Jerusalem: The Biography (16 page)

Pompey hurried back to Rome to enjoy the Triumph celebrating his Asian conquests. Hyrcanus meanwhile was tormented by the rebellions of Aristobulos and his sons, but the real ruler, his minister Antipater, possessed a genius for winning support in Rome which was now the source of all power. However, even that most serpentine of politicians was challenged by the twists of Roman politics. Pompey was forced to share power in a triumvirate with two other leaders, Crassus and Caesar, the latter soon to make his name conquering Gaul. In 55
BC
, Crassus, the next Roman oligarch looking for glory in the east, arrived in Syria, keen to equal the conquests of his rivals.
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CAESAR AND CLEOPATRA

Crassus, known in Rome as Dives, the Rich Man, was notorious for his avarice and cruelty. He had added victims to the Roman dictator Sulla’s death-lists purely to seize their money, while he had celebrated his suppression of the Spartacus rebellion by crucifying 6,000 slaves along the Appian Way. Now he planned an expedition to throw back the new Parthian kingdom that had replaced the Persians and Seleucids in today’s Iraq and Iran.

Crassus funded his invasion by raiding the Temple in Jerusalem, whence he stole 2,000 talents untouched by Pompey and the ‘beam of solid gold’ in the Holy of Holies. But the Parthians annihilated Crassus and his army. The Parthian king Orad II was watching a Greek play when Crassus’ head was tossed on stage. Orad had molten gold poured into Crassus’ mouth, saying, ‘Be satisfied now with thy life’s desire.’
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Now Rome’s two strongmen, Caesar and Pompey, competed for supremacy. In 49
BC
, Caesar crossed the Rubicon from Gaul and invaded Italy, defeating Pompey eighteen months later. Pompey fled to Egypt. Elected dictator of Rome, Caesar gave chase, arriving in Egypt two days after the Egyptians had murdered Pompey. He was horrified yet relieved to receive Pompey’s pickled head as a welcoming gift. He had campaigned in the East thirty years earlier. Now he found Egypt divided in a vicious struggle between King Ptolemy XIII and his sister-wife Cleopatra VII to secure for Rome the richest prize of the East: Egypt. But he could not have foreseen how this young queen, deposed from the throne and in desperate straits, would shape his will to her own ends.

Cleopatra demanded a secret audience with the master of the Roman empire. This accomplished impresario of sexual-political pantomime had herself carried into Caesar’s palace wrapped in a laundry bag (not a carpet) – perhaps divining that he was susceptible to such theatrical excitement. Gaius Julius Caesar, battleworn and grizzled, was fifty-two and self-conscious about his balding pate. But this astounding if somewhat chilling life-force, possessed of all the talents of war, letters and politics, and the remorseless energy of a younger man, was also a sexual adventurer who had slept with the wives of both Crassus and Pompey. Cleopatra was twenty-one: ‘her beauty was absolutely not without parallel but her physical attractions, combined with her persuasive charm and the aura she projected’ exerted a powerful fascination, even if, as coins and statues suggest, she possessed the aquiline nose and pointed chin of her forebears. She had a kingdom to reclaim and a peerless lineage to live up to. Both Caesar and Cleopatra were keen practitioners of the adventurous school of politics. They embarked on an affair – she soon bore him a child, Caesarion – but, more importantly, he was now committed to back her.

Caesar soon found himself trapped in Alexandria as the Egyptians rose against Cleopatra and her Roman patron. Meanwhile in Jerusalem, Antipater, Pompey’s ally, saw a chance of redeeming himself with Caesar. He marched on Egypt with 3,000 Jewish troops, persuaded the Egyptian Jews to back him, and attacked Caesar’s opponents. Caesar triumphed and restored Cleopatra. Before returning to Rome, the grateful Caesar reappointed Hyrcanus as high priest and ethnarch – ruler – of the Jews and let him repair Jerusalem’s walls, but he granted all the power to Antipater as procurator of Judaea with his sons as the local tetrarchs: the elder one, Phasael, ran Jerusalem; the younger, Herod, got Galilee.

Herod, aged just fifteen, immediately showed his mettle when he hunted down and killed a band of fanatical religious Jews. In Jerusalem, the Sanhedrin were incensed by young Herod’s unauthorized killings and summoned him for trial. However, the Romans appreciated that Antipater and his sons were the sort of allies required to govern this turbulent people. The Roman governor of Syria ordered Herod’s acquittal and awarded him greater powers.

