Jewish War — Book 1

Josephus · a new plain-English translation from the Greek

The war of the Jews against the Romans was the greatest not only of the wars of our own time but, one might almost say, of all the wars between cities or between nations that report has handed down to us. Yet it has not been written up as it deserves. Some who were not present at the events have gathered up random and inconsistent hearsay and written it up in the manner of sophists; others who were present have falsified the facts, some out of flattery toward the Romans, some out of hatred for the Jews, so that their books contain now denunciation and now panegyric, but nowhere the precision of true history. I have therefore set myself, for the benefit of those who live under Roman rule, to render into Greek the account I had earlier composed in my native tongue and sent to the barbarians of the interior. I am Joseph, son of Matthias, a priest from Jerusalem, who fought against the Romans myself in the opening stages of the war and was present, of necessity, at everything that followed.

For when this vast upheaval broke out, the internal affairs of the Romans were in sickness, and the revolutionary party among the Jews, seizing the troubled times, rose up flourishing in both manpower and money — so much so that, amid the excess of turmoil, some regions of the East were gripped by hope of gain and others by fear of loss. The Jews hoped that their kinsmen beyond the Euphrates would rise with them, while on the Roman side the neighboring Gauls were restive and the Celtic country would not stay quiet; everything was full of disorder after Nero's death, and the moment tempted many to reach for the throne, while the armies, in hope of profit, longed for a change of masters. I thought it monstrous to let the truth wander astray amid events of such magnitude — to let the Parthians and Babylonians and the most distant Arabs, and our own kinsmen beyond the Euphrates, the Adiabenians, learn through my careful account exactly where the war began, through what sufferings it ran its course, and how it ended, while the Greeks and those Romans who took no part in the campaign remain ignorant of it, dependent on flattering or fictional accounts. And yet these writers have the nerve to entitle their works histories — works which, besides telling nothing sound, seem to me to miss their very purpose as well.

For they wish to make the Romans appear great, yet they constantly disparage and belittle the Jews. I do not see, however, how conquerors of the weak can be thought great. These writers respect neither the length of the war, nor the numbers of the exhausted Roman army, nor the stature of the generals who labored so hard around Jerusalem — labor which, I think, they find humiliating to their reputation if the achievement is made to look small. I, for my part, have no intention of competing with those who exalt Rome by inflating the deeds of my own people. I will set out the actions of both sides with precision, but the reflections that arise from the events I reserve for my own feelings, allowing myself to grieve over the calamities of my country. That internal strife destroyed her, and that it was the tyrants of the Jews who drew down the unwilling hands of the Romans and the fire onto the Temple, Caesar Titus himself, the very man who sacked the city, can testify: throughout the whole war he pitied the populace held under guard by the insurgents, and often deliberately postponed the city's capture, giving the siege more time so the guilty might yet repent.

If anyone should charge me with slander for the things I say against the tyrants and their banditry, or for lamenting my country's misfortunes, let him excuse the feeling, even if it goes against the rule of history. For of all the cities under Roman rule, ours rose to the greatest prosperity, and fell back again to the depths of disaster. Indeed, measured against the calamities of the Jews, I think all the misfortunes of every age since the beginning of the world are found wanting. And no foreigner was to blame for them, so that it was impossible to master one's grief. If some judge should prove harsher than pity allows, let him assign the events to history and the lamentations to the writer.

And yet I might justly reproach the learned men of Greece, who, though events of such magnitude occurred in their own time — events that make the wars of old look small by comparison — sit in judgment on them, carping at those who strove to record them, though in eloquence they may surpass, in purpose they fall short. Instead, they write about the Assyrians and the Medes, as though the ancient historians had told those stories none too well. Yet they fall as far short of those old writers in power of composition as they do in seriousness of purpose. For the ancients each strove to write of their own times, precisely because presence at the events gave their account vividness, and lying in front of those who knew the truth would have been shameful. But to preserve past events for memory, and to hand down the record of one's own age to those who come after, is worthy of praise and gratitude. A man is not industrious merely for reworking someone else's arrangement and structure, but only if, while saying something new, he builds the very body of his history as his own.

For my part, at very great expense and labor, I, a foreigner, dedicate to Greeks and Romans alike this record of great achievements. But among our own people, the mouth and tongue that gape wide open at once over profits and lawsuits are struck dumb the moment it comes to history, where one must speak the truth and gather the facts with much labor; they yield the field to the weaker sort, men who do not even know how to write of the deeds of their leaders. Let the truth of history, then, be honored among us, since it has been neglected among the Greeks.

As for tracing the ancient history of the Jews — who they were, how they departed from Egypt, what country they wandered through and how much of it they later occupied, and how they migrated from it — I judged this untimely now, and in any case superfluous, since many Jews before me have set out the history of our ancestors with precision, and some Greeks too, translating those accounts into their own tongue, have not strayed far from the truth. I will begin my narrative where those writers and our own prophets left off. Of what follows, I will treat the war of my own time in greater detail and with as much thoroughness as I can manage, while the events before my own lifetime I will run through briefly:

how Antiochus, called Epiphanes, took Jerusalem by force, held it for three years and six months, and was driven out of the country by the sons of Asamoneus; how their descendants, quarreling over the kingship, then drew the Romans and Pompey into their affairs; and how Herod, son of Antipater, brought in Sosius and put an end to their dynasty; how the people rose in rebellion after Herod's death, while Augustus governed the Romans and Quintilius Varus held the country; and how, in the twelfth year of Nero's reign, the war broke out — the events involving Cestius, and all that the Jews accomplished by arms in their first onslaughts, and how they fortified the surrounding towns; and how Nero, alarmed at Cestius's setbacks for the whole enterprise, put Vespasian in charge of the war; how Vespasian, with the elder of his sons, invaded the land of the Jews with what forces of the Romans he used, and how many allies were cut down throughout Galilee; and how, of its cities, some he took entirely by force and others by surrender — at which point I will also describe the discipline of the Romans in war and the training of their legions, the extent and nature of both Galilees, the boundaries of Judaea, and further the peculiar character of the country, its lakes and springs, and the sufferings that befell each captured city, described with precision, as I saw them or endured them myself —

for I will not conceal even my own misfortunes, since I mean to speak to people who already know them. Then, how, with the Jews' fortunes already failing, Nero died, and Vespasian, having set out for Jerusalem, was drawn back by his elevation to supreme power; the signs that appeared to him concerning this, and the revolutions at Rome, and how he himself was proclaimed emperor by the soldiers against his own will, and, on his departure to administer the whole empire, how sedition broke out among the Jews, how the tyrants rose up against them, and their quarrels with one another. And how Titus, setting out from Egypt, invaded the country a second time; what forces he gathered, where and how many; and in what state internal strife had left the city at his arrival; how many assaults he mounted and how many earthworks he raised; the circuits of the three walls and their measurements; the strength of the city, and the layout of the sanctuary and the Temple, and further the measurements of the altar as well, all with precision; certain customs of the festivals, the seven purifications, and the priests' ministrations; and further the vestments of the priests and of the high priest, and the character of the Temple's holy place — concealing nothing and adding nothing to what has been discovered.

Next I will set out the cruelty of the tyrants toward their own countrymen and the restraint of the Romans toward foreigners, and how often Titus, wishing to save the city and the Temple, invited the insurgents to come to terms; and I will distinguish the sufferings of the populace and the calamities they endured — however many were brought low and captured by war, by internal strife, or by famine. Nor will I pass over the misfortunes of the deserters, or the punishments of the captives; how the Temple was burned against Caesar's will, and how much of the sacred treasures was seized from the fire; the capture of the whole city and the signs and portents that preceded it; the captivity of the tyrants, the number of those enslaved, and the fate to which each was allotted; and how the Romans went on to deal with what remained of the war and tore down the fortified strongholds; Titus's traversal of the whole country, restoring order to it; and finally his return to Italy and his triumph.

All this I have set out in seven books, leaving no ground for reproach or accusation to those who know the facts and were present at the war — at least to those who love the truth — for I have written it not to please, but as it happened. I will make this the beginning of my narrative, the same beginning I gave among my chapter headings.

When strife broke out among the powerful men of the Jews, at the time when Antiochus, called Epiphanes, was contending with Ptolemy the Sixth for possession of the whole of Syria, their rivalry turned on supremacy, each man of rank refusing to submit to his equals: Onias, one of the high priests, gained the upper hand and expelled the sons of Tobias from the city. They fled to Antiochus and begged him to use them as guides and invade Judaea. The king agreed, having long been eager to do so, and setting out himself with a very great force, he took the city by storm and killed a great number of Ptolemy's partisans. Letting his soldiers loose without restraint to plunder, he himself pillaged the Temple and put a stop to the daily sacrifice for three years and six months. The high priest Onias fled to Ptolemy and, receiving from him a place in the district of Heliopolis, founded a small town modeled on Jerusalem and built a temple like it there — of which we will speak again in its proper place.

But for Antiochus, neither his unexpected mastery of the city nor the plundering and the great slaughter were enough. Overcome by the violence of his passions, and remembering what he had suffered during the siege, he tried to force the Jews to abandon their ancestral laws, to leave their infants uncircumcised, and to sacrifice swine upon the altar. All refused, and the most eminent among them were slaughtered. Bacchides, the garrison commander sent by Antiochus, adding to his natural cruelty these impious orders, left no excess of lawlessness untried, torturing the notable men one by one and daily displaying to the city, as a group, the spectacle of its own coming ruin.

Until, driven by the excess of these wrongs, he goaded the sufferers into daring resistance. Mattathias, then, son of Asamoneus, one of the priests, from a village called Modein, gathered his own household about him — for he had five sons — and killed Bacchides with daggers. Then, fearing at once the numbers of the garrison, he fled to the mountains; but as many of the people joined him, he took heart and came down again.

He met the generals of Antiochus in battle and defeated them, driving them out of Judaea. Passing from success to power, and, because he had freed his people from foreign rule, ruling them now with their own consent, he died, leaving the leadership to Judas, the eldest of his sons. Judas, supposing that Antiochus would not remain quiet, mustered the forces of the region and was the first to make an alliance with the Romans; and when Epiphanes invaded the country again, he repelled him with a heavy blow.

Fresh from this success, he moved against the garrison in the city, which had not yet been dislodged, and, driving the soldiers out of the upper city, forced them back into the lower — the part of the town called the Acra. Having gained control of the Temple, he cleansed the whole precinct and walled it round, had new vessels made for its ministrations and brought them into the sanctuary, since the old ones had been defiled, built another altar, and began the sacrifices anew. But just as the city was recovering its sacred order, Antiochus died, and his son, also named Antiochus, inherited both the kingdom and the hatred toward the Jews.

Gathering fifty thousand infantry, five thousand cavalry, and eighty elephants, he invaded Judaea through the hill country. He took the small town of Bethsura, and at a place called Beth-Zachariah, where the pass was narrow, Judas met him with his forces. But before the lines could close, his brother Eleazar, catching sight of the tallest of the elephants, adorned with a great tower and gilded outworks, and supposing Antiochus himself to be mounted upon it, ran far out ahead of his own men, cut through the enemy's ranks, and made his way to the elephant.

He could not reach the man he took for the king, because of the height, but he struck the beast under the belly, bringing it crashing down upon himself; he was crushed and died, having accomplished nothing more than

He had set his heart on great deeds and put fame ahead of his own life. Yet the man who drove the elephant was only a common soldier, and even if it had been Antiochus himself, the one who dared this would have gained nothing more than the appearance of choosing death in hope of a glorious success. The whole battle turned into an omen for his brother as well, since the Jews fought hard and held out for a long time, but the king's forces, superior in numbers and favored by fortune, prevailed, and after killing many of them Judas took the survivors and fled to the district of Gophna.

Antiochus advanced to Jerusalem and stayed there a few days, but withdrew for lack of provisions, leaving behind a garrison he judged sufficient and marching the rest of his army off to winter in Syria. Once the king had withdrawn, Judas did not rest. Many from the nation joined him, and gathering up those who had survived the battle, he engaged Antiochus's generals at the village of Adasa. There he proved himself outstanding in the fighting, killed many of the enemy, and was himself killed, and a few days later his brother John was murdered through a plot by men loyal to Antiochus.

His brother Jonathan succeeded him. He kept a watchful guard over affairs with the local population, strengthened his rule through friendship with the Romans, and made a treaty with the son of Antiochus. None of this, however, was enough to secure him. Trypho, the usurper who served as guardian of Antiochus's son but had long been plotting against him, tried to remove Jonathan's friends: when Jonathan came to Ptolemais with a small escort to meet Antiochus, Trypho seized him by treachery, put him in chains, and marched on Judea. But he was driven off by Simon, Jonathan's brother, and in his rage at the defeat he killed Jonathan.

Simon took command with distinction. He captured Gazara, Joppa, and Jamnia, towns in the neighborhood, and, after overcoming its garrison, razed the citadel as well. He then became an ally of Antiochus against Trypho, whom Antiochus was besieging at Dora before his campaign against the Medes. But helping to destroy Trypho did nothing to check the king's greed: not long after, Antiochus sent his general Cendebaeus with an army to ravage Judea and subdue Simon. Although now an old man, Simon conducted the war with youthful vigor. He sent his sons ahead with the strongest of his men, while he himself took a division of the army and advanced by another route. Setting many ambushes in the hills, he succeeded in every plan and won a brilliant victory. He was declared high priest, and one hundred and seventy years after the Macedonian domination began, he freed the Jews from it.

But he too died by treachery, murdered at a banquet by Ptolemy his son-in-law, who had shut up Simon's wife and two of his sons and sent men to kill the third, John, who was also called Hyrcanus. Learning of the attempt in advance, the young man hurried to reach the city, relying above all on the people's memory of his father's achievements and their hatred of Ptolemy's lawlessness.

Ptolemy also tried to enter by another gate, but was quickly driven back by the people, who had already welcomed Hyrcanus. He withdrew at once to one of the strongholds above Jericho called Dagon. Hyrcanus, having recovered his father's high priesthood and offered sacrifice to God, hastened against Ptolemy to help his mother and brothers, and, attacking the fortress, had the upper hand in every other respect but was defeated by his own sense of justice. Whenever Ptolemy was hard pressed, he brought Hyrcanus's mother and brothers up onto the wall in plain view, tortured them, and threatened to throw them down unless Hyrcanus withdrew at once. At this, pity and fear overcame Hyrcanus's anger, but his mother gave in neither to the torments nor to the death threatened against her; she stretched out her hands and begged her son not to be swayed by her outrage into sparing that godless man, since for her a death at Ptolemy's hands, exacting punishment for the crimes he had committed against their house, was better than immortality.

Whenever John recalled his mother's fortitude and heard her pleading, he was moved to press the attack, but whenever he saw her being beaten and torn, he grew soft and was overcome entirely by his feelings. Because the siege dragged on for this reason, the sabbatical year set in, which the Jews leave fallow every seven years just as they rest on the seventh day. During this time Ptolemy, released from the siege, killed John's brothers along with their mother and fled to Zeno, surnamed Cotylas, who was tyrant of Philadelphia.

Antiochus, angered by what he had suffered at Simon's hands, marched into Judea and besieged Hyrcanus, laying siege to Jerusalem. Hyrcanus opened the tomb of David, who had been the wealthiest of kings, and removed from it more than three thousand talents of silver; with three hundred talents of this he persuaded Antiochus to lift the siege, and he became the first of the Jews to hire foreign mercenaries out of his surplus wealth.

Later, when Antiochus campaigned against the Medes, this gave Hyrcanus his chance for revenge, and he at once set out against the cities of Syria, expecting to find them stripped of their best fighting men, which proved correct. He himself captured Medaba and Samaga along with their neighboring towns, as well as Shechem and Gerizim, and along with these the nation of the Cuthaeans, who lived around the temple built in imitation of the one in Jerusalem. He also took a good many towns in Idumea, including Adora and Marisa. He advanced as far as Samaria, where the city of Sebaste now stands, built by King Herod, and after walling it in on every side, he set his sons Aristobulus and Antigonus over the siege. When the Samaritans refused to yield, famine drove the people in the city to eat food unfit even to be named. They called on Antiochus, surnamed Aspendius, to help them, and he readily agreed, but was defeated by Aristobulus's forces. Pursued by the brothers as far as Scythopolis, he escaped, while they turned back against the Samaritans, shut the whole population up inside the wall again, and, after taking the city, razed it to the ground and enslaved its inhabitants.

With their successes still mounting, they did not slacken their drive, but pressed on with the army as far as Scythopolis, overran it, and divided up between them the whole region south of Mount Carmel. But envy at the good fortune of John and his sons stirred up sedition among the local population, and many gathered against them and would not stay quiet until they were driven to open war and defeated.

For the rest of his life John lived in prosperity, managed the affairs of his rule in the finest way, and died after thirty-three years, leaving five sons, truly blessed and allowed by fortune no grounds whatever for complaint on his own account. He alone possessed the three greatest things: rule over the nation, the high priesthood, and the gift of prophecy. For the divine spoke with him, so that he was ignorant of nothing that was to come; indeed, he foresaw and foretold concerning two of his elder sons that they would not remain masters of affairs. Their downfall deserves to be told, showing how far they fell short of their father's good fortune.

After their father's death, the eldest, Aristobulus, converted the rule into a kingship and was the first to put on the diadem, four hundred and seventy-one years and three months after the people had returned to their own land, freed from slavery in Babylon. Of his brothers, he kept the one next to him in age, Antigonus, whom he appeared to love, on an equal footing with himself, but the others he had chained and imprisoned. He also imprisoned his mother, who disputed his authority with him, for John had left her as mistress of the whole realm, and he carried his cruelty so far that he let her die of starvation in chains.

Retribution for these acts fell in turn on his brother Antigonus, whom he loved and had made partner in the kingship; for he killed him too, on the strength of slanders concocted by wicked men at court. At first Aristobulus disbelieved what they said, both because he loved his brother and because he attributed much of what was being reported to envy. But when Antigonus, splendid from a military campaign, arrived for the festival at which it is the ancestral custom to build booths for God, it happened that Aristobulus fell ill in those very days, and Antigonus, at the close of the festival, went up as magnificently equipped as possible with the armed men around him, chiefly to honor his brother.

