus’s, and decided that, the best way, to prove his loyalty to Caligula was to enforce the Imperial edict which had, as a matter of fact, been intended only for the Greeks of the city., When the Jews refused to swear by Caligula’s godhead or admit his statues within the synagogues the Governor published a decree declaring all Jews in the city aliens and intruders. The Alexandrians were jubilant and began a pogrom against the Jews, driving the richer ones from other parts of the city, where they lived in style side by side with Greeks and Romans, into the crowded narrow streets of ‘The Delta’. Over 400 merchants’ houses were sacked, and the owners murdered or maimed. Countless insults were heaped on the survivors. The loss in lives and the damage to property were so heavy that the Greeks decided to justify their action by sending an embassy to Caligula at Rome, explaining that the refusal of the Jews to worship his majesty had so outraged the younger and less’disciplined Greek citizens that they had taken vengeance into their own hands. The Jews sent a counter-embassy, led by the Alabarch’s brother, one Philo, a distinguished Jew with a reputation as the best philosopher in Egypt. When Philo reached Rome he naturally called upon Herod, to whom he was now related by marriage; for Herod, after paying back the Alabarch those 8,000 gold pieces, together with interest at ten per cent for two years - greatly to the Alabarch’s embarrassment, for as a Jew he could not lawfully accept interest on a loan from a fellow-Jew had further shown his gratitude by betrothing Berenice, his eldest surviving daughter, to the Alabarch’s eldest son. Philo asked Herod to intervene on his behalf with Caligula, but Herod said that he preferred to have nothing to do with the embassy: if events took a serious turn he would do what he could to mitigate the Emperor’s displeasure, which he expected to be severe - and that was all that he could say at present.

Caligula listened affably to the Greek embassy, but dismissed the Jews with angry threats, as Herod had foreseen, telling them that he did not wish to hear any more talk about Augustus’s promises to them of religious toleration: Augustus, he shouted, had been dead a long time now and his edicts were out of date and absurd. ‘I am your God, and you shall have no other Gods but me.’

Philo turned to the other ambassadors and said in Aramaic: ‘I am glad that we came; for these words are a deliberate challenge to the Living God and now we can be sure that this fool will perish miserably.’ Luckily none of the courtiers understood Aramaic.

Caligula sent a letter to the Governor of Egypt informing him that the Greeks had done their duty in forcibly protesting against the Jews’ disloyalty, and that if the Jews persisted in their present disobedience he would himself come with an army and exterminate them. Meanwhile, he ordered the Alabarch and all other officials of the Jewish colony to be imprisoned. He explained that but for the Alabarch’s kinship with his friend Herod Agrippa he would have put him and his brother Philo to death. The only satisfaction that Herod was at presentable to give the Jews in Alexandria was to have the Governor of Egypt removed. He persuaded Caligula to arrest him on the grounds of his former enmity to Agrippina (who, was, of course, Caligula’s mother) and banish him to one of the smaller Greek islands.