Herod was already exceptional. He was, wrote Josephus, ‘blessed with every gift of looks, body and mind’. Named to be a hero, he was sophisticated enough to charm and impress the pre-eminent Romans of the era. He was sexually voracious – or, as Josephus put it, ‘slave to his passions’ – yet he was not crude. He had taste in architecture, was highly educated in Greek, Latin and Jewish culture and, when not busy with politics and pleasure, he enjoyed debates on history and philosophy. Yet power always came first and this craving would poison every relationship he had. Son of a second-generation Idumean convert to Judaism and an Arab mother (hence his brother was called Phasael – Faisal), Herod was a cosmopolitan who could play the Roman and the Greek and the Jew. But the Jews never quite forgave his mongrel origins. Raised in a rich but vigilant and ruthless household, he would see the destruction of his closest family and sense the fragility of power and the facility of terror. He grew up using death as a political tool: paranoid, over-sensitive, almost hysterical, this tough teenager, a ‘man of great barbarity’ as well as sensitivity, played to survive and dominate at all costs.

After Caesar was assassinated in 44, Cassius (who was one of his killers) arrived to govern Syria. Herod’s father Antipater switched sides. But the somersaults of intrigue finally caught up with him, and he was poisoned by a rival, who managed to occupy Jerusalem – until Herod had him murdered. Soon afterwards, Cassius and his fellow assassin Brutus were defeated at Philippi. The victors were Caesar’s great-nephew and adopted son Octavian, twenty-two years old, and the swashbuckling general Mark Antony. They split the empire, Antony receiving the East. As Antony processed towards Syria, two young potentates, with radically opposite interests, rushed to meet the Roman strongman. One wanted to restore the Jewish kingdom, the other to swallow it into her ancestral empire.
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ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA

Cleopatra came to Antony, as a queen at the height of her charisma, scion of the Ptolemies, the most prestigious dynasty in the known world, and, as Isis-Aphrodite to meet her Dionysus, who could grant her the provinces of her forefathers.

Their meeting was fateful for both. Antony was fourteen years older than her but in his prime: he was hard-drinking, thick-necked, barrel-chested, lantern-jawed and prided himself on his muscular legs. He was dazzled by Cleopatra and keen to embrace the Greek culture and sybaritic splendour of the East, seeing himself as the heir of Alexander, descendant of Hercules – and Dionysus of course. But he also required Egyptian money and provisions for his planned Parthian invasion. Thus they needed each other, and necessity is so often the mother of romance. Antony and Cleopatra celebrated their alliance and affair by murdering Cleopatra’s sister (she had already murdered her brother).

Herod, too, had ridden hastily to Antony. As a young cavalry commander in Egypt, the general had been cultivated by Herod’s father. He therefore appointed Herod and his brother as the real rulers of Judaea with High Priest Hyrcanus as the figurehead. Herod celebrated his rising power with a royal engagement. His fiancée was Mariamme, a Maccabean princess who, by family intermarriage, was the granddaughter of two kings. Her body, wrote Josephus, was as beautiful as her face. This relationship, played out in Jerusalem, would be passionately destructive.

Antony followed Cleopatra, now pregnant with his twins, to her capital, Alexandria. But, just as it appeared that Herod’s rise was assured, the Parthians invaded Syria. Antigonos, a Maccabean prince who was Hyrcanus’ nephew, offered the Parthians 1,000 talents and a harem of 500 girls in exchange for Jerusalem.

PACORUS: PARTHIAN SHOT

The Jewish city rose against the Roman puppets Herod and his brother Phasael. Besieged in the royal palace opposite the Temple, the brothers defeated the rebellion – but the Parthians were a different matter. Jerusalem was crowded with pilgrims – it was the Feast of Weeks – as Maccabean supporters opened the gates for the Parthian prince Pacorus
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and his protégé Antigonos. Jerusalem celebrated the return of the Maccabees.

The Parthians pretended to play the honest broker between Herod and Antigonos. Instead they lured Herod’s brother Phasael into a trap. Herod faced elimination as the Parthians looted the city and then handed power to Antigonos as king of Judaea and high priest.
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He mutilated his uncle Hyrcanus, cutting off his ears, to disqualify him from the high priesthood. As for Herod’s brother Phasael, he was either murdered or dashed out his own brains.