At that moment the wicked men went to the king and told him about the parade of armed men and about Antigonus's bearing, greater than that of a private citizen, saying that he had come with so large a force in order to kill him, since he could not bear holding mere honor from the kingship when it was in his power to seize it outright. Little by little, and against his will, Aristobulus was won over by these reports, and, taking care that his suspicion should not become apparent and arranging in advance against the uncertain outcome, he stationed his bodyguards in one of the dim underground chambers—he himself was then lodging in the fortress once called Baris, later renamed Antonia—with orders to leave Antigonus alone if he came unarmed, but to kill him if he approached in arms, and he sent men to Antigonus telling him in advance to come unarmed.

At this the queen, with great cunning, conspired with the plotters: they persuaded the messengers sent to Antigonus to say nothing of what the king had actually said, but instead to tell Antigonus that his brother, hearing he had prepared magnificent arms and military equipment for him in Galilee, was prevented by his illness from inspecting it himself, and that now, since Antigonus was about to leave, he would be delighted to see him in his armor.

Hearing this, and led on by his brother's evident affection to suspect nothing wicked, Antigonus went forward in his arms as if for a display. But when he reached the dark passage called the Tower of Strato, he was killed by the bodyguards, proving beyond doubt that slander destroys every kind of goodwill and natural affection, and that of all good feelings none is so strong as to hold out forever against envy.

One might well marvel, in this connection, at Judas, an Essene by birth, who was never once mistaken or found false in his predictions. When he saw Antigonus passing through the temple on that very day, he cried out to his companions—and there were not a few of them sitting with him, students of his teaching—"Ah, how good it would be for me to die now, since the truth has died before me and one of my own predictions has proved false: for this Antigonus is alive today, though he was fated to be killed."

The place fixed for his slaughter was Strato's Tower, and that place is six hundred stadia from here, and it is already the fourth hour of the day; the time itself refutes the prophecy. Having said this, the old man remained troubled and downcast, and shortly afterward news came that Antigonus had been killed in the underground chamber which was itself also called Strato's Tower, sharing its name with the coastal city of Caesarea. This, then, was what threw the seer into confusion.

As for Aristobulus, remorse for his crime struck him at once with sickness, and with his mind forever troubled by the thought of the murder, he wasted away until his innards, torn apart by his unmixed grief, brought up a great quantity of blood. One of the attendants carrying this away slipped, by some divine providence, at the very spot where Antigonus had been slaughtered, and poured out the blood of the murderer onto the bloodstains from the killing still visible there. At once a cry of grief rose from those who saw it, as though the young man had deliberately poured a libation of blood on that very spot. Hearing the outcry, the king asked the reason.

When no one dared to speak, he pressed all the harder, wanting to learn the truth, until at last, under threats and force, they told him what had happened. He filled his eyes with tears, and, groaning with all the strength left in him, said, "So then I was not going to escape the great eye of God as I committed unholy deeds, but swift justice pursues me for the blood of my own kin. How much longer, most shameless body, will you hold on to a soul condemned by a brother and a mother? How much longer shall I pour out my own blood to them drop by drop? Let them take it all at once, and let the divine no longer mock itself with libations poured from my own entrails." With these words he died at once, having reigned no more than a year.

His wife released his brothers and made Alexander king, the one who seemed to surpass the others both in age and in moderation. On taking power, he killed one of his brothers, who aspired to the throne, and kept the one who remained, content to live without meddling in affairs, in private life. He also fought a battle against Ptolemy, surnamed Lathyrus, who had taken the city of Ashocis; he killed many of the enemy, but the victory tipped in Ptolemy's favor. After Ptolemy was driven off by his mother Cleopatra and withdrew to Egypt, Alexander took Gadara by siege, and Amathus as well, the greatest of the strongholds beyond the Jordan, which held the most valuable possessions of Theodorus son of Zeno.

But Theodorus fell on him without warning, recovered his own property along with the king's baggage train, and killed as many as ten thousand of the Jews. Alexander recovered from the blow, however, and, turning toward the coast, took Gaza, Raphia, and Anthedon, later renamed Agrippias by King Herod. After he had enslaved the populations of these towns, the Jewish people rose against him at a festival—for it is above all at their feasts that sedition takes hold among them—and it seems he would not have gotten the better of the plot had his foreign troops, Pisidians and Cilicians, not come to his aid; for he would not accept Syrians as mercenaries because of their inborn hostility toward the nation.

After killing more than six thousand of the rebels, he turned against Arabia, and, conquering the Gileadites and the Moabites there, imposed tribute on them and returned to Amathus. When Theodorus, terrified by his successes, abandoned the fortress, Alexander took it deserted and razed it. Then, engaging Obedas king of the Arabs, who had set an ambush for him in the region of Gaulanitis, he fell into the trap and lost his whole

He lost his army there, crushed together in a deep ravine and trampled by the sheer mass of camels. He himself escaped to Jerusalem, but the scale of the disaster provoked a nation that already hated him into rebellion. Even so he proved stronger this time, and in a series of battles killed no fewer than fifty thousand Jews over six years. Yet he took no joy in these victories, since he was wearing down his own kingdom to win them. So he laid down his weapons and tried instead to come to terms with his subjects through negotiation.

But this only made them hate him more, both for his change of heart and for the unpredictability of his temper. When he asked what he could do to pacify them, they told him: die. A dead man might just possibly be reconciled to people he had wronged so grievously. At the same time they sent for Demetrius, known as Akairos. He readily answered their call, hoping for greater gains, and when he arrived with an army the Jews joined forces with his allies near Shechem.

Alexander met them both with a thousand cavalry and eight thousand mercenary infantry, along with about ten thousand Jews still loyal to him. His opponents had three thousand cavalry and fourteen thousand infantry. Before the armies clashed, the two kings tried, through public appeals, to win over each other's troops — Demetrius hoping to detach Alexander's mercenaries, Alexander hoping to win back the Jews fighting alongside Demetrius. But when neither the Jews nor the Greeks abandoned their loyalties, the matter was settled by arms. Demetrius won the battle, even though many of Alexander's mercenaries displayed great courage and skill.

Yet the outcome of the engagement turned out contrary to what either side expected: the very men who had summoned Demetrius did not stay with him even in victory, while six thousand Jews, moved to pity by Alexander's reversal of fortune, went over to him as he fled into the mountains. Demetrius could not withstand this shift; reckoning that Alexander was now capable of fighting again, and that the whole nation might drift back to him, he withdrew. Even so, the greater part of the people did not lay down their quarrel with Alexander once his allies had retreated, and the war against him went on relentlessly,

until, after killing great numbers, he drove the rest into the town of Bemeselis, took it too, and led the captives back to Jerusalem. His rage carried him, through sheer excess, into an act of impiety: of the prisoners he had taken, he crucified eight hundred in the middle of the city, and had their wives and children slaughtered before their eyes — all while he sat drinking, reclining among his concubines and looking on.

Such terror gripped the people that eight thousand of his opponents fled that very night beyond the borders of Judea altogether, and did not return until Alexander's death. Only by such deeds did he manage, late and with difficulty, to bring peace to his kingdom and lay down his arms.

Then a new source of turmoil arose: Antiochus, also called Dionysus, a brother of Demetrius and the last of the line of Seleucus. Alexander, fearing that Antiochus, who had set out to campaign against the Arabs, might turn against him instead, dug a deep trench across the stretch of land between the hill country above Antipatris and the shore at Joppa, raised a high wall in front of the trench, and built wooden towers to block off the easy points of entry. But this did not succeed in stopping Antiochus: he burned the towers, filled in the trench, and drove his army through with the rest of his force.

Setting aside for the moment his revenge on the man who had tried to hinder him, he marched at once against the Arabs. Their king withdrew into the more favorable parts of the country for battle, then suddenly wheeled his cavalry — ten thousand strong — and fell upon Antiochus's disordered troops. In the fierce battle that followed, so long as Antiochus lived his army held its ground, even though the Arabs were cutting them down without mercy.

But once he fell — for he had always been the first to risk himself in support of his hard-pressed men — the whole army broke. Most of them perished, either in the battle itself or in the flight that followed, and those who escaped to the village of Kana all died there, save a few, for lack of provisions. After this, the people of Damascus, out of hatred for Ptolemy son of Mennaeus, invited Aretas in and made him king of Coele-Syria.

He marched against Judea, defeated Alexander in battle, and then withdrew under a treaty. Alexander, for his part, took Pella, then advanced on Gerasa, again coveting Theodorus's possessions; he walled the garrison off with a triple line of siege-works and took the place by force. He also subdued Golan, Seleucia, and the region called the Ravine of Antiochus.

In addition he captured the strong fortress of Gamala, removed its commander Demetrius from office on numerous charges, and returned to Judea, having completed three years of campaigning. The nation welcomed him gladly because of his successes, but the very rest from war brought on the beginning of an illness. Afflicted by fevers that recurred every fourth day, he thought he could shake off the sickness by throwing himself once more into action.

So he committed himself to ill-timed campaigns, forcing his body beyond its strength for the sake of activity, and it gave out. He died, in fact, in the midst of turmoil, having reigned twenty-seven years. He left the kingdom to his wife Alexandra, convinced that the Jews would submit to her more readily than to anyone else, since she was as far removed as possible from his own cruelty and had opposed his lawless acts, which had won her the people's goodwill.

And her hope was not disappointed: the woman held the throne securely, on the strength of her reputation for piety. She was scrupulous above all in observing the ancestral law, and from the outset excluded from public life those who transgressed the sacred laws. She had two sons by Alexander. The elder, Hyrcanus, she appointed high priest, both because of his age and because he was

too sluggish by nature to trouble himself with affairs of state generally; the younger, Aristobulus, she kept as a private citizen because of his fiery temperament. Into her administration crept the Pharisees, a group of Jews reputed to be more scrupulously pious than the rest and more exact in their exposition of the laws. Alexandra deferred to them to an extraordinary degree, being wholly given over to religion. They, for their part, gradually took advantage of the woman's simplicity,

until they had become, in effect, the administrators of the whole state, free to banish and recall whomever they wished, to release and to imprison. In short, the enjoyment of royal power was theirs, while the expense and the difficulties fell to Alexandra. She proved formidable in managing the larger affairs of state: she kept building up her forces until she had doubled them, and gathered no small body of foreign troops, so that she not only held her own nation in check

but was also feared by foreign rulers. Yet while she ruled everyone else, the Pharisees ruled her. They put to death, for instance, a certain Diogenes, a prominent man who had been a friend of Alexander, charging him with having advised the king in the matter of the eight hundred men who had been crucified. They kept pressing Alexandra to have the rest of those who had provoked Alexander against the victims put to death as well; and yielding

to her own superstitious fear, she let them kill whomever they pleased. Those in danger who seemed to be of the highest standing fled to Aristobulus, and he persuaded his mother to spare them, out of respect for their rank, but to send them out of the city if she did not consider them innocent. So, once granted this reprieve, they scattered throughout the country. Alexandra also sent an army against Damascus, on the pretext that Ptolemy

was continually harassing the city, but it accomplished nothing of note. She also won over, through treaties and gifts, Tigranes, king of Armenia, who was encamped before Ptolemais and besieging Cleopatra. But he broke off the siege because of unrest at home, after Lucullus had invaded Armenia. Meanwhile, while Alexandra lay ill, her younger son Aristobulus seized the moment, gathered his household servants — of whom he had many,

all devoted to him because of his fiery spirit — and took control of every fortress in the land. With the money these yielded he gathered mercenaries and had himself proclaimed king. Hyrcanus, distressed at this, was pitied by his mother, who confined Aristobulus's wife and children in the Antonia — a fortress adjoining the northern side of the Temple, formerly called, as I have said, the Baris,

but later renamed, once Antony came to prominence, just as, from Augustus and Agrippa, the cities Sebaste and Agrippias took their names. Before Alexandra could move against Aristobulus for overturning his brother's rule, she died, having governed for nine years. Hyrcanus was heir to the whole kingdom, which she had entrusted to him even while she lived, but Aristobulus surpassed him in power and in spirit.

When the two came to a decisive clash near Jericho, most of Hyrcanus's men deserted him and went over to Aristobulus. Hyrcanus, with those who remained loyal, managed to escape first to the Antonia and seize control of the hostages held there for security — these being Aristobulus's wife and children. Before the affair could turn to real bloodshed, however, the brothers reached an agreement: Aristobulus would be king, while Hyrcanus, stepping aside,

would enjoy every other honor due to a king's brother. On these terms they were reconciled in the Temple, and, with the people standing around them, embraced each other warmly and exchanged houses — Aristobulus moving into the palace, and Hyrcanus withdrawing into Aristobulus's own house. But fear now fell upon the rest of Aristobulus's opponents, since he had won power against all expectation, and above all upon Antipater, who had long been his enemy.

Antipater was an Idumaean by birth, and by virtue of his ancestry, his wealth, and his general power he stood foremost among his people. It was he who persuaded Hyrcanus, once he had taken refuge with Aretas, king of Arabia, to try to recover his kingdom, and who persuaded Aretas to receive Hyrcanus and restore him to power — heaping abuse on Aristobulus's character, and praising Hyrcanus at length,

urging Aretas to receive him, and arguing that it was fitting for the ruler of so splendid a kingdom to extend a helping hand to a man who had been wronged — and Hyrcanus had indeed been wronged, deprived of the rule that belonged to him by right of primogeniture. Having thus prepared them both, he took Hyrcanus by night and slipped away from the city, and by hard, continuous flight made it safely to the place called Petra, the royal seat of Arabia. There he handed Hyrcanus

over to Aretas, and by much flattering conversation and many gifts persuaded him to supply a force to restore him. This force numbered fifty thousand, infantry and cavalry combined, and against it Aristobulus could not hold his ground; defeated in the first engagement, he was driven back into Jerusalem. He would soon have been taken by storm, had not Scaurus, the Roman commander, intervened at just that moment

and lifted the siege. Scaurus had been sent into Syria from Armenia by Pompey the Great, who was then at war with Tigranes; arriving at Damascus, which had recently been captured by Metellus and Lollius, he removed them from it, and, once he learned of events in Judea, hurried there as if to seize a windfall. As soon as he entered the country, envoys came to him at once from each of the brothers, each begging for his help.

But three hundred talents from Aristobulus outweighed the claims of justice: on receiving this sum, Scaurus sent word to Hyrcanus and the Arabs, threatening them with Rome and Pompey if they did not lift the siege. Aretas, alarmed, withdrew from Judea to Philadelphia, and Scaurus went back to Damascus. But Aristobulus was not content merely to have avoided capture; he gathered his whole force

and pursued the retreating enemy. Engaging them near the place called Papyron, he killed more than six thousand, among them Phallion, the brother of Antipater. Hyrcanus and Antipater, stripped of Arab support, now shifted their hopes to the other side; and when Pompey, advancing through Syria, arrived at Damascus, they took refuge with him, and, setting gifts aside, used the same arguments they had used with Aretas,

pleading with him to detest Aristobulus's violence and to restore to the kingship the man to whom it belonged, both by character and by seniority. Nor was Aristobulus slow to act; trusting in the bribe he had given Scaurus, he too presented himself, arrayed as splendidly as a king could be. But he found it beneath him to court favor in this way, and, unwilling to lower himself to the demands of the moment, he withdrew from the city

of Dium. Pompey, angered by this, and moved besides by the entreaties of Hyrcanus's party, set out against Aristobulus, bringing with him the Roman army and a large body of allied troops from Syria. Passing by Pella and Scythopolis, he reached Coreae, from which point, going inland, the territory of the Jews begins, and there he heard that Aristobulus had taken refuge at Alexandreium, a fortress

built with the greatest lavishness, set on a high mountain. He sent orders for Aristobulus to come down. The king, though summoned, felt the impulse — natural to one used to command — to risk everything rather than obey; but seeing that his people were terrified, and with his friends urging him to consider that Rome's power was irresistible, he yielded to their advice, went down to Pompey, made a long defense of his right to rule, and then returned to the fortress. Then again,

at his brother's renewed challenge, he came down, spoke on the justice of his claims, and departed again, Pompey raising no objection. He was caught between hope and fear: he would come down as if to persuade Pompey to concede everything to him, and then go back up to the citadel, so as not to seem to have given himself up too soon. But when Pompey finally ordered him to surrender his fortresses, and instructed the garrison commanders — who were bound to obey only written orders in his own hand —

he forced Aristobulus to write to each of them, telling them to withdraw. Aristobulus did as he was ordered, but in anger withdrew to Jerusalem and began preparing for war against Pompey. Pompey, giving him no time to prepare, followed at once, his resolve strengthened further by news, brought to him near Jericho, of the death of Mithridates. It was there, in Jericho, that the richest part of Judea is found, abundant in palms and in balsam,

which the people gather by slitting the trunks with sharp stones and collecting what oozes, weeping, from the cuts. Pompey camped there one evening, and at dawn hastened toward Jerusalem. Terrified at his approach, Aristobulus came to him as a suppliant, promising money and offering to submit himself and the city, and so managed to calm Pompey's anger. But none of what had been agreed came to pass:

for the men loyal to Aristobulus would not even let Gabinius, who had been sent to collect the money, into the city. Furious at this, Pompey kept Aristobulus under guard, went up to the city himself, and surveyed it to determine how best to attack — seeing that the strength of its walls made it hard to approach, that the ravine before them was formidable, and that the Temple within the ravine was fortified more strongly still, so that even if the city itself fell, there would be a second

This was a refuge for the defenders. For a long time the people inside were undecided, until factional strife broke out: Aristobulus's supporters wanted to fight and rescue the king, while Hyrcanus's supporters wanted to open the gates to Pompey. Fear of Roman discipline drove many of the people to side with the latter. Beaten, Aristobulus's party withdrew into the temple and cut away the bridge connecting it to the city, preparing to hold out to the end.

The other faction let the Romans into the city and handed over the palace. Pompey sent in one of his own officers, Piso, with a force to take charge of these; Piso stationed garrisons through the city, and since he could not persuade by argument any of those who had fled into the temple to come to terms, he made the surrounding ground ready for an assault, with Hyrcanus's men eager in both planning and service. Pompey himself set up on the north side, filling the ditch and the whole ravine there, his troops hauling in timber from everywhere. It was hard to fill the ravine, its depth being immense and the Jews blocking every attempt from above; the work would have gone on forever for the Romans had Pompey not watched for the Sabbaths, on which the Jews, out of religious scruple, refrain from all labor. He raised his siege-mound on those days, keeping his soldiers back from hand-to-hand fighting, since on the Sabbath the Jews defend only their own persons. Once the ravine was filled, he set high towers on the mound, brought up the siege engines shipped from Tyre, and began battering the wall; the defenders' stone-throwers kept driving off those working from above. The towers on this side held out longest, being finer and larger than the rest.

The Romans suffered heavily here, and Pompey marveled at the Jews' endurance in general, and above all at how they let nothing interrupt their worship even amid a hail of missiles. As if the city were at perfect peace, the daily sacrifices, libations, and every rite of divine service were carried out to the last detail, and even at the moment of capture, while being cut down beside the altar, they did not abandon their daily observances. In the third month of the siege the Romans finally brought down one of the towers and broke into the temple. The first man bold enough to scale the wall was Faustus Cornelius, son of Sulla, followed by two centurions, Furius and Fabius, each with his own company; surrounding the temple on every side, they killed some as they fled for refuge to the sanctuary, others as they made a brief stand. Many priests, seeing the enemy bearing down on them swords in hand, stayed calmly at their duties and were cut down while pouring libations and burning incense, putting the service of God above their own survival.

Most of the dead, though, fell at the hands of their own countrymen in the opposing faction, and many, in desperation, threw themselves from the cliffs; some near the wall, driven mad by their helplessness, set fires and burned along with them. Twelve thousand Jews were killed; very few Romans died, though more were wounded. Nothing in that catastrophe struck the nation harder than the exposure, by foreigners, of the holy place that until then had been unseen. Pompey, with his staff, went into the sanctuary — a place only the high priest was permitted to enter — and viewed what was inside: the lampstand and its lamps, the table, the libation vessels, the censers, all of solid gold, a great heap of spices, and sacred treasure amounting to two thousand talents.

He touched none of this, nor any other sacred object, and the day after the capture he ordered the temple attendants to purify the sanctuary and resume the customary sacrifices. He then reappointed Hyrcanus high priest, both for the eagerness he had shown throughout the siege and because he had kept the population of the countryside from joining Aristobulus's war effort — by this, as a good commander should, he won the people's support more through goodwill than through fear. Among the captives was Aristobulus's father-in-law, who was also his uncle. Pompey executed by the axe those most responsible for the war, while rewarding Faustus and the men who had fought bravely with him with splendid decorations, and imposed tribute on the country and on Jerusalem.

He stripped the nation of the cities it had taken in Coele-Syria, placing them under the Roman governor appointed over that region, and confined the Jews within their own borders alone. He rebuilt Gadara, which the Jews had razed, as a favor to a certain Demetrius of Gadara, one of his own freedmen. He also freed from Jewish control the inland cities that had escaped destruction — Hippos, Scythopolis, Pella, Samaria, Jamnia, Marisa, Azotus, and Arethusa — and likewise the coastal cities of Gaza, Joppa, and Dora, along with the city once called Strato's Tower, later rebuilt with magnificent works by King Herod and renamed Caesarea. All of these he restored to their native inhabitants and assigned to the province of Syria.

He put this province, together with Judea and the territory as far as Egypt and the Euphrates, under Scaurus's administration, with two legions, while he himself hurried through Cilicia to Rome, bringing Aristobulus and his family as captives. Aristobulus had two daughters and two sons; one son, Alexander, escaped along the way, while the younger, Antigonus, was carried to Rome with his sisters.

Meanwhile Scaurus invaded Arabia but was kept from Petra by the difficult terrain, though he ravaged the surrounding country widely, suffering hardship in the process since his army was starving. Hyrcanus came to his aid by sending supplies through Antipater. Scaurus, knowing Antipater was on friendly terms with Aretas, sent him to negotiate an end to the war for money. The Arab king agreed to pay three hundred talents, and on these terms Scaurus withdrew his forces from Arabia.

Alexander, Aristobulus's son who had escaped from Pompey, in time gathered a considerable force and became a heavy burden to Hyrcanus, overrunning Judea; it seemed he would soon overthrow him, since he was already bold enough to attempt rebuilding the wall in Jerusalem that Pompey had torn down. But Gabinius, sent to Syria as Scaurus's successor, proved himself a capable man in many affairs and marched against Alexander. Alexander, alarmed at his approach, gathered an even larger force, amounting to ten thousand infantry and fifteen hundred cavalry, and fortified strategic places — Alexandreion, Hyrcania, and Machaerus, near the Arabian mountains.

Gabinius sent Mark Antony ahead with part of the army and himself followed with the whole force. Antipater's picked men and the rest of the Jewish contingent, commanded by Malichus and Peitholaus, joined Antony's officers and went out to meet Alexander; before long Gabinius arrived with the main body. Faced with the united enemy force, Alexander did not stand his ground but withdrew, and near Jerusalem was forced to give battle. He lost six thousand men in the fighting — three thousand killed and three thousand taken prisoner — and fled with the survivors to Alexandreion. When Gabinius arrived there and found many entrenched, he first tried, before fighting, to win them over by promising pardon for their offenses; when they would not listen to reason, he killed many of them and shut the rest up in the fortress. In this battle the commander Mark Antony distinguished himself, always brave everywhere but never so much as here.

Leaving men to reduce the fortress, Gabinius himself moved on, restoring cities that had not been destroyed and rebuilding those that had. At his order Scythopolis, Samaria, Anthedon, Apollonia, Jamnia, Raphia, Marisa, Adora, Gabala, Azotus, and many others were resettled, their inhabitants gladly flocking to each. After seeing to this, he returned to Alexandreion and pressed the siege harder, until Alexander, giving up on the whole enterprise, sent envoys asking pardon for his offenses and surrendered the captured fortresses — Hyrcania and Machaerus, and later Alexandreion as well. Gabinius, at the urging of Alexander's mother, demolished all of these so they could not again serve as a base for a second war; she came to appease Gabinius out of fear for the captives at Rome, her husband and her other children. After this, Gabinius brought Hyrcanus back to Jerusalem and entrusted him with the care of the temple, while setting the rest of the administration in the hands of the leading men.

He divided the whole nation into five councils, assigning one to Jerusalem, one to Gadara, one to render account at Amathus, a fourth allotted to Jericho, and for the fifth Sepphoris was designated a city of Galilee. The people, glad to be freed from rule by a single man, were governed from then on by an aristocracy.

Not long after, however, trouble began again for them: Aristobulus escaped from Rome and once more rallied many Jews to him, some eager for change, others devoted to him from before. At first he seized Alexandreion and tried to refortify it, but when Gabinius sent an army against him under Sisenna, Antony, and Servianus, he learned of it and withdrew to Machaerus. There he discharged the useless crowd and kept with him only the armed men, about eight thousand, among them Peitholaus, the former deputy commander at Jerusalem, who had deserted to him with a thousand men. The Romans pursued, and in the engagement that followed Aristobulus's men held out bravely for a long while, but at last, overwhelmed by the Romans, five thousand fell, about two thousand fled to a hill, and the remaining thousand, with Aristobulus, cut through the Roman line and made for Machaerus. There, on the first night, the king camped among the ruins, hoping to gather another force once the fighting eased, and fortified the stronghold as best he could; but when the Romans attacked, he held out for two days beyond what his strength allowed and was captured, along with his son Antigonus, who had fled with him from Rome. He was taken in chains to Gabinius, and from Gabinius back to Rome, where the Senate imprisoned him; his children, however, Gabinius sent on to Judea, having promised this by letter to Aristobulus's wife in exchange for the surrender of the strongholds.

When Gabinius was setting out to campaign against the Parthians, Ptolemy stood in his way; turning back from the Euphrates, Ptolemy led him down into Egypt, making full use along the way of Hyrcanus and Antipater for every need — Antipater supplied money, weapons, grain, and auxiliaries, and persuaded the Jews guarding the approaches at Pelusium to let Gabinius pass. Meanwhile the rest of Syria rose up at Gabinius's departure, and Alexander, Aristobulus's son, again incited the Jews to revolt; gathering a very large force, he set out to destroy every Roman in the country. Alarmed at this, Gabinius, who had just returned from Egypt in haste because of the disturbances there, sent Antipater ahead to some of the rebels and won them over by persuasion; but thirty thousand remained with Alexander, and he was determined to fight. So Gabinius marched out to battle; the Jews came to meet him, and in the clash near Mount Tabor ten thousand were killed and the rest of the multitude scattered in flight.

Gabinius then came to Jerusalem and settled the constitution as Antipater wished. From there he marched out, defeated the Nabateans in battle, and secretly sent away Mithridates and Orsanes, who had fled from the Parthians, though he told his soldiers they had escaped. At this point Crassus arrived as his successor and took over Syria. Setting out on his campaign against the Parthians, Crassus stripped away all the remaining gold from the temple at Jerusalem and carried off the two thousand talents that Pompey had left untouched. He crossed the Euphrates and there perished, along with his army — a matter not to be told here. After Crassus, Cassius checked the Parthians, who were eager to cross over into Syria, by escaping into the province and securing it.

He then hurried against the Jews, took Tarichaeae, and sold about thirty thousand Jews into slavery; he also killed Peitholaus, who was stirring up Aristobulus's partisans, and Antipater advised this killing. Antipater, who had married a woman of noble Arabian birth named Cypros, had four sons by her — Phasael and the future king Herod, and besides these, Joseph, Pheroras, and a daughter, Salome. He had won over the most powerful men everywhere with ties of friendship and hospitality, and above all the Arab king, through his marriage connection; and when he took up the war against Aristobulus, he sent his children to the Arab king for safekeeping. Cassius, having forced Alexander by treaty to keep the peace, returned to the Euphrates to block the Parthian crossing — a matter we shall speak of elsewhere.

Meanwhile Caesar, after Pompey and the Senate had fled across the Ionian Sea and he had made himself master of Rome and of the whole state, released Aristobulus from his chains, gave him two legions, and sent him quickly to Syria, hoping to win over that province and, through him, the affairs of Judea, with ease. But envy outran both Aristobulus's zeal and Caesar's hopes: he was poisoned by men loyal to Pompey, and for a long time was denied even burial in his native land — his body lay preserved in honey until Antony sent it to the Jews to be buried in the royal tombs. His son Alexander was also put to death, beheaded at Antioch by Scipio on Pompey's orders, after a formal charge was brought against him for the harm he had done to the Romans. His siblings were taken in by Ptolemy, son of Mennaeus, who ruled Chalcis under Lebanon; he sent his son Philippion to fetch them at Ascalon. Philippion took Antigonus and his sisters away from Aristobulus's widow and brought them to his father, but, smitten with love, married one of the sisters himself — and was afterward killed by his own father because of her, for Ptolemy killed his son and married Alexandra himself.

...because of this marriage he showed himself more solicitous toward his brothers-in-law.

After Pompey's death, Antipater changed sides and cultivated Caesar. When Mithridates of Pergamum, leading the force he was bringing against Egypt, was held up at Ascalon and blocked from the approaches to Pelusium, Antipater, drawing on his connections as a guest-friend, persuaded the Arabs to come to his aid and himself arrived leading close to three thousand Jewish men-at-arms. He also roused the powerful men of Syria to lend assistance—Ptolemy, the settler of the Lebanon, and Iamblichus—through whom the cities of that region readily joined the war effort.

Mithridates, now emboldened by the strength Antipater had added to him, marched on Pelusium, and when he was prevented from passing through, laid siege to the city. In the assault Antipater distinguished himself above all: breaching the section of the wall opposite him, he was the first to leap into the city with his men. Pelusium was taken. But as Mithridates pressed on, he was again blocked, this time by the inhabitants of the district called the Land of Onias—Jews of Egyptian residence. Antipater persuaded these not merely to stop obstructing but to supply the army with provisions, with the result that even the people of Memphis no longer offered resistance and instead went over to Mithridates of their own accord.

Mithridates, having now made his way round the Delta, engaged the rest of the Egyptians in battle at a place called the Camp of the Jews. He and his entire right wing were in danger in the fighting when Antipater came round along the riverbank and rescued him—for on his own side, holding the left wing, he had already prevailed—then fell upon the men pursuing Mithridates, killed many of them, and pursued the survivors so far that he even captured their camp. He lost only eighty of his own men, while Mithridates lost about eight hundred in the rout. Saved beyond his hope, Mithridates became an unstinting witness before Caesar to Antipater's achievements.

Caesar at that time spurred the man on with praise and with hopes for the dangers he would still face on his behalf; and in all of these Antipater proved the most reckless of fighters, wounded many times over nearly his whole body, bearing on it the marks of his courage. Later, when he had settled affairs in Egypt and returned to Syria, Caesar granted him Roman citizenship, exemption from taxation, and, out of honor and goodwill, made him an object of envy, and on his account confirmed Hyrcanus in the high priesthood as well.

About this same time Antigonus, son of Aristobulus, who was present before Caesar, unexpectedly became the cause of still greater advancement for Antipater. For rather than lamenting that his father seemed to have been poisoned over his quarrels with Pompey, and rather than reproaching Scipio's cruelty toward his brother, and mixing no envious passion into his plea for pity, he instead came forward and accused Hyrcanus and Antipater of this: that they had most lawlessly driven him and his brothers from all their ancestral land, and that out of excess they themselves had committed many outrages against the nation, and that the force they had sent to Egypt they had sent not out of goodwill toward Caesar but out of fear stemming from their old quarrels and to shed their friendship with Pompey.

In response to this Antipater tore off his cloak and displayed the number of his wounds, saying that concerning his goodwill toward Caesar there was no need of words on his part, for his body cried out even while he kept silent. As for Antigonus's audacity, he said he marveled at it—that a son of an enemy of Rome, and of a fugitive from Rome, with a hereditary bent for revolution and faction himself, should attempt to bring accusations against others before the Roman commander and try to gain some advantage, when he ought to be content simply to be alive; for even now he craved power not so much out of need as in order to come forward and set the Jews at odds with one another and use against those who had given him his opportunities the very resources they had given him. Hearing this, Caesar declared Hyrcanus the more worthy of the high priesthood, and gave Antipater his choice of office. Antipater, leaving the measure of his honor to the one who was honoring him, was appointed procurator of all Judea, and obtained in addition permission to rebuild the walls of his homeland, which had been torn down.

Caesar ordered these honors inscribed on the Capitol, as a mark both of his own justice and of the man's future merit. Antipater, having escorted Caesar out of Syria, returned to Judea. There he first rebuilt the wall of his homeland that Pompey had torn down, and then went about the country suppressing the disturbances that had broken out, acting toward each community both as one who threatens and as one who advises: that if they held to Hyrcanus's cause they would live in prosperity and quiet, enjoying their own possessions and the common peace; but if they were persuaded by the cold hopes of those bent on revolution for their own private gain, they would find him a master instead of a protector and Hyrcanus a tyrant instead of a king, and the Romans and Caesar enemies instead of rulers and friends—for they would not tolerate the removal from power of the man they themselves had installed.

Even as he said this he was in fact establishing his own control over the country, seeing that Hyrcanus was sluggish and too feeble for kingship. Phasael, the eldest of his sons, he appointed governor of Jerusalem and its surrounding district, and Herod, the next after him, though quite young, he sent out on equal terms to Galilee.

Herod, being by nature vigorous, immediately found material for his ambition. Catching Hezekiah, the brigand chief, who was overrunning the districts bordering Syria with a very large band, he seized and killed him along with many of the brigands. This above all won him the gratitude of the Syrians—indeed Herod was celebrated in the villages and in the cities as one who had restored peace to them and safeguarded their possessions. It was through this that he also became known to Sextus Caesar, a relative of the great Caesar and governor of Syria; and rivaling his brother's good repute, Phasael too competed in the same honorable contest, winning over the people of Jerusalem to greater goodwill toward himself, and though he held the city in his own hands, never abusing his power in any tasteless way. From this Antipater came to enjoy from the nation a royal court of attendance and honors from everyone as though he were master of all—yet he himself never shifted at all from his goodwill or loyalty toward Hyrcanus.

But it is impossible in times of prosperity to escape envy. Hyrcanus was already, quietly, on his own, being gnawed by resentment at the young men's renown, and above all he was distressed by Herod's successes and by the constant stream of messengers proclaiming each new triumph; and many of the envious men at court, whom either the sons' or Antipater's moderation had offended, incited him further, saying that in yielding affairs to Antipater and his sons he sat holding only the name of king, stripped of power—"How long will you go on being deceived into raising up kings against yourself? They no longer even pretend to be mere stewards—they are openly masters, having pushed you aside, since without your order, without your command, Herod has put to death so many men in violation of Jewish law. If he is not king but still a private citizen, he ought to come before the court and answer for himself, to you and to the ancestral laws, which do not permit the killing of men without trial."

By these words Hyrcanus was gradually inflamed, and finally, his anger breaking out, he summoned Herod to be tried. Herod, both because his father urged it and because circumstances allowed him confidence, went up, but first secured Galilee with garrisons. He went with a strong body of troops, so that he would neither seem, by bringing an impressive force, to be intent on overthrowing Hyrcanus, nor fall unguarded into the grip of envy. Sextus Caesar, fearing for the young man—lest, cut off among his enemies, he should come to harm—sent men to Hyrcanus expressly instructing him to acquit Herod of the capital charge; and Hyrcanus, who in any case was so inclined, for he loved Herod, voted for his acquittal.

Herod, however, supposing that he had escaped against the king's wishes, withdrew to Damascus, to Sextus, preparing not to obey again if summoned. And once more the wicked men provoked Hyrcanus, saying that Herod had gone off in anger and was making preparations against him. The king, believing this, did not know what to do, seeing that the disagreement had grown greater. But when Herod was appointed general of Coele-Syria and Samaria by Sextus Caesar, he became formidable, not only through the goodwill of the nation but through military power as well, and Hyrcanus fell into the utmost fear, expecting at any moment that he would march against him with an army.

Nor was he wrong in his surmise: Herod, in anger over the threat of that trial, gathered an army and led it against Jerusalem to depose Hyrcanus. And he would have done this without delay, had not his father and his brother gone out to meet him and checked his impulse, urging him to measure his vengeance by threat and menace alone, and to spare the king, through whom he had risen to such power. He ought, they said, if he had been provoked by being summoned to trial, at least to give thanks for his acquittal, and not meet harshness with harshness while being ungrateful for his deliverance; and if one must reckon that the outcomes of war are decided by God, then the injustice lay more heavily on the side of the campaign, since he was about to engage a king who was also his foster-companion, and often his benefactor, never harsh toward him except insofar as, swayed by wicked advisers, he had cast a shadow of wrongdoing over him.

Herod was persuaded by this, judging that it was enough for his future hopes to have simply displayed his strength to the nation. Meanwhile there arose around Apamea a Roman disturbance and civil war: Caecilius Bassus, out of loyalty to Pompey, treacherously murdered Sextus Caesar and took over his forces, while Caesar's other generals gathered an army to avenge the murder. To these men, both because of the one killed and because of the one still living—both being his friends—Antipater, through his sons, sent military support. As the war dragged on, Murcus arrived from Italy as Sextus's successor; and at this same time there broke out among the Romans the great war of Cassius and Brutus, who had treacherously killed Caesar after he had held power for three years and seven months.

After the enormous upheaval caused by this murder, and with the leading men split into factions, each moved according to his own hopes toward whatever he judged to his advantage; and so Cassius came into Syria to take over the forces around Apamea. There he reconciled Bassus and Murcus and their divided legions, freed Apamea from siege, and then, taking command of the army himself, went about the cities levying tribute and exacting payments beyond their capacity. When the Jews too were ordered to contribute seven hundred talents, Antipater, fearing Cassius's threats, divided the task of collecting the money quickly among his sons and certain other associates, among them a certain Malichus, one of his rivals—so pressing was the necessity.

Herod was the first to placate Cassius, bringing in a hundred talents from his own share in Galilee, and for this he was counted among his closest friends. The rest Cassius reviled for their slowness and vented his anger on their cities. Gophna and Emmaus and two other, lesser towns he reduced to slavery, and he was on his way to put Malichus to death as well, for not having collected his share promptly, when Antipater averted his ruin, and that of the other cities, by quickly winning over Cassius with a hundred talents.

Malichus, however, once Cassius had withdrawn, did not repay Antipater's kindness with gratitude, but instead began plotting against the very man who had so often saved him, eager to remove the obstacle to his own crimes. Antipater, fearing the man's power and cunning, crossed the Jordan to gather an army in defense against the plot. But Malichus, though found out, got the better of Antipater's sons through sheer shamelessness: by many protestations and oaths he beguiled both Phasael, the guardian of Jerusalem, and Herod, who held command of the forces, into becoming intermediaries for him with their father—so that once again he was saved through Antipater's intervention, who persuaded Murcus, then governor of Syria, who had been intent on putting Malichus to death for his rebellious conduct.

When war broke out against Cassius and Brutus on the part of the young Caesar and Antony, Cassius and Murcus, gathering an army out of Syria, and since Herod seemed to contribute a great deal to their needs, appointed him at that time overseer of all Syria, giving him both infantry and cavalry, and Cassius promised that after the war was settled he would make him king of Judea as well. But it turned out that the very strength of his son and this hope became the cause of Antipater's destruction: for fearing these things, Malichus bribed one of the royal cupbearers with money to give Antipater poison. And so, having become the victim of Malichus's crime, he died after a banquet—a man in other respects vigorous in the conduct of affairs, and one who had both recovered the throne for Hyrcanus and preserved it for him.

Malichus, suspected of the poisoning, denied it and won over the angry populace, and made himself still more powerful by mustering men-at-arms; for he supposed that Herod would not remain quiet—and indeed Herod at once appeared, leading an army to avenge his father. But when his brother Phasael advised him not to move openly against the man, lest the populace be thrown into factional strife, for the moment Herod received Malichus when he came to defend himself, and professed to absolve him of suspicion, while conducting a splendid funeral procession for his father.

Turning then to Samaria, which was in the grip of civil strife, he restored order to the city; then, at the time of a festival, he returned to Jerusalem leading his troops. And when Hyrcanus sent word—for Malichus, in his fear of Herod's approach, urged him to do so—forbidding foreign troops to be brought in among the ritually purified native population, Herod disregarded both the pretext and the one giving the order and entered by night. And again Malichus, coming to him, wept over Antipater; Herod, with difficulty, pretended in return, restraining his anger, and in letters to Cassius, who hated Malichus in any case, he lamented his father's murder. Cassius, writing back, ordered him to avenge his father's murderer, and secretly instructed the tribunes under his own command to assist Herod in this just act.

And when, after Herod had taken Laodicea, the powerful men from every quarter gathered bringing gifts and crowns, Herod set aside this occasion for his vengeance. Malichus, growing suspicious, as this took place at Tyre, resolved secretly to withdraw his son, who was being held hostage among the Tyrians, and made ready to flee himself into Judea; and it was his despair of safety that spurred him to this plan.

and forced King Antiochus to surrender Samosata. Meanwhile Herod's affairs in Judea were falling apart. He had left his brother Joseph in charge of everything, with orders to attempt nothing against Antigonus until his own return, since Machaeras had not proved a reliable ally, to judge from what he had done. But when Joseph heard that his brother was far away, he ignored those orders and marched on Jericho with five cohorts that Machaeras had sent along with him, meaning to seize the grain at the height of the harvest. The enemy attacked him in the mountains and difficult terrain; he himself died, showing great courage in the battle, and the whole Roman force was destroyed, for the cohorts were newly levied from Syria and had no admixture of the so-called veteran soldiers able to support men inexperienced in war.

Antigonus was not satisfied with the victory. He carried his rage so far as to abuse Joseph's corpse: once he held the bodies, he cut off his head, even though Pheroras, Joseph's brother, offered fifty talents as ransom for it. After Antigonus's victory, affairs in Galilee were thrown into such turmoil that his partisans there seized the leading men who favored Herod and drowned them in the lake. Much of Idumea also changed sides, where Machaeras was fortifying one of the strongholds, called Gitta. Herod had not yet learned of any of this. After the fall of Samosata, Antony placed Sossius in charge of Syria and ordered him to support Herod against Antigonus, then withdrew himself to Egypt. Sossius sent two legions ahead into Judea to assist Herod and followed close behind with the rest of his force.

While Herod was at Daphne, near Antioch, clear dreams foretold his brother's death, and as he leapt from his bed in distress, messengers brought news of the disaster. He mourned the loss only briefly, put off the greater part of his grief, and pressed on against the enemy, marching beyond what his strength allowed. Reaching Lebanon, he gathered eight hundred men from around the mountain as allies, and one Roman legion joined him there. With these forces, without waiting even a single day, he invaded Galilee and drove the enemy, who had come out to meet him, back to the position they had abandoned earlier.

He kept attacking the fort without pause, but before he could take it a violent storm forced him to encamp in the nearby villages. When, a few days later, the second legion arrived from Antony and joined him, the enemy, fearing his strength, abandoned the stronghold during the night. From there he pressed on through Jericho, hurrying to hunt down his brother's killers as quickly as possible. There a strange, providential thing happened to him, from which, saved against all expectation, he won a reputation as a man especially beloved by God: many of the leading men had dined with him that evening, and once the banquet broke up and everyone had left, the house immediately collapsed. Reading this as a common sign of both the dangers and the deliverance awaiting him in the coming war, he set his army moving at dawn.

About six thousand of the enemy came running down from the mountains and tested his front ranks, not daring to close with the Romans hand to hand but hurling stones and javelins from a distance, wounding many. In this skirmish Herod himself, riding past, was struck in the side by a javelin. Wanting to prevail not only through his men's daring but also through sheer numbers, Antigonus sent a certain Pappus, one of his companions, with an army around to Samaria. Pappus's task, then, was to deal with Machaeras, while Herod overran the enemy's territory, destroyed five small towns, killed two thousand of their inhabitants, burned the houses, and returned to camp, quartered near the village called Cana. Each day a great crowd of Jews joined him, from Jericho itself and from the rest of the country, some driven by hatred of Antigonus, others stirred by Herod's successes, though most were moved simply by an irrational hunger for change. Herod hurried to give battle, and Pappus's men, undaunted by either the numbers or the momentum against them, went out eagerly to meet him.

When the fighting began, the rest of the enemy's forces held out only briefly, but Herod, risking himself in memory of his murdered brother and determined to punish those responsible for the killing, quickly overpowered the men before him, then turned again and again against whatever body still held together, pursuing them all. The slaughter was immense: some were driven back into the village they had set out from, while Herod pressed the rearmost and killed without number. He burst in among the enemy inside the village itself; every house was packed with armed men, and the rooftops above were crowded with defenders. Once he had mastered those outside, he tore apart the dwellings and dragged out those hiding within, bringing the roofs down on many at once and destroying them in heaps, while the soldiers met with drawn swords those who scrambled out of the wreckage. So great a heap of corpses piled up that it blocked the roads for the victors.

The enemy could not bear this blow. What remained of their gathered force, once it saw those throughout the village destroyed, scattered in flight, and Herod, at once emboldened by the victory, would have marched straight on Jerusalem had a most violent storm not held him back. This delay proved an obstacle both to his complete triumph and, for Antigonus, to his ruin, since it left him weighing whether to abandon the city already. Toward evening, Herod sent his exhausted friends off to have their bodies tended, and went himself, still warm from his armor, to bathe in rather soldierly fashion, with only a single attendant. Before he reached the bathhouse, one of the enemy ran out to face him with a drawn sword, then a second, a third, and several more after them. These men had fled from the battle armed into the bathhouse and had been crouching there in hiding; but when they saw the king, shock overcame them, and they ran past him trembling, though he stood there unarmed, and made for the exits. By chance none of his other men were present to seize them, and Herod was content simply to have escaped unharmed, so all of them got away.

The next day he beheaded Pappus, Antigonus's general, who had already fallen in the battle, and sent the head to his brother Pheroras as payment for their murdered brother, since it was Pappus who had killed Joseph. Once the storm had passed, he marched on Jerusalem, led his force up to the wall — it was now the third year since he had been declared king at Rome — and encamped before the Temple, on the side vulnerable to attack, the very side by which Pompey too had earlier taken the city. He divided the army for the labor, cut down the suburbs, and ordered three earthworks raised with towers built upon them; then, leaving the most capable of his companions in charge of the works, he went himself to Samaria to marry the daughter of Alexander, son of Aristobulus, who had already been promised to him, as we mentioned, treating the wedding as a mere incident to the siege, since he already held the enemy in contempt.

Having married, he returned to Jerusalem with a larger force. Sossius joined him there with a very large army of cavalry and infantry, which he had sent ahead by the inland route while he himself marched through Phoenicia. Once the whole force was assembled — eleven legions of infantry and six thousand cavalry, apart from the Syrian allies, who were no small part of it — they encamped near the north wall: Herod relying on the Senate's decrees by which he had been declared king, Sossius relying on Antony, who had sent the army under his command to support Herod. The Jewish population throughout the city was in turmoil of every kind. The weaker element, gathered around the Temple, indulged in wild talk more suited to superstition than to the crisis, while the bolder spirits carried out raids of every sort in bands, above all seizing the city's provisions and leaving neither horses nor men any food. The more disciplined part of the fighting men, however, was arrayed for the defense: they kept those building the earthworks away from the wall and constantly devised some new countermeasure against the siege engines. In nothing did they gain the advantage over the enemy so much as in their tunneling.

Against their raids the king devised companies of soldiers to check their sallies, and against the shortage of provisions, supplies brought from a distance. In the fighting itself the Romans had the advantage through skill and experience, though the defenders left no degree of daring untried: openly they clashed with the Romans in the certainty of death, and through tunnels they suddenly appeared in the enemy's midst; before any part of the wall could be brought down, they had already built another in its place. In short, they spared neither their hands nor their ingenuity, determined to hold out to the last. Despite so great a force besieging them, they held out for five months, until some of Herod's picked men, daring to mount the wall, burst into the city, followed by Sossius's centurions.

The area around the Temple was captured first, and once the army poured in everywhere there was boundless slaughter — the Romans enraged by the length of the siege, Herod's Jewish troops determined to leave no rival alive. Great numbers were butchered, crowded together in the alleys, in the houses, and as they fled for refuge to the Temple. There was no pity for infants, for old age, or for the weakness of women; though the king sent word around urging restraint, no one held back his hand, and they went after every age as though possessed. There Antigonus, giving no thought to either his former or his present fortune, came down from the citadel and threw himself at Sossius's feet. Sossius, showing him no pity in his reversal of fortune, laughed at him without restraint and called him "Antigone." Yet he did not release him as one would a woman free of guard, but had him bound and kept under watch.

Herod, now master of his enemies, was anxious also to master his foreign allies, for the throng of foreign troops was eager to see the Temple and the sacred things within the sanctuary. The king, by persuading some, threatening others, and in some cases restraining them outright, held them back, judging the victory harsher than defeat if anything forbidden should be seen by them. He also put a stop to the plundering throughout the city, protesting strongly to Sossius that if the Romans emptied the city of both money and men and left him king over a desert, he would count so vast a slaughter of citizens a poor exchange even for dominion over the whole world. When Sossius replied that it was only fair to let the soldiers plunder in place of pay for the siege, Herod said he would himself distribute the rewards to each man from his own funds. In this way he ransomed what remained of his homeland and kept his promises: he rewarded each soldier splendidly, the officers in proportion, and Sossius most royally of all, so that no one went away wanting for money.

Sossius, having dedicated a golden crown to God, withdrew from Jerusalem, taking Antigonus in chains to Antony. Antigonus, who had clung to life to the very end on a craven hope, met the death his ignoble spirit deserved, by the axe. King Herod, meanwhile, separated out the population of the city: those who had favored his cause he made more loyal still through honors, while those who had sided with Antigonus he put to death. And since money was now scarce, he had whatever ornaments he owned melted down and sent to Antony and his circle.

Yet even this did not buy him complete immunity from harm, for Antony, by now ruined by his passion for Cleopatra, was in every way a slave to his desire. Cleopatra, having worked her way through her own family until none of her blood remained, turned next to murdering outsiders as well, and by slandering the leading men of Syria to Antony induced him to have them put to death, so that she might easily become mistress of each man's property. Extending her greed further still, toward the Jews and the Arabs, she worked to have both peoples' kings, Herod and Malchus, put to death. Antony, however, coming partly to his senses over these demands, judged it impious to kill men so honorable and kings of such standing, and instead turned away the friends closest to them; yet he still cut away much of their territory — including the palm grove at Jericho where balsam is produced — and gave her all the cities within the Eleutherus river except Tyre and Sidon.

Once mistress of these lands, and having escorted Antony as far as the Euphrates on his campaign against the Parthians, Cleopatra came to Judea by way of Apamea and Damascus. There Herod appeased her hostility with great gifts, and also leased back the territories cut away from his kingdom for two hundred talents a year, and escorted her as far as Pelusium, showing her every courtesy. Not long after, Antony returned from Parthia bringing as a captive Artabazes, son of Tigranes, a gift for Cleopatra; for along with the money and all the plunder, the Parthian prince was handed over to her at once.

When the war at Actium broke out, Herod had already prepared to join Antony's expedition, being now free of the other disturbances in Judea and having subdued Hyrcania, a stronghold held by Antigonus's sister. But Cleopatra craftily kept him from sharing in Antony's dangers; for, as we said, plotting against the two kings, she persuaded Antony to entrust to Herod the war against the Arabs, so that whichever side won — if Arabia prevailed or if Judea were defeated — she would become mistress of it, using one ruler to destroy the other.

But the scheme turned out to Herod's advantage. First, driving off raiders against the enemy and gathering a large body of cavalry, he sent it against them near Diospolis and won, even though they had put up a stiff resistance. In response to this defeat a great uprising of the Arabs followed, and, gathering at Kanatha in Coele-Syria in numbers beyond count, they waited for the Jews. Herod arrived there with his force and tried to conduct the war more cautiously, ordering a fortified camp to be built. But his men would not obey; emboldened instead by their earlier victory, they rushed at the Arabs, and when these turned back at the first charge, pursued them — and it was in this pursuit that Herod was ambushed, through the treachery of Athenion, by the local people of Kanatha,

He answered the messengers as his grief dictated and turned back toward Egypt. The first evening he lodged at a local shrine, gathering up those who had fallen behind; the next day, as he pressed on toward Rhinocorura, word reached him of his brother's death. Adding mourning to the cares he had just set aside, he pushed forward all the harder. The Arab, repenting though slowly, sent men in haste to recall the man he had wronged, but Herod had already outrun them and reached Pelusium. There, unable to get passage from the ships stationed at anchor, he appealed to their commanders, who, respecting his reputation and rank, sent him on to Alexandria. Entering the city, he was received splendidly by Cleopatra, who hoped to secure him as a general for the campaign she was preparing; but he brushed aside the queen's invitations and, fearing neither the depth of winter nor the turmoil in Italy, sailed for Rome.

He ran into danger off Pamphylia and, after throwing most of his cargo overboard, barely made it to Rhodes, a city badly battered by the war with Cassius, where he was received by his friends Ptolemy and Sappinius. Though short of funds, he had a very large trireme built, and in it, together with his friends, sailed to Brundisium and from there hurried on to Rome. There he first sought out Antony, because of the friendship between their fathers, and laid out before him the disasters that had befallen himself and his family: how he had left his closest kin besieged in a fortress and had sailed through winter, a suppliant, to reach him. Antony was moved to pity by this reversal of fortune, and, remembering Antipater's hospitality and, above all, recognizing the man's own worth, resolved then and there to make king of the Jews the very man he had earlier made tetrarch. What drove him was no less his quarrel with Antigonus than his regard for Herod, for he took Antigonus to be a rebel and an enemy of Rome.

Caesar proved even readier than Antony, recalling Antipater's campaigns alongside his own father in Egypt, his hospitality, his goodwill in every matter, and seeing besides Herod's own energetic character. Antony convened the Senate, where Messalla, and after him Atratinus, presented Herod, reviewing the services of his father and his own goodwill toward Rome, and showing at the same time that Antigonus was an enemy — not only for his earlier quarrel with Rome but because he had now seized power through the Parthians, holding Rome in contempt. When the Senate had been stirred by this, Antony rose and declared that for the sake of the war against Parthia it was in Rome's interest that Herod be king, and all present voted for it. When the session broke up, Antony and Caesar went out with Herod between them, while the consuls and the other magistrates led the way to offer sacrifice and to deposit the decree in the Capitol. On the first day of Herod's kingship, Antony gave a feast in his honor.

During this same time Antigonus was besieging those holding Masada, who had supplies enough of everything else but were running short of water. So Joseph, Herod's brother, together with two hundred of his household, was planning to flee to the Arabs, having heard that Malchus now regretted his offenses against Herod. He would have abandoned the fortress had it not happened, on the very night set for the escape, that a heavy rain fell; the cisterns filled, and the need to flee vanished. Instead they went out against Antigonus's men, openly engaging some and ambushing others, destroying a good many — though not always with success, for at times they themselves were driven back after a setback. Meanwhile Ventidius, the Roman general sent from Syria to drive back the Parthians, turned aside into Judea after them, ostensibly to help Joseph's party but in reality to extort money from Antigonus. Camping close by Jerusalem until he had filled his coffers, he withdrew with the bulk of his force, leaving Silo behind with a portion, so that pulling everyone out at once would not expose the bribery. Antigonus, still hoping the Parthians would come to his aid, courted Silo for the time being, so that he would cause no trouble before that hope was tested.

By now Herod had sailed from Italy to Ptolemais and, having gathered no small force of foreign and native troops, was marching through Galilee against Antigonus, with Ventidius and Silo cooperating — for Dellius, sent by Antony, had persuaded them to help bring Herod home. Ventidius happened to be occupied settling the disturbances the Parthians had caused in the cities, while Silo remained in Judea, bribed by Antigonus. Herod, however, was not short of strength; as he advanced, his forces grew day by day, and all of Galilee but for a few joined him. His most urgent task lay ahead: relieving Masada and rescuing his kin from the siege there. But Joppa stood in his way, and, being hostile, had to be taken first, so that no enemy stronghold would remain at his back once he advanced on Jerusalem. Silo gladly joined him in this, glad of a pretext to withdraw, and was pursued by the Jews as he did so. Herod, sallying out against them with a small band, quickly routed them and rescued Silo, who was defending himself poorly. Then, having taken Joppa, he hurried on to Masada to rescue his kin.

Of the local people, some were drawn to him by their fathers' friendship, others by his own renown, others by gratitude for benefits received from both him and his father, but the greatest number by hope, as toward a king already secure in his throne; and so a force not easily shaken had gathered. As he advanced, Antigonus set ambushes for him, blocking the useful passes, though these did the enemy little or no harm. Herod, having taken up his kin from Masada, easily took also the fortress of Rhesa, and marched on Jerusalem. Silo's troops joined him there, along with many from the city, terrified by his strength. When they had camped on the western side of the city, the guards posted there shot arrows and hurled javelins at them, while others sallied out in bands to test the strength of the front ranks. Herod at first ordered a proclamation made around the wall, that he had come for the people's good and the city's safety, that he would not take revenge even on his open enemies, and that he would grant amnesty even to his bitterest opponents. But when Antigonus's men shouted him down, allowing no one to hear the proclamations or change sides, he thereafter permitted his own men to strike back at those on the wall, and they quickly drove everyone from the towers with their missiles.

It was then that Silo's bribery came out into the open: he had stirred up a great many of the soldiers to cry out over a shortage of supplies and demand money for provisions, and to press for withdrawing to winter quarters in their own territory, on the grounds that the country around the city had been stripped bare, Antigonus's men having cleared it out in advance. He broke camp and tried to withdraw. Herod, meeting with Silo's officers and with the rank and file in a body, begged them not to abandon him, sent as he was by Caesar, Antony, and the Senate; he would, he said, resolve their shortages that very day. And after this appeal he set out at once into the countryside and brought back so great an abundance of provisions that he cut away every pretext of Silo's. Taking thought also that the supply not fail in the days that followed, he wrote to the people around Samaria — a city on friendly terms with him — to bring down grain, wine, oil, and cattle to Jericho.

When Antigonus heard of this, he sent men throughout the countryside with orders to block the roads and ambush the grain convoys. They obeyed, and a great number of armed men gathered beyond Jericho, taking up positions on the hills to watch for those bringing in the supplies. Herod, however, would not rest: taking ten cohorts, of which five were Roman and five Jewish, along with some mixed mercenaries and a few cavalry, he came to Jericho, and found the city itself abandoned, but five hundred men holding the heights together with their wives and children. These he released once he had taken them, while the Romans burst into the rest of the town and plundered it, finding the houses full of every kind of valuable. The king then left a garrison at Jericho and turned back, dispersing the Roman army for the winter among Idumea, Galilee, and Samaria, all now on his side. Antigonus for his part also managed, through Silo's venality, to have a portion of the army quartered at Lydda, as a courtesy to Antony.

While the Romans lived in plenty with their arms laid aside, Herod did not rest. He secured Idumea with two thousand infantry and four hundred cavalry, sending his brother Joseph there so that nothing might turn toward Antigonus in his absence, while he himself brought his mother and all the kin he had brought out of Masada to Samaria, and, having settled them there safely, went on to subdue the rest of Galilee and drive out Antigonus's garrisons. Marching on Sepphoris through a violent snowstorm, he took the city without a blow, its guards having fled before he even arrived. There he took up those of his men who had suffered from the storm — supplies were abundant — and then set out against the brigands living in the caves, who were ravaging much of the country and inflicting on the local people evils no less than those of war. Sending ahead three infantry regiments and one cavalry squadron to the village of Arbela, he himself came up after forty days with the rest of his force. The enemy were not frightened by his approach but met him in arms, having the experience of soldiers along with the daring of brigands; engaging his men, they drove back the left wing of Herod's line with their own right.

But Herod, quickly wheeling around from his own right wing, came to the rescue, turned back his own men from their flight, and, falling upon the pursuers, checked their advance until, unable to bear the assault head-on, they turned aside. He pursued them, killing, as far as the Jordan, destroying a great part of them; the rest scattered beyond the river, so that Galilee was cleared of danger except for those still lurking in the caves, and dealing with these required time. So first he paid his soldiers the fruits of their labors, distributing a hundred and fifty silver drachmas to each man and far more to the officers, sending it to them at the quarters where they were wintering. He instructed Pheroras, the youngest of his brothers, to see to their supplies and to fortify Alexandreium, and Pheroras attended to both tasks.

Meanwhile Antony was spending his time around Athens, and Ventidius, preparing for the war against the Parthians, summoned Silo and Herod, writing first that affairs in Judea should be settled beforehand. Herod, glad to be rid of him, released Silo to join Ventidius, and himself campaigned against the men in the caves. These caves lay against sheer cliffs, approachable from no direction except by narrow, oblique paths. The rock facing them dropped away into very deep ravines, plunging steeply down to the gorges, so that the king for a long time was at a loss before the impossibility of the place, until at last he resorted to a most hazardous device: lowering his strongest men in chests, he had them let down to the mouths of the caves. There they slaughtered the occupants along with their families and threw fire in upon those who resisted.

Wishing to spare some of them, Herod had it proclaimed that they should come out to him. Not one came voluntarily, and of those taken by force, many chose death over captivity. There one old man, father of seven children, when his sons and their mother begged to be allowed to come out under a pledge of safety, killed them instead in this manner: ordering them to come forward one at a time, he himself stood at the mouth of the cave and cut down each son as he stepped forward. Herod, watching from a distance, was seized with pity and stretched out his hand to the old man, begging him to spare his children. But the man, yielding to none of it, and even reproaching Herod for his baseness, killed the children and then the wife as well, and, throwing the bodies down the cliff, at last threw himself down after them.

In this way Herod subdued the caves and those within them. Leaving behind as much of his army as he judged sufficient to guard against uprisings, with Ptolemy in command, he turned back toward Samaria, taking three thousand infantry and six hundred cavalry with him against Antigonus. But no sooner had he withdrawn than those accustomed to stir up trouble in Galilee, seizing their chance, fell suddenly upon Ptolemy the commander and killed him, and went on to ravage the countryside, taking refuge in the marshes and other places hard to search out. When Herod learned of the uprising, he hurried to the rescue, destroyed a great number of them, and, reducing all their strongholds by siege, exacted from the cities, as the penalty for their defection, a hundred talents.

Now that the Parthians had been driven out and Pacorus killed, Ventidius, on Antony's instructions, sent Herod a thousand cavalry and two legions as reinforcements against Antigonus. Antigonus, by letters, begged their commander Machaeras to come and help him instead, complaining bitterly of Herod's violence and promising money. Machaeras did not slight the man who had sent for him, especially since he was offering more than Herod, yet he did not go over to the betrayal; instead, feigning friendship, he went to spy out Antigonus's position, ignoring Herod's efforts to dissuade him. Antigonus, sensing his intent beforehand, shut the city against him and defended the walls as against an enemy, until Machaeras, ashamed, withdrew to Emmaus to join Herod. Furious at the rebuff, he killed every Jew he came across, sparing none of Herod's own men either, treating them all as though they belonged to Antigonus.

Angered at this, Herod set out to retaliate against Machaeras as an enemy, but, mastering his rage, rode instead to Antony to accuse Machaeras of his lawless conduct. Antony, on reflection, recognized the wrongs that had been done and quickly pursued the king, and after much entreaty was reconciled with him. Even so, Herod did not slacken his drive toward Antony; hearing that he was pressing the siege of Samosata with a large force — a strong city near the Euphrates — he hurried there all the faster, seeing the moment fit both for a display of courage and for winning Antony's favor still further. Arriving, he brought the siege to its conclusion, killing many of the barbarians and carrying off a great deal of plunder, so that Antony, who had long admired his valor, now held him in even higher regard than before, and added a great deal more to the honors he had already given him.

to the other honors he showed him and to his hopes for the kingship, and forced King Antiochus to surrender Samosata. Meanwhile Herod's affairs in Judea were falling apart. He had left his brother Joseph in charge of everything, with orders to undertake nothing against Antigonus until his return, since Machaeras could not be trusted as an ally after what he had done.

But when Joseph heard that his brother was very far away, he ignored these instructions and marched on Jericho with five cohorts that Machaeras had sent along, intending to seize the grain at the height of the harvest. The enemy fell upon him in the mountains and rough terrain; he himself died, showing great courage in the battle, and the entire Roman force was destroyed. The cohorts were newly levied men from Syria, and none of the so-called veterans had been mixed in among them who could have supported troops inexperienced in war.

The victory was not enough for Antigonus; his rage went so far that he even mutilated Joseph's corpse. Once he had the bodies in his power, he cut off Joseph's head, even though Pheroras his brother offered fifty talents as ransom for it. After the victory of Antigonus, Galilee was thrown into such upheaval that the partisans of Herod among the leading men were seized by Antigonus's supporters and drowned in the lake. Much of Idumea also changed sides, where Machaeras was fortifying a stronghold called Gitta.

Herod had not yet learned of any of this. After the capture of Samosata, Antony had set Sossius over Syria and ordered him to help Herod against Antigonus, and had himself withdrawn to Egypt. Sossius sent ahead two legions into Judea to reinforce Herod, and himself followed close behind with the rest of the army. While Herod was at Daphne near Antioch, clear dreams foretold his brother's death, and he leapt from his bed in distress just as messengers came in with news of the disaster.

He gave brief vent to grief over the misfortune, but put off the greater part of his mourning and pressed on against the enemy, forcing the march beyond his strength. Reaching Lebanon, he took on eight hundred of the mountain people as allies and joined with them one Roman legion. With these he did not wait even a day but invaded Galilee, and the enemy who came out to meet him were driven back to the position they had earlier abandoned.

He kept up a steady assault on the fortress, but before he could take it he was forced by a very severe storm to encamp in the neighboring villages. When a few days later the second legion from Antony joined him as well, the enemy, fearing his strength, abandoned the stronghold by night. From there he pressed on through Jericho, hurrying to overtake his brother's murderers as quickly as possible. There a strange and providential thing happened to him, from which, having been unexpectedly saved, he gained a reputation as a man especially favored by God.

Many of the leading men had dined with him that evening, and after the banquet broke up and everyone had left, the house immediately collapsed. Judging this a sign common to both the dangers and the deliverance of the coming war, he roused the army before dawn. About six thousand of the enemy came running down from the hills to test his front ranks; not daring to close with the Romans hand to hand, they hurled stones and javelins from a distance and wounded many. In this skirmish Herod himself, riding along the line, was struck in the side by a javelin.

Antigonus, wanting to prevail not only in daring but in numbers, sent a certain Pappus, one of his companions, with an army around toward Samaria. Machaeras became this man's opponent, while Herod overran the enemy's territory, destroyed five small towns, killed two thousand of their inhabitants, burned the houses, and returned to camp; he had bivouacked near the village called Cana. Every day a great crowd of Jews came over to him from Jericho itself and from the rest of the country, some out of hatred for Antigonus, others stirred by his own successes, but the majority driven by nothing more than a senseless craving for change.

Herod was eager to give battle, and Pappus and his men, undaunted by either the numbers or the ardor of his forces, came out boldly to meet him. When the lines engaged, the rest of the enemy's units held out for only a short while, but Herod, fighting recklessly in memory of his murdered brother in order to punish those responsible for the killing, quickly overcame the troops facing him and then, turning always against whatever body still held together, routed them all. The slaughter was great: some were driven back together into the village they had set out from, while Herod pressed hard on the rearmost, killing without number.

He burst into the village along with the fleeing enemy; every house was packed with armed men, and the roofs above were crowded with defenders. Once he had overcome those outside, he tore apart the buildings and dragged out those within. On many he brought the roofs down all at once, crushing them in heaps, while his soldiers with drawn swords caught those who tried to escape from the wreckage; so great a mass of dead piled up that the roads were blocked even to the victors. The enemy could not bear this blow; as soon as the survivors gathering together saw their comrades throughout the village destroyed, they scattered in flight, and Herod, emboldened at once by the victory, would have marched straight on Jerusalem had he not been checked by a most violent storm. This alone stood in the way both of his complete success and, for Antigonus, of a defeat that would have made him abandon the city already.

Toward evening Herod dismissed his friends, worn out, to attend to their bodies, and he himself, still hot from his armor, went off to bathe in soldierly fashion, with only one servant attending him. Before he reached the bathhouse, one of the enemy ran out toward him with a drawn sword, then a second, a third, and several more after them. These men had fled from the battle into the bathhouse still armed, and had been crouching there in hiding; but when they caught sight of the king, panic overcame them, and they ran past him, naked and trembling as he was, making for the exits. No one else happened to be present to seize the men, and Herod was satisfied simply to have come to no harm, so all of them got away. The next day he beheaded Pappus, Antigonus's general, who had fallen in the battle, and sent the head to his brother Pheroras as payment for their murdered brother, since it was this man who had killed Joseph.

When the storm subsided, he marched on Jerusalem and brought his army up to the wall; it was now the third year since he had been declared king at Rome. He encamped before the temple, since that side was open to attack, the very point where Pompey too had earlier taken the city. He divided the army for the work, and after clearing the suburbs he ordered three earthworks raised and towers built upon them, and leaving the most capable of his companions in charge of the works, he himself went to Samaria to marry Alexander's daughter, granddaughter of Aristobulus, who had been betrothed to him as we mentioned, treating the wedding as a mere incident to the siege, since he already held the enemy in contempt.

Having married, he returned to Jerusalem with a larger force; Sossius too joined him with a very large army of both cavalry and infantry, which he had sent on ahead through the interior while he himself marched through Phoenicia. When the whole force was assembled, eleven legions of infantry and six thousand cavalry besides the Syrian allies, who were no small part of it, they encamped near the north wall, Herod relying on the decree of the senate by which he had been declared king, Sossius acting as ally to Herod on behalf of Antony, who had sent the army under his command.

The mass of the Jews throughout the city was thrown into various kinds of confusion. The weaker sort, gathering around the temple, spun out prophecies filled with superstition and wishful thinking suited to the crisis, while among the bolder men there were bands of raiders of every sort, who above all plundered the supplies around the city and left neither horses nor men any food. But the better-disciplined part of the fighting force was posted to defend against the siege; they kept those building the earthworks away from the wall and forever devised some new countermeasure against the siege engines. In nothing did they have the advantage over the enemy so much as in mining.

Against the raiders the king devised ambush parties by which he checked their sallies, and against the shortage of supplies, convoys brought from a distance; but in the actual fighting the Romans had the advantage through their skill, though the defenders left no degree of daring untried. Openly they threw themselves upon the Romans in the face of certain death, and through the mine tunnels they suddenly appeared in the enemy's very midst, and before any part of the wall had been battered down they had already built another behind it. In short, they were tireless in hand and in ingenuity, resolved to hold out to the very end. Indeed, against so great a force laying siege, they kept up the resistance for five months, until some of Herod's picked men, daring to mount the wall, broke into the city, followed by Sossius's centurions.

First the area around the temple was taken, and once the army poured in everywhere there was slaughter without measure, the Romans enraged by the length of the siege, and Herod's Jewish troops determined to leave not one of their opponents alive. They were butchered in droves, crowded together in the alleys and in the houses, and as they fled for refuge to the temple; there was no pity for infants, none for old age, none for the weakness of women. Though the king sent men around begging that they be spared, no one held back his hand, but as if possessed they cut down every age alike. It was then that Antigonus, giving no thought to his past or present fortune, came down from the citadel and fell at Sossius's feet. But Sossius, showing him no pity in his change of fortune, laughed at him without restraint and called him Antigone, as if he were a woman; yet he did not let him go free as a woman would be, but had him bound and kept under guard.

Once he had mastered his enemies, Herod's next concern was to master his foreign allies as well; for the mass of foreign troops was eager to view the temple and the sacred things within the sanctuary. The king, by persuading some and threatening others, and restraining a few even by force, held them back, judging the victory harsher than defeat if anything forbidden to be seen were exposed by them. He also put a stop by now to the plundering of the city, protesting strongly to Sossius that if the Romans left him king of an emptied city, stripped of both money and men, they would be valuing the rule of the whole world too cheaply against the killing of so many citizens. When Sossius replied that it was only just to allow the soldiers the plunder in place of the siege pay, Herod said he himself would distribute the wages to each man from his own funds. In this way, having ransomed the rest of his native city, he fulfilled his promises: he rewarded each soldier splendidly, the officers in proportion, and Sossius most royally of all, so that no one went away wanting for money.

Sossius, after dedicating a golden crown to God, withdrew from Jerusalem, taking Antigonus in chains to Antony. This man, who had clung to life to the last out of a cold hope, met the axe he deserved for his cowardice. King Herod, meanwhile, sorted out the population of the city, showing greater favor and honor to those who had supported him and putting to death the partisans of Antigonus. And now, being short of funds, he sent to Antony and his circle all the gold ornaments he had, converted into coin. Even this did not buy him complete immunity from harm, for Antony, by now corrupted by his passion for Cleopatra, was in all things a slave to his desire, while Cleopatra, having worked her way through her own family so that not one of her blood relations was left, now turned her murderous designs on outsiders, and by slandering the leading men of Syria to Antony persuaded him to have them put to death, so that she might easily become mistress of each man's property. Extending her greed further, to the Jews and the Arabs, she worked to have Herod and Malchus, the kings of the two peoples, put to death.

In the matter of these orders, however, Antony came partly to his senses: he judged it impious to kill men so good and kings of such standing, but he did break off his friendship with those closest to them. He cut away a good deal of their territory, including the palm grove at Jericho where the balsam is produced, and gave it to Cleopatra, along with all the cities within the Eleutherus river except Tyre and Sidon. Once mistress of these, she escorted Antony as far as the Euphrates on his campaign against the Parthians and then came to Judea by way of Apamea and Damascus. There Herod won over her ill will with lavish gifts, and also leased back the territories cut away from his kingdom for two hundred talents a year, and escorted her as far as Pelusium, showing her every attention. Not long after, Antony returned from the Parthian campaign bringing as a captive Artabazus, son of Tigranes, a gift for Cleopatra; for along with the money and all the plunder, the Parthian prince himself was straightway given to her. When the war at Actium had broken out,

Herod was already preparing to set out with Antony, having by now freed himself from the other disturbances in Judea and having gained control of Hyrcania, a stronghold held by Antigonus's sister. But he was cunningly kept by Cleopatra from sharing in Antony's dangers; for, as we said, plotting against the kings, she persuaded Antony to entrust the war against the Arabs to Herod, so that whichever man prevailed, whether he conquered Arabia or was conquered and lost Judea, she might become mistress and use the one ruler to bring down the other. The scheme, however, tipped in Herod's favor: first, driving off cattle from the enemy and gathering a large body of cavalry, he launched it against them near Diospolis and was victorious, even though they resisted stoutly. In response to this defeat a great uprising of the Arabs arose, and gathering at Canatha in Coele-Syria in countless numbers,

they waited for the Jews. There Herod came up with his army and tried to conduct the war more cautiously, ordering a fortified camp to be built. But the army would not obey; emboldened by their earlier victory, they rushed upon the Arabs, and when the enemy broke at the first onset they pursued them, but in the pursuit Herod was ambushed, Athenion having let loose against him the local people of Canatha,

This man had always been at odds with Herod among Cleopatra's generals. Under this attack the Arabs took heart and turned to face the Jews again; massing their forces amid rocky, impassable ground, they routed Herod's men and inflicted very heavy losses. The survivors of the battle fled to Ormiza, where the Arabs surrounded their camp as well and captured it, men and all.

Not long after, Herod arrived with reinforcements, too late to be of use. The blame for this blow fell on the insubordination of his officers, for if the engagement had not broken out unexpectedly, Athenion would never have found the occasion for his trap. Herod nevertheless took his revenge on the Arabs, overrunning their country again and again, until he had recovered his single lost victory many times over.

But while he was still punishing his enemies, another calamity struck him, one that seemed to come from heaven: in the seventh year of his reign, at the height of the war at Actium, at the beginning of spring the earth was shaken and destroyed countless numbers of cattle and thirty thousand people, though the army escaped unharmed, since it was camped in the open. In the midst of this the Arabs were emboldened to still greater insolence by rumor, which as always added something still worse to the gloom already there. Believing all Judea leveled and the land empty for the taking, they set out against it, first sacrificing the envoys who had come to them from the Jews.

The people, terrified by this invasion and worn down by the weight of one disaster following another, lost heart, and Herod gathered them together and tried to rouse them to defend themselves with a speech of this kind:

"It seems to me quite unreasonable that the present fear should be taking hold of you. Being disheartened at the blows that came from heaven was understandable enough, but to feel the same way before a human attack is a mark of cowardice. I myself am so far from cringing before the enemy after the earthquake that I take it the god has set this very thing before the Arabs as bait, to bring them to justice; for they have come relying not so much on weapons or their own hands as on the misfortunes that struck us by chance, and hope resting on another's misery rather than one's own strength is a shaky thing.

"Neither ill fortune nor its opposite is stable among men; one can see fortune shifting to both sides in turn. You can learn this from your own experience: in the earlier battle, though we had the upper hand, the enemy defeated us, and it is likely that now, when they think they are sure to win, they will be caught, for overconfidence goes unguarded, while fear teaches foresight. So it is precisely your present dread that gives me grounds for confidence. When you grew bolder than was wise and rushed out against the enemy against my judgment, that was when Athenion's ambush found its opportunity; but now your hesitation, and what looks like faintheartedness, is my guarantee of victory. Still, this frame of mind should hold only until the moment we advance; once in action, you must rouse your spirits and convince the most godless of men that no evil, whether from men or from heaven, will ever bring down the courage of the Jews, so long as they keep their resolve, and that no one will stand by and watch an Arab become master of another man's goods, when he has time and again all but fallen into that man's hands as a captive.

"And do not let the tremors of lifeless matter unsettle you, nor take the earthquake as a sign portending some further disaster; such disturbances of the elements are natural, and bring men no harm beyond the damage they do in themselves. Of plague, famine, and tremors of the earth some small warning sign might come beforehand, but these very things have a limit to their scale; what greater harm, after all, could the earthquake do to us than a war, once it has gained the upper hand? But the greatest portent of the enemy's coming destruction has come about not by accident nor at another's hand: they have put our envoys to death in brutal violation of the law common to all mankind, and have crowned the war with such offerings to god. They will not escape his great eye and his unconquerable right hand; they will pay us the penalty at once, if only we now summon up the spirit of our fathers and rise as avengers of the men who were murdered in violation of the truce. Let each man go forth, not for wife, not for children, not for a homeland in danger, but in defense of the envoys; the dead will command this war better than the living. And I myself will risk danger before you, if you follow me obediently; for be assured, your own courage is irresistible, unless some rashness does you harm."

With this speech he roused his army, and when he saw them eager for battle, he offered sacrifice to God and after the sacrifice crossed the river Jordan with his forces. Encamping near Philadelphia, close to the enemy, he skirmished with them over a fort that lay between the two camps, wanting to bring on a battle quickly, for the Arabs too had already sent some men ahead to seize the stronghold. These the king's men quickly drove back and took the hill, while Herod himself led his forces out day after day and drew them up for battle, challenging the Arabs to fight.

But no one came out against him, for a terrible panic gripped them, and even their general Elthemus stood rigid with fear before the eyes of his own troops. At last, driven on by necessity, they came out to battle, disorganized, infantry and cavalry mixed in confusion. In numbers the Jews were outmatched, but they were far superior in eagerness, though the Arabs too fought recklessly out of despair of victory. So as long as they held their ground the slaughter among them was not great, but once they showed their backs, many were destroyed by the Jews and many more trampled by their own comrades; five thousand fell in the rout, and the rest of the mass just managed to crowd into the camp. Herod surrounded and besieged them, and as they were about to be overcome by force, thirst, brought on by the failure of their water supply, pressed them even harder. The king scorned their attempts to negotiate, and even when they offered five hundred talents as ransom pressed the siege all the harder. As their thirst grew unbearable they came out in crowds and surrendered themselves to the Jews of their own accord, so that in five days four thousand were taken prisoner, and on the sixth the remaining mass, driven by despair, came out to fight; Herod engaged them and killed about seven thousand more.

Having thus punished Arabia with so heavy a blow and crushed the spirit of its men, he rose so far in standing that the nation chose him as its protector. But at once the concern for the whole state of affairs took hold of him again, because of his friendship with Antony, now that Caesar had won at Actium. Yet he had more to fear from the appearance of the thing than he actually suffered, for Caesar did not consider Antony truly beaten while Herod still stood by him. The king, for his part, resolved to face the danger head-on; sailing to Rhodes, where Caesar was staying, he came before him without his diadem, in dress and bearing a private citizen, but in spirit a king. Holding back nothing of the truth, he spoke to him directly:

"I, Caesar, was made king by Antony, and I admit that in everything I proved myself useful to Antony. Nor would I hold back from saying this too: you would certainly have found me a grateful ally with my arms as well, had the Arabs not prevented it. I sent him what help I could, and many thousands of measures of grain besides, and even after the disaster at Actium I did not abandon my benefactor, but became his best counselor, once I was no longer of use to him as an ally, telling him that the one remedy for his failures was the death of Cleopatra. Had he put her to death, I promised him money, walls for security, an army, and myself as a partner in the war against you. But it seems his ears were stopped up by his longing for Cleopatra, and by the god who was granting the victory to you. I have fallen together with Antony, and I have laid down my diadem along with his fortune. I have come to you holding to virtue as my hope of safety, believing that you would first want to examine what kind of friend I was, not whose friend."

To this Caesar replied: "No, be safe, and rule now on firmer ground than before; for you deserve to govern a great many, holding to your friendships as steadfastly as this. Try to remain just as faithful to me, now that fortune has favored me more. For my part I have the highest hopes for a man of your spirit. Antony, though, did well to be persuaded by Cleopatra rather than by you, for through his folly we have gained you. It seems, moreover, you are already beginning to do me good service, to judge by what Ventidius writes me, that you have sent him aid against the gladiators. For now, then, I declare by decree that your kingdom is secure. And I shall try in the future to do you further good, so that you will not miss Antony."

With these kind words to the king, he set the diadem back on his head and made known this gift by public decree, in which he spoke at length and generously in the man's praise. Herod, having won him over further with gifts, begged from him the life of Alexas, one of Antony's friends who had become his suppliant; but Caesar's anger prevailed, since he had many harsh complaints against the man he was asked to spare, and so he refused the request. Afterward, when Caesar was traveling to Egypt through Syria, Herod received him with all his royal wealth and rode out with him for the first time as Caesar reviewed his forces near Ptolemais, and feasted him together with all his friends; after them he distributed provisions for a banquet to the rest of the army as well. He also took care to supply plentiful water for those marching through the waterless country as far as Pelusium, and the same again on the return, so that the army lacked for nothing it needed. Indeed, it struck both Caesar and his soldiers that the kingdom left to Herod was far too small a reward for what he had provided. For this reason, when Caesar reached Egypt, now that Cleopatra and Antony were both dead, he not only heaped further honors on Herod but added to his kingdom the territory that Cleopatra had cut away from it, and besides this, from outside, Gadara, Hippos, and Samaria, and along the coast Gaza, Anthedon, Joppa, and Strato's Tower. He also gave him four hundred Galatians as a bodyguard, who had formerly served Cleopatra as spearmen. Nothing spurred Caesar on to such gifts so much as the greatness of spirit shown by the man who received them.

After the first Actiad, he added to Herod's kingdom the district called Trachonitis, and the neighboring Batanea and Auranitis, for the following reason. Zenodorus, who had leased the estate of Lysanias, did not stop letting loose the bandits of Trachonitis on the people of Damascus. They fled to Varro, the governor of Syria, and begged him to report their disaster to Caesar; and Caesar, on learning of it, sent back orders that the band of robbers be wiped out. Varro accordingly took the field, cleared the land of the men, and took it away from Zenodorus. Caesar later gave this territory to Herod, so that it would not again become a base for bandits threatening Damascus. He also made him procurator of the whole of Syria when he returned to the province ten years later, so that nothing could be done by the other procurators without his advice. And when Zenodorus died, he assigned to Herod as well the whole territory between Trachonitis and Galilee. But what mattered more to Herod than all this was that he was loved by Caesar second only to Agrippa, and by Agrippa second only to Caesar. From this point he advanced to the height of prosperity, his spirit rose to greater things, and the greater part of that ambitious spirit he turned toward acts of piety.

Thus in the fifteenth year of his reign he rebuilt the temple itself and enclosed a precinct around it twice the size of the former one, sparing no expense and matching it with unsurpassed magnificence. Proof of this could be seen in the great colonnades around the sanctuary and the fortress on its north side; the colonnades he built up from their foundations, while the fortress, which he refurbished with lavish wealth, he named Antonia in Antony's honor, making it in no way inferior to a royal palace. His own palace, which he built in the upper city, contained two very large and beautiful wings, with which not even the temple could be compared; these he named, after his friends, the Caesareum and the Agrippeum.

Nor did he confine their memory and their names to buildings alone; his ambition to honor them spread to whole cities. In the territory of Samaria he built a city with a very fine wall twenty stadia in circuit, settled six thousand people there, gave them the richest land, and in the middle of the new city founded a very great temple with a sacred precinct around it three and a half stadia across dedicated to Caesar, and named the town Sebaste; he also granted its inhabitants a special constitution. Since Caesar further rewarded him with the grant of additional territory, Herod there too founded him a temple of white marble near the springs of the Jordan. The place is called Panium: there a mountain peak rises to an immense height, and at the foot of the cliff a shaded cave opens up, through which a chasm plunges down to an unfathomable depth, filled with still water so deep that no line let down to explore the bottom of the earth has ever proved long enough. Outside the cave, at the base of the rock, the springs rise up; and this, as some think, is the true source of the Jordan, though we will explain the precise truth of the matter later.

The king also built other structures at Jericho, between the fortress of Cypros and the former palaces, finer and more useful for visits, and named them after the same friends. In short, there was no site anywhere suitable in his kingdom that he left without some mark of honor to Caesar. And once he had filled his own country with temples, he poured his honors out over the province as well, founding a Caesarea in many cities. Noticing, too, a city on the coast that was already in decline, called Strato's Tower, he saw that the natural advantages of the site could match his ambition, and rebuilt the whole of it in white stone, adorning it with the most splendid palaces; here above all he displayed the greatness of his natural genius, for between Dor and Joppa, midway between which the city lies, the entire coast lacks a harbor, so that everyone sailing along Phoenicia toward Egypt must ride at anchor out at sea because of the threat from the southwest wind, which even at a moderate blow raises so great a swell against the rocks that the backwash of the waves churns the sea into fury far and wide. But the king, overcoming nature by his outlay and his ambition, built a harbor larger than Piraeus, and within its recesses other deep anchorages besides. Since the whole site worked against him, he fought the difficulty to a standstill, so that the strength of the construction proved unconquerable by the sea, while its beauty was adorned as though no difficulty stood in the way at all; for having measured out the size we have described...

He let down stones twenty fathoms into the sea to form the harbor's breakwater, most of them fifty feet long, nine feet deep, and ten feet wide, some even larger. Once the submerged foundation had been filled in, the wall rising above the water was widened to two hundred feet. Of this, a hundred feet had been built out first to break the force of the waves — hence it was called the breakwater — and the rest supports the stone wall running around the harbor.

This wall is broken up by very large towers, the finest and most prominent of which, named after Caesar's stepson, is called the Drusion. Frequent vaulted chambers receive those putting in to anchor, and the whole area in front of them forms a broad walkway, circling round, for passengers landing. The entrance faces north, since the north wind is the calmest at that place, and at the mouth of the harbor stand three colossal statues on each side, resting on columns: on the left as one sails in a solid tower holds them up, while on the right two upright stones stand joined together, larger than the tower on the opposite side. Houses of white stone adjoin the harbor as well, and the streets of the city run down to it, laid out at equal intervals.

Opposite the harbor mouth, on a rise of ground, stands a temple of Caesar, remarkable for its beauty and size; in it is a colossal statue of Caesar, not inferior to the Olympian Zeus, on which it was modeled, and one of Rome equal to the Hera of Argos. He dedicated the city to the province, the harbor to those who sail these waters, and the honor of the whole construction to Caesar — accordingly he named it Caesarea.

The rest of the works — an amphitheater, a theater, and marketplaces — he built worthy of that name as well. He also instituted games held every four years, likewise named after Caesar, and was himself the first to offer the greatest prizes, in the hundred and ninety-second Olympiad, in which not only the winners but also those who came second and third shared in the king's wealth. He rebuilt the coastal town of Anthedon, destroyed in war, and renamed it Agrippeion, out of excessive devotion to his friend, whose name he also inscribed on the gate he himself built in the temple.

He was, if any man was, devoted to his father: he raised a monument to him in the form of a city, which he founded in the finest plain of his kingdom, rich in rivers and trees, and named Antipatris. He also fortified the stronghold above Jericho, remarkable for its strength and beauty, and dedicated it to his mother, calling it Cypros. For his brother Phasael he built the tower in Jerusalem bearing his name, whose form and lavish scale we will describe in what follows. And he founded another city in the valley leading north from Jericho, which he named Phasaelis.

Having provided for his household and friends in this way, he did not neglect his own memory either: he fortified a stronghold on the mountain toward Arabia and named it Herodeion after himself, and the breast-shaped hill, artificially made, sixty stadia from Jerusalem, he likewise named after himself, but adorned it more lavishly still. He surrounded its summit with round towers and filled the enclosure with the most costly palaces, so that not only the interior of the rooms was splendid to see, but wealth was lavished on the outer walls, copings, and roofs as well. From far off, at enormous expense, he brought in an abundance of water, and laid an ascent of two hundred steps of purest marble, for the hill was fairly high and entirely artificial. Around its base he also built other palaces able to house his baggage and his friends, so that because it had everything, the fortress seemed like a city, though in its layout a palace.

Having built so much, he displayed his generosity toward a great many cities outside his kingdom as well. To Tripolis, Damascus, and Ptolemais he gave gymnasia; to Byblos, a wall; to Berytus and Tyre, exedras, colonnades, temples, and marketplaces; to Sidon and Damascus, theaters; to the coastal Laodiceans, an aqueduct; to the people of Ascalon, baths and costly fountains, and colonnades admired for their workmanship and size; to some he dedicated groves and meadows. Many cities, as though they were partners in his kingdom, received territory from him as well; on others he bestowed annual and perpetual revenues to fund gymnasiarchies, as he did for the Coans, so that this honor would never lapse.

He supplied grain to all who were in need, and gave money to Rhodes, many times and in many ways, for building their fleet; and when the temple of Apollo there burned down, he rebuilt it at his own expense, and better than before. What need is there to speak of his gifts to the Lycians or the Samians, or of his generosity throughout all Ionia, wherever people were in need? The Athenians, the Spartans, the people of Nicopolis, and Pergamum in Mysia — are they not full of Herod's dedications? And the broad street of the Syrian Antiochenes, which people avoided because of the mud — did he not pave it with polished marble for twenty stadia in length, and adorn it with a colonnade of equal length as protection from the rain?

These gifts one might call particular to each people that benefited from them. But what he granted the Eleans was a gift not only to Greece as a whole but to the entire inhabited world, since the fame of the Olympic games reaches to it. Seeing that these games were collapsing for lack of funds, and the sole remnant of ancient Greece slipping away, he not only became the president of the games for the one four-year cycle he happened to attend, sailing to Rome, but also provided funds in perpetuity, so that the memory of his presidency would never fade.

It would be an endless task to go through his cancellations of debts or remissions of taxes, as when he lightened the annual tribute for the people of Phaselis, Balanea, and the small towns of Cilicia. Yet his greatest generosity was checked most of all by fear — fear of seeming to court popularity, or to be pursuing something greater by benefiting cities more than their own means allowed.

His body matched his spirit: he was always an excellent hunter, succeeding in this especially through his skill on horseback — on one occasion he brought down forty wild animals in a single day. The country breeds wild boar, and is abundantly stocked with deer and wild asses. As a warrior he was irresistible; many, watching him at exercises, were amazed to see him the most accurate of javelin-throwers and the surest of archers.

To his advantages of mind and body good fortune was added as well: he rarely suffered a setback in war, and when he did, the fault lay not with him but with the treachery of some or the recklessness of his soldiers.

Yet fortune avenged his successes abroad with troubles at home, and his misfortunes began with the woman he loved most. For when he came to power, he divorced the wife he had married as a private citizen — her name was Doris, from Jerusalem — and married Mariamme, daughter of Alexander son of Aristobulus. Because of her his household fell into faction, sooner than one might expect, but especially after his return from Rome. First he banished Antipater, his son by Doris, from the city on account of the children he had by Mariamme, allowing him to return only for festivals.

Then he killed Hyrcanus, his wife's grandfather, who had come to him from the Parthians, out of suspicion of a plot — the same Hyrcanus whom Barzapharnes had taken captive when he overran Syria, and whom their fellow countrymen beyond the Euphrates had begged for out of pity. Had he listened to their advice not to cross over to Herod, he would not have perished; but the marriage of his granddaughter proved the bait that lured him to his death. Trusting in this and yearning more than was wise for his homeland, he came. It was not that he himself aspired to the kingship that provoked Herod, but that kingship fell naturally to him.

Of the five children born to him by Mariamme, two were daughters and three were sons. Of these the youngest died being educated in Rome, and Herod raised the two eldest as royal heirs, both because of their mother's noble birth and because they had been born to him as king.

Stronger than all these considerations was Herod's love for Mariamme, which burned in him more fiercely day by day, so that he was insensible to all the pain her attitude caused him — for as great as his love for her was, so great was her hatred of him. Her resentment had a reasonable basis in what had happened, and speaking her mind came from being loved: she openly reproached him for what he had done to her grandfather Hyrcanus and to her brother Jonathan. For he had not spared Jonathan either, boy though he was — he gave him the high priesthood at seventeen, and immediately after honoring him put him to death, because when the boy put on the sacred vestments and approached the altar at the festival, the crowd burst into tears at the sight of him. So the boy was sent by night to Jericho, and there, on Herod's orders, was drowned in a pool by the Galatians.

For these reasons Mariamme reproached Herod, and heaped bitter insults on his sister and his mother as well. He himself was silenced by his passion for her, but the women were seized with fierce resentment, and to strike at what would most move Herod, they accused her of adultery, fabricating many plausible details, among them the charge that she had sent her portrait to Antony in Egypt, and out of excessive shamelessness had displayed herself, though absent, to a man mad for women and capable of taking her by force.

This news struck Herod like a thunderbolt, unsettling him above all through jealous love, but also because he reckoned with Cleopatra's ruthlessness, through which King Lysanias had been put to death, and Malchus the Arab as well — for he measured the danger not by the loss of a wife, but by death itself.

So when he was about to travel abroad, he entrusted his wife to Joseph, the husband of his sister Salome, a man he trusted and who was well disposed to him through their kinship, secretly giving orders to kill her if Antony killed him. But Joseph, not out of malice, but wishing to demonstrate the king's love to her — that even in death he could not bear to be parted from her — revealed the secret.

When Herod returned, she, in the course of their private conversations, as he swore repeatedly how deeply he felt for her and that he had never loved another woman, said, "You certainly showed your love for me well enough in the orders you gave Joseph — commanding him to kill me." As soon as he heard the secret revealed, he was beside himself, and declared that Joseph would never have disclosed the order unless he had seduced her; carried away by his passion, he leapt from his bed and paced wildly about the palace.

His sister Salome seized this moment to press her slanders further, confirming the suspicion against Joseph. Driven mad by unbridled jealousy, Herod at once ordered them both put to death. But remorse followed immediately upon the deed, and as his anger subsided, his love flared up again. So fierce was the fever of his desire that he seemed not even to believe she was dead, but in his grief spoke to her as though she still lived, until time taught him to grieve for her properly, with sorrow suited to one who was truly gone.

Her sons inherited their mother's resentment, and coming to understand the horror of it, looked on their father as an enemy — at first while being educated in Rome, and even more once they returned to Judea; and as they grew, their feelings grew with them. When they came of age for marriage, one married the daughter of his aunt Salome, who had accused their mother, and the other married the daughter of Archelaus, king of Cappadocia; and gaining this support, they now spoke their hatred more openly.

Their boldness gave their accusers an opening, and some now spoke more openly to the king, saying that both sons were plotting against him, and that the one connected by marriage to Archelaus was preparing to flee, relying on his father-in-law, in order to bring an accusation against Herod before Caesar. Filled with these slanders, Herod, as though setting up a bulwark against his sons, brought back Antipater, his son by Doris, and began to give him preference in every way.

To the brothers this reversal was unbearable, and seeing a son of a common mother advancing at the expense of their own noble birth, they could not contain their indignation, and at every grievance let their anger show, so that day by day they grew more hostile, while Antipater was now courted for his own sake as well — a man most skilled in flattering his father, and in fabricating varied slanders against his brothers, some he invented himself, others he had his associates spread, until at last he had utterly stripped his brothers of any hope for the throne. Indeed, in the will he himself was already named successor, and openly so: he was sent to Caesar as if he were already king, using every mark of royal state except the diadem. In time he even succeeded in bringing his mother into Mariamme's bed.

Using two weapons against his brothers, flattery and slander, he worked on the king to the point of endangering his sons' lives. He dragged Alexander all the way to Rome, and his father brought a charge before Caesar of a plot against his own life. Alexander, having with difficulty won leave to voice his grief, and finding a judge far more experienced and wiser than Antipater or Herod, modestly passed over his father's faults, but vigorously refuted the slanders against himself. Having also shown that his brother was innocent and shared in the same dangers, he then lamented Antipater's villainy and their own dishonor. His case was helped, along with his clear conscience, by his gift for speech, for he was indeed a most powerful speaker. And in the end, saying that it would even be pleasant for their father to kill them, and offering himself to the charge, he moved everyone to tears, and so affected Caesar that he dismissed the accusations against them and reconciled Herod with them at once. The terms of reconciliation were that the sons should obey their father in everything, while he should leave the kingdom to whomever he wished.

After this the king returned from Rome, appearing to have dropped the charges against his sons, but not free of suspicion, for Antipater remained close at hand, the source of his hatred. Still, out of respect for the one who had brought about the reconciliation, he did not openly show his hostility. But as he sailed along the coast of Cilicia and put in at Elaeusa, Archelaus received him warmly and gratefully, for the safety of his son-in-law, and joined in the reconciliation.

rejoicing at it, since he had also written more quickly to his friends in Rome, urging them to assist in Alexander's case. He escorted him as far as Zephyrium, giving him gifts worth up to thirty talents.

When Herod arrived in Jerusalem, he gathered the people together, brought his three sons forward, and spoke in defense of his journey abroad. He thanked God at length, and thanked Caesar at length as well, for having set his troubled household in order and for having granted his sons something greater than kingship — harmony, which he himself, he said, would bring into still closer accord.

"For Caesar has made me master of the succession and arbiter of who inherits it, and I, in keeping with what is advantageous, repay him in kind. These three sons I declare kings, calling first upon God to ratify my judgment, and then upon you as well. Age recommends the succession to one, noble birth to the others, but the size of this kingdom is enough for even more than these. Those whom Caesar has joined together, and their father now appoints, you must maintain, giving them honors neither unjust nor uneven, but each according to his rank; for no one is so gladdened by being honored beyond his years as he is pained by being dishonored. As for the kinsmen and friends who must attend upon each of them, I will assign these myself and make them guarantors of harmony, knowing well that it is the ill nature of one's companions that breeds factions and rivalries, whereas if these men are decent, they preserve affection. And I ask not only these men but also the officers of my army to place their hopes in me alone for the present; for I am handing over to my sons not kingship but the honor of kingship — they will enjoy its pleasures as rulers, while the weight of affairs remains mine, even against my will. Let each of you weigh my age, my manner of life, and my piety: I am not so old a man that I might quickly be given up for dead, nor have I given myself over to the kind of luxury that cuts short even the young; and I have cultivated the divine so well that I may hope to reach the furthest span of life. Whoever pays court to my sons in hope of my downfall will answer to me concerning them as well; for it is not out of envy toward my own offspring that I check the eager attentions shown them, but because I know that such eagerness becomes, for young men, fuel for rashness. If each man who approaches them would consider that, being upright, he will receive his reward from me, but that if he stirs up faction, his ill nature will prove unprofitable even with the one he courts, I think all will come to share my mind — which is to say, my sons' mind as well; for it serves them that I should rule, and it serves me that they should be in harmony. But you, good sons, consider first the sacred bond of nature, which even wild beasts preserve in their affections; then consider Caesar, who brought about our reconciliation; and third, myself, who ask this of you while I still have the power to command it: remain brothers. I give you now royal dress and royal attendance, and I pray to God to uphold my judgment, if you keep this harmony."

Having said this, and having affectionately embraced each of his sons, he dismissed the crowd — some joining in prayer for what had been said, but those who longed for a change of regime pretending not to have heard it at all.

Yet the discord left with the brothers still intact, and they parted holding worse suspicions of one another than before: Alexander and Aristobulus grieving that the right of seniority had been confirmed to Antipater, Antipater resentful that his brothers ranked second to him. But Antipater, the most versatile in character of the three, knew how to hold his tongue, and with great cunning concealed his hatred toward them, whereas the other two, because of their noble breeding, spoke whatever they thought. Many provoked and pressed them on, and still more of their friends slipped in among them as spies. Whatever was said by Alexander reached Antipater at once, and passed from Antipater to Herod with additions; for the young man could not simply speak without being held to account — whatever he said was twisted into slander, and if he ever spoke with modest frankness, the smallest things were built up into the greatest. Antipater was forever sending men to provoke him, so that his lies might rest on some real foundation, and when even one of the rumors was proven true, it lent credit to all the rest. As for his own friends, each was either by nature perfectly closemouthed or was won over with gifts so that nothing secret ever leaked out, and one would not be wrong to call Antipater's life a mystery of wickedness. But Alexander's companions he corrupted with money or won over with flattery, until he had turned every one of them into a traitor and a spy on what was done or said. Staging everything with great care, he made his approaches to Herod through slander the most skillful of all — wearing the mask of a brother himself while sending other men as informers. Whenever some charge against Alexander was reported, he would come forward and pretend to make light of it, but then would quietly work it up and provoke the king to indignation. Everything was traced back to a plot, to the appearance that Alexander lay in wait for his father's murder; for nothing lent more credit to the slanders than Antipater's own show of defending him. Herod, exasperated by all this, transferred to Antipater, day by day, exactly as much affection as he withdrew from the young men.

Some of those at court inclined the same way, some willingly, others under compulsion — men like Ptolemy, the most honored of the king's friends, the king's own brothers, and the whole family; for Antipater was everything, and — most bitter of all to Alexander — Antipater's mother was everything too, a counselor against them harsher than any stepmother, hating the sons of the queen more fiercely than stepmothers commonly hate stepchildren. So by now everyone courted Antipater in hope of the future, and the king's own orders estranged each of them further still, since he had instructed the most honored men neither to approach nor to pay attention to Alexander's circle. He was feared not only by those within the kingdom but by friends abroad as well; for Caesar had given no king such power that a man who fled from him could be extradited even from a city with no connection to him. The young men, meanwhile, knew nothing of the slanders, and for that very reason fell into them all the more unguardedly; for their father found no open fault with them, but came to understand things little by little from his own coolness, and grew harsher the more it pained him. Antipater also turned their uncle Pheroras against them with hostility, and their aunt Salome as well, working on her constantly, courting her favor and provoking her further.

What also fed the hatred toward Salome was Alexander's wife Glaphyra, who traced out her own noble descent and boasted that she was mistress of everyone in the palace, being descended on her father's side from Temenus and on her mother's side from Darius son of Hystaspes. She often reproached Herod's sister and his wives for their low birth, since each of them had been chosen for her beauty and not for her lineage. And there were many such wives, since it was ancestral custom among the Jews to marry several, and the king delighted in having many; and all of them, because of Glaphyra's arrogance and her insults, hated Alexander. As for Salome, although she was his mother-in-law, it was Aristobulus himself who set her against him, she being already angered by Glaphyra's insults; for he constantly reproached his own wife for her low birth, saying that he had married a commoner while his brother Alexander had married a king's daughter. His wife, in tears, reported this to Salome, adding that Alexander's circle threatened that once they took the kingdom, they would make the other brothers' mothers weavers alongside the slave women, and the brothers themselves village clerks — mocking them as men so carefully educated. At this Salome, unable to contain her anger, reported everything to Herod; and she was a very credible witness in speaking against her son-in-law. Another slander converged with this one and further inflamed the king's anger: he heard that they were constantly invoking their mother's name, wailing and cursing him, and that often, when he passed on some of Mariamne's garments to his later wives, they threatened that before long they would fit them out with garments made of hair in place of royal robes.

Because of this, although he had come to fear the young men's proud spirit, he did not yet abandon hope of setting things right. Instead he summoned them — for he was also about to sail to Rome — and threatened them briefly as a king, but for the most part admonished them as a father, urging them to love their brothers and granting them pardon for their past offenses, if they would be better men in the time to come.

They cleared themselves of the slanders, calling them false, and said they would confirm their defense by their deeds; but they also said that he too must block the path of such gossip by not believing it so readily, for there would never be a shortage of people willing to lie about them as long as there was someone ready to believe. Having won him over as a father with these words, they quickly dispelled the immediate danger, but took on grief for what lay ahead; for they learned that Salome was their enemy, and their uncle Pheroras too — both of them burdensome and harsh, but Pheroras the more so, since he shared in the whole kingdom except the diadem, had revenues of his own amounting to a hundred talents, and enjoyed the fruit of the entire country beyond the Jordan, which he had received as a gift from his brother, who had also had him made tetrarch by petitioning Caesar on his behalf. Herod had even judged him worthy of a royal marriage, giving him his own wife's sister to marry; and after her death he had pledged to him his eldest daughter, with a dowry of three hundred talents. But Pheroras fled from the royal marriage out of love for a slave woman, at which Herod, in anger, joined his daughter instead to his nephew, who was later put to death by the Parthians. Yet not long after, he relaxed his anger toward Pheroras, excusing him on account of his passion.

Pheroras had also been accused, even earlier while the queen was still alive, of plotting against Herod with poison, and now a great number of informers came forward, so that although Herod loved his brother more than anyone, he was led into believing what was said and into dread of it. Having tortured many of those under suspicion, he came at last to Pheroras's friends. Not one of them openly confessed to a plot, but they said that Pheroras was preparing to carry off his beloved and flee to the Parthians, and that his partners in this scheme and in the flight included Costobarus, Salome's husband, to whom the king had given her in marriage after her first husband had been put to death for adultery. Nor was Salome herself free of slander; for Pheroras's own brother accused her of an agreement of marriage with Syllaeus, the steward of Obodas, king of the Arabs, who was Herod's bitterest enemy. Cross-examined on this charge, and on every other that Pheroras brought against her, she was cleared; and the king released Pheroras himself as well from the accusations.

But the storm within the household now shifted to Alexander, and settled its whole weight upon his head. There were three eunuchs held in the highest honor by the king, and their duties made this plain: one was appointed to pour his wine, another to serve his dinner, and the third put him to bed and lay down beside him. Alexander won these men over into intimacy with great gifts. When this was reported to the king, they were examined under torture; they confessed at once to the intimacy, and also revealed the promises made to secure it — how they had been persuaded by Alexander, who told them they should not place their hopes in Herod, a shameless old man who dyed his hair (unless they supposed that by this he also wished to pass for young), but should look instead to him, who would succeed to the kingdom before long even against his father's will, take vengeance on his enemies, and make his friends happy and blessed — these men above all. He told them, too, that a secret following of powerful men already surrounded him, including the officers of the army and the company commanders, who met with him in private.

This so terrified Herod that he did not dare bring the informations out into the open even at once, but sent spies about by night and by day to search out everything done or said, and put to death at once anyone who fell under suspicion. The palace was filled with dreadful lawlessness: everyone, out of private enmity or hatred, fabricated slanders of his own, and many used the king's murderous temper as a weapon against their rivals. A lie won instant credit, while the punishments that followed slander were swifter still than the slander itself. A man who had just brought an accusation would himself be accused, and would be led off together with the very man he had exposed; for the danger to one's own life cut short the king's inquiries. His bitterness reached such a pitch that he could not even look with kindness on anyone not yet accused, and he was harshest of all toward his friends — he barred many of them from the palace, and toward those on whom he had no power to lay hands, he was harsh in word. Antipater joined in against Alexander amid these misfortunes, gathering a whole company of kinsmen, and left no slander untried. The king was driven to such terror by Antipater's monstrous fabrications and contrivances that he seemed to himself to see Alexander standing over him, sword in hand.

So he suddenly had him seized and bound, and turned to torturing his friends. Many died in silence, saying nothing beyond what their conscience allowed; others, forced by their agonies to lie, said that Alexander was plotting against him together with his brother Aristobulus, that he was watching for his chance to kill him while hunting, and then meant to flee to Rome. Although these statements were not plausible but improvised under compulsion, the king believed them gladly, finding comfort, in having bound his son, in the thought that he had not done so unjustly.

But Alexander, once he saw that it was impossible to change his father's mind, resolved to meet the danger head-on, and composed four books against his enemies, in which he admitted the plot but named as accomplices most of the men themselves — above all Pheroras and Salome, saying that Salome had even once forced herself upon him at night against his will. These books, loud with grave and terrible charges against the most powerful men, came into Herod's hands, and Archelaus hurried to Judea with all speed, in fear for his son-in-law and his daughter. He proved a most far-sighted ally to them, and skillfully turned aside the king's threat.

Meeting Herod at once, he cried out: "Where, where is that accursed son-in-law of mine? Where shall I see that head, a father's murderer, so that I may tear it apart with my own hands? And I will hand over my daughter too, to her fine bridegroom; for even if she has had no share in the plot, she is defiled simply by having become such a man's wife. I am amazed, too, at your patience — you who were the very man plotted against — that he still lives...

...Alexander—until now. I hurried here from Cappadocia expecting to find him already condemned, and meaning to discuss with you the question of my daughter, whom I had betrothed to him out of respect for your rank. But now we must take counsel about them both together. And if you are too indulgent a father to punish a treacherous son, let us join right hands and become heirs to each other's anger.

With this bluster he won Herod over, guarded as the king had been. He gave him the letters composed by Alexander to read, and going through them chapter by chapter, discussed each with him. Archelaus took this as his opening move, and little by little shifted the blame onto the men named in them, and onto Pheroras. When he saw that the king believed him, he said, "We must consider whether the young man is really being plotted against by so many scoundrels—

not by the young man himself. For I cannot see what reason he would have to fall into so great a crime, when he already enjoys the kingship and hopes for the succession besides—unless certain men were egging him on and exploiting the pliability of his age for evil ends. It is through such men that not only the young but even the old are deceived, and the most splendid households and whole kingdoms overturned."

Herod agreed with what he said, and relaxed his anger against Alexander for a while, but grew the more incensed against Pheroras; for Pheroras was the subject of the four letters. Pheroras, seeing the king's volatility and Archelaus's friendship with him prevailing over everyone, realized there was no honorable way to safety, and so procured one through shamelessness: he abandoned Alexander and fled for refuge to Archelaus.

Archelaus said he could not see how he could ask for his pardon when he was implicated in so many charges, from which it was plainly shown that he had plotted against the king and had caused the young man's present troubles—unless he was willing to drop his cunning and his denials, and instead confess to the charges and beg forgiveness from his brother, who loved him; for in that case Archelaus himself would cooperate in every way. Pheroras was persuaded,

and having arranged himself so as to appear as pitiable as possible, in black clothing and in tears, he fell at Herod's feet, as he had often done before when begging pardon, confessing himself to be vile—for he had indeed done everything he was accused of—yet lamenting a derangement of mind and a madness, whose cause, he said, was his love for his wife. Having thus put forward Pheroras as his own accuser and witness, Archelaus at once

began to plead for him and to check Herod's anger, using illustrations drawn from his own case: he too, he said, had suffered far worse at his brother's hands, yet had set the claims of nature above those of vengeance; for in kingdoms, as in large bodies, some part is always inflamed by its own weight, and this ought not to be cut off, but treated more gently. By saying much along these lines he softened Herod toward Pheroras, though he himself continued to feign anger at Alexander, and declared he would separate his daughter from him and take her away—until he brought Herod round to pleading on the young man's behalf and to betrothing his daughter to him once again.

Very convincingly Archelaus said he would let her marry whomever she pleased, except Alexander; for he set the highest value on maintaining toward him the rights owed by the marriage bond. When the king said his son would receive this as a gift from him if he would not dissolve the marriage—since they already had children together, and the wife was so loved by the young man that her staying with him would restrain his faults, while her being torn away would drive him to total despair, for reckless daring grows milder when entangled with one's own affections—Archelaus reluctantly gave in, was reconciled, and reconciled the young man to his father.

He said, however, that Alexander must by all means be sent to Rome to speak with Caesar, for he himself had written to him about the whole matter. So Archelaus's stratagem, by which he rescued his son-in-law, achieved its end, and after the reconciliation they spent their days in feasting and mutual goodwill. As Archelaus was leaving, Herod presented him with gifts worth seventy talents, a gold throne set with jewels, eunuchs, and a concubine named

Pannychis, and he honored each of his friends according to his rank. In the same way, at the king's command, his relatives too all gave splendid gifts to Archelaus, and he was escorted by Herod and the nobles as far as Antioch. Not long after, a man far more capable than Archelaus at such stratagems arrived in Judea, one who not only undid the reconciliation Archelaus had arranged for Alexander,

but became the cause of his destruction as well. He was a Spartan by birth, named Eurycles, driven into the kingdom by a longing for money, since Greece could no longer support his extravagance. He brought Herod splendid gifts as bait for what he was hunting, and having at once received many times as much in return, he considered a clean gift worthless unless he could trade in the kingdom through bloodshed. He went about winning the king over with flattery

and cleverness of speech and false praises of himself. Quickly grasping Herod's character, and saying and doing everything to please him, he became one of his foremost friends; for the king, on account of his homeland, and everyone around him too, gladly gave the Spartan preference. Once he had learned the rotten spots in the household—

the quarrels among the brothers, and how the father stood toward each of them—finding that Antipater had already won him over through hospitality, he feigned friendship with Alexander, falsely claiming to have long been a companion of Archelaus as well; and so he was quickly received as one already trusted, and Alexander at once introduced him to his brother Aristobulus too. Having tested every face, he approached each in his own way; but above all he became Antipater's hired agent and Alexander's betrayer,

reproaching Antipater, if he, being the eldest, would overlook those lying in wait for his hopes, and reproaching Alexander, if he, born of a queen and married to a queen, would allow the son of a commoner to succeed to the throne—especially since he had so great an advantage in Archelaus. He posed as a trusted counselor to the young man, having fabricated a friendship with Archelaus; and so, holding nothing back, Alexander poured out to him his complaints about Antipater, and

how, since Herod had killed their mother, it was no wonder if he also took from them her kingdom; at which Eurycles pretended to pity and share his pain. He induced Aristobulus to say the same things, and having entangled both of them in their complaints against their father, he went off and carried their secrets to Antipater; he also falsely added a plot, as though the brothers were lying in ambush for him

and all but drawing their swords already. Having taken a great sum of money on top of this, he became a champion of Antipater's cause even before the father. And finally, having contracted for the death of Aristobulus and Alexander, he became their accuser before their father, and coming to him declared that he was offering Herod his life in return for his benefactions, and repaying the light of day in exchange for his hospitality; for long ago

a sword had been sharpened against him, he said, and Alexander's right hand made ready for it, and he himself had stood in the way, feigning cooperation in order to slow things down; for Alexander had said, he claimed, that Herod was not content to reign himself over what belonged to others, and, after murdering their mother, to have squandered her kingdom, but was even bringing in a bastard as successor, offering their grandfather's kingdom to Antipater the corrupter. He would

avenge Hyrcanus and Mariamme with his own hand; for it was not fitting, he said, that he should inherit the throne from such a father without bloodshed. There were, moreover, many things that provoked him daily, so that not even the most innocent kind of talk had been left free of slander: whenever the noble birth of others was mentioned, he himself was insulted for no reason, since his father would say that Alexander alone was noble and despised his own father

for his lack of noble birth; and in the hunts, if he made some mistake he was met with silence, but if he did well he was met with ironic praise. Everywhere he found his father implacable, and affectionate only toward Antipater—for whose sake he would gladly die too, if he failed in his plot. And if he succeeded in killing him, his best hope of safety, he said, lay first with Archelaus, being his father-in-law, to whom he could easily escape, and then with Caesar, who up to now did not know Herod's true character;

for he would no longer, as before, present himself trembling before his overbearing father, nor speak only of his own grievances, but would first proclaim the nation's sufferings and the people taxed to the point of exhaustion, and then the luxuries and doings on which the money raised through bloodshed had been squandered, the sort of men from among them who had grown rich, and at whose expense the favored cities had been beautified. He would also seek out

his grandfather there, and his mother, and would proclaim all the pollutions of the kingdom, crimes for which he would not be judged a parricide. Having fabricated such monstrous tales against Alexander, Eurycles heaped much praise on Antipater, declaring that he alone was devoted to his father and for that reason had so far stood in the way of the plot. The king, not yet fully calmed after the earlier accusations, now flared up into an ungovernable rage.

And once again seizing the opportunity, Antipater sent forward other accusers against his brothers, to say that they were secretly conferring with Jucundus and Tyrannus, men who had once been the king's cavalry commanders but had since fallen from their rank because of some offenses. Herod, in a fury over this, immediately had the men tortured. They, however, confessed nothing of what was charged against them; but a letter was produced and brought before the commander

of the garrison at Alexandreion, from Alexander, urging him to receive him and his brother Aristobulus into the fortress once they had killed their father, and to let them make use of the weapons and the other resources there. Alexander said this was a forgery of Diophantus; Diophantus was the king's secretary, a bold man skilled at imitating anyone's handwriting, who, after many such forgeries, was in the end put to death for it.

Herod tortured the garrison commander as well, but learned nothing from him either about the charges. Yet, although he found the proofs weak, he ordered his sons kept under guard—though still unbound for the moment—while he called Eurycles, the corrupter of his household and the stage-manager of the whole abomination, his savior and benefactor, and rewarded him with fifty talents. Eurycles, outrunning the accurate report of events, went off to Cappadocia and extracted money

from Archelaus too, daring to say that he had actually reconciled Herod with Alexander. Then, crossing to Greece, he put his ill-gotten gains to similarly base use: indeed, having twice been accused before Caesar of filling Achaea with sedition and stripping its cities bare, he was sent into exile. Such was the requital that overtook him for the ruin of Alexander and Aristobulus. It is worth setting Euarestus of Cos over against the Spartan; for he too

was among Alexander's closest friends, and, visiting at the same time as Eurycles, when the king questioned him about the things Eurycles had been slandering the young men with, he swore on oath that he had heard nothing of the kind from them. Yet this did nothing to help the unfortunate youths; for of all reports, Herod was quickest to lend an ear to those of wrongdoing, and anyone who shared his suspicions and shared his outrage found favor with him. Salome too

provoked his savagery toward his children; for Aristobulus, wishing to bind her to their danger since she was both mother-in-law and aunt to them, sent word urging her to save herself, since the king was ready to kill her too, accused—as before—of secretly passing on the king's confidential business to Syllaeus the Arab, whom she was eager to marry, though he was Herod's enemy. This news, like a final storm,

overwhelmed the young men, already caught in the tempest; for Salome ran to the king and reported the warning she had received. Herod, no longer able to restrain himself, had both his sons bound and kept apart from one another, and sent Volumnius the camp commander and his friend Olympus in haste to Caesar, bearing written reports. When they had sailed to Rome and delivered the king's letter,

Caesar was deeply distressed over the young men, but did not think it right to take from their father his authority over his sons. He wrote back, then, establishing Herod as sole judge, but saying he would do well to examine the plot in a joint council of his own relatives and the governors of the province; and if they were found guilty, to put them to death, but if they had merely planned flight, to punish them

more moderately. Herod complied with these instructions, and on arriving at Berytus, where Caesar had directed, convened the tribunal. The governors took their seats as Caesar's letter had prescribed—Saturninus and his colleagues from Pedanius's staff—together with Volumnius the procurator; after them the king's relatives and friends, Salome and Pheroras; and after them the leading men of all Syria, except Archelaus the king;

for Herod, since Archelaus was Alexander's father-in-law, held him under suspicion. As for the sons themselves, he did not bring them before the court, very deliberately; for he knew that the mere sight of them would inevitably win them pity, and that if they were also given a chance to speak, Alexander would easily clear himself of the charges. So they were kept under guard in the village of Platana in Sidonian territory. The king, standing as though they were present, pressed his case,

accusing them of the plot rather weakly, as one at a loss for proofs of it, but bringing forward countless insults, jeers, abuse, and offenses against himself, which he declared to the assembled council to be worse than death. Then, when no one contradicted him, he made a show of pity, as though he himself were the one convicted, and were winning a bitter victory over his own children, and asked each man's opinion in turn. Saturninus was the first to declare his verdict: that the young men should be condemned, but not to death;

for it was not right for him, he said, with three children of his own standing by, to vote for the destruction of another man's children. The two envoys with him agreed, and some others followed their lead. Volumnius, however, opened with the grimmer sentence, and after him all condemned the young men to death, some out of flattery, some out of hatred for Herod, but none out of real indignation. At that point

all Syria and Judea alike hung in suspense, waiting for how the drama would end; yet no one supposed that Herod's cruelty would go so far as to kill his own children. But he had his sons dragged off to Tyre, and from there sailed across to Caesarea, pondering what manner of death to give the young men. There was an old soldier of the king's, named Tiro, whose own son was a close friend and companion of Alexander's,

and who himself had grown fond of the young men in his own right; out of the excess of his indignation he lost all self-control, and at first went about crying out that justice had been trampled underfoot, that truth had perished, that nature itself had been thrown into confusion, that life was filled with lawlessness, and everything else that his passion, careless of his own life, dictated to him. In the end he even dared to approach the king himself, and said, "To me you seem the most cursed of men, you who...

...against your dearest kin you let yourself be persuaded by the most wicked men, if indeed, having often condemned Pheroras and Salome to death, you now believe them against your own children—men who, cutting off your legitimate heirs, leave you with Antipater alone, choosing for themselves a king they can easily manage. Consider, too, that this same man may one day earn the soldiers' hatred for the death of his brothers; for there is no one who does not pity the boys, and many of the officers show their anger openly." As he said this, he named the men who were angry.

Herod immediately arrested them, and Tiron himself, and his son. At this a court barber named Trypho, driven by some supernatural folly, rushed forward and informed on himself: "This Tiron," he said, "tried to persuade me too, whenever I attended you with the razor, to cut your throat, and promised me great rewards from Alexander." Hearing this, Herod put Tiron, his son, and the barber to torture. The father and the barber denied everything, and when the son said nothing further, Herod ordered Tiron tortured more severely. The son, pitying him, promised the king he would tell everything if his father's life were spared. When the king agreed, he said that his father, persuaded by Alexander, had wanted to kill him. Some thought this had been invented to end his father's torment; others believed it true.

In an assembly Herod accused the officers and Tiron before the people and set the crowd on them; there, at any rate, they were killed along with the barber, stoned and clubbed to death. He then sent his sons to Sebaste, not far from Caesarea, with orders to strangle them. When the order had quickly been carried out, he had the bodies brought up to the fortress of Alexandrium, to be buried with Alexander their maternal grandfather. Such, then, was the end of Alexander and Aristobulus.

With Antipater now undisputed heir, unbearable hatred against him arose from the nation, for everyone knew that he had contrived all the accusations against his brothers; and there lurked in him no small fear as he watched the growing family of the men he had destroyed. For Alexander had two sons by Glaphyra, Tigranes and Alexander, and Aristobulus had, by Berenice daughter of Salome, sons Herod, Agrippa, and Aristobulus, and daughters Herodias and Mariamme. Glaphyra, with her dowry, Herod sent back to Cappadocia once he had killed Alexander; Berenice, Aristobulus's widow, he married to Antipater's uncle on his mother's side—for Antipater, working to win over Salome, who was estranged from him, arranged this marriage. He also courted Pheroras with gifts and every kind of service, and sent no small sums of money to Caesar's friends in Rome. Saturninus and his circle in Syria, too, were all glutted with his gifts.

But the more he gave, the more he was hated, since it was plain he was not being generous out of magnanimity but spending out of fear. And it turned out that those who received something became no more friendly, while those to whom he gave nothing became still harsher enemies. He made his distributions more lavish by the day, seeing the king—contrary to his own hopes—caring for the orphans and showing repentance for those he had killed by pitying their children.

Once, gathering his relatives and friends, and setting the children before him, Herod filled his eyes with tears and said: "A grim spirit has taken from these children their fathers, but this loss stirs in me, together with nature itself, pity for their orphaned state. Though I proved the unluckiest of fathers, I mean to prove a more devoted grandfather, and after my death to leave them guardians drawn from those dearest to me. I betroth your daughter, Pheroras, to the elder of Alexander's two sons, so that you will be bound to him as his necessary guardian; and to your son, Antipater, I betroth Aristobulus's daughter—so you may become a father to the orphan girl. Her sister my own Herod shall take, since on his mother's side he is grandson of a high priest. Let this be my settlement, one that