Herod had lost Jerusalem and his brother. He had backed the Romans, but it was the Parthians who had conquered the Middle East. A mercurial man, he was surely cyclothymic, if not a manic depressive. But his will to power, pungent intelligence, greed for life and instinct for survival were ferocious. He almost cracked up, but he overcame his nerves. By night, he gathered his entourage for a desperate escape, and a bid for power.

HEROD: ESCAPE TO CLEOPATRA

Herod, accompanied by his retinue – 500 concubines, his mother, sister, and, most importantly, his fiancée, the Maccabee princess Mariamme – galloped out of Jerusalem into the barren Judaean hills. King Antigonos, furious that Herod had escaped with his concubines (clearly the harem offered as payment to the Parthians) sent his cavalry in pursuit. As he fled through the hills, Herod again broke down and tried to commit suicide, but his guards snatched his raised sword. Soon afterwards Antigonos’ horsemen caught up with his caravan. Herod recovered his confidence and defeated them. Leaving his entourage in the impregnable mountain fortress of Masada, he himself escaped to Egypt.

Antony had already left for Rome, but Herod was welcomed by Queen Cleopatra, who offered him employment in a bid to keep him in Alexandria. Instead Herod sailed for Rome, accompanied by his fiancée’s little brother, Jonathan, a Maccabean prince who was his candidate for the Judaean throne. But Antony, who was now planning a war to expel the Parthians, realized that this was no job for a child; it would require Herod’s ruthless competence.

Antony and Octavian, his partner in ruling the empire, escorted Herod to the Senate where he was declared king of Judaea and Roman ally:
rex socius et amicus populi Romani
. The newly minted King Herod walked out of the Senate flanked by Octavian and Antony, the two pillars of the world, quite a moment for a half-Jew half-Arab from the mountains of Edom. His relationship with these two men would be the foundation of his forty-year reign of terror and magnificence. However, he was a long way from ruling a kingdom: the Parthians still occupied the east; Antigonos reigned in Jerusalem. To the Jews, Herod was a Roman stooge and Idumean mongrel. He would have to fight for every inch of his kingdom, and then Jerusalem.
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THE HERODS

40
BC
–
AD
10

THE FALL OF ANTIGONOS: LAST OF THE MACCABEANS

Herod sailed to Ptolemais, mustered an army and started to conquer his kingdom. When rebels held out in impregnable caves in Galilee, he lowered his troops in chests held by chains and, armed with hooks, these soldiers fished out his opponents and sent them hurtling into the canyons below. But Herod needed Antony’s support to take Jerusalem.

The Romans were driving back the Parthians. In 38
BC
, Antony himself was besieging a Parthian fortress at Samosata (south-eastern Turkey) when Herod marched north to offer, and ask for, help. The Parthians had ambushed Antony when Herod counter-attacked and saved the baggage-train. The bluff Antony welcomed Herod like an old comrade, affectionately hugging him in front of his army, paraded in honour of the young king of Judaea. The grateful Antony despatched 30,000 infantry and 6,000 cavalry to besiege Jerusalem in Herod’s name. As the Romans pitched camp just north of the Temple, Herod married the seventeen-year-old Mariamme. After a forty-day siege, the Romans stormed the outer wall. Two weeks later, they burst into the Temple, ravaging the city ‘like a company of madmen’, cutting down the Jerusalemites in the narrow streets. Herod had to bribe the Romans to stop the slaughter – and then sent the captured Antigonos to Antony who solicitously beheaded the last Maccabean king. The Roman strongman then set off to invade Parthia with 100,000 troops. His military prowess was much exaggerated; his expedition was a near-disaster, and he lost a third of his army. The survivors were saved by Cleopatra’s delivery of provisions. Antony’s reputation in Rome never quite recovered.

King Herod celebrated his conquest of Jerusalem by liquidating forty-five of the seventy-one members of the Sanhedrin. Demolishing the Baris Fortress north of the Temple, he built a square fortified tower with four turrets, the Antonia, named after his patron, and colossal enough to dominate the city. Nothing is left of the Antonia except traces of its stone-cut base, but we know what it must have been like because many of Herod’s fortresses survive: each of his mountain strongholds was designed to combine impregnable security with peerless luxury.
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Yet he never felt secure, and now he had to defend his kingdom from the intrigues of two queens, his own wife Mariamme – and Cleopatra.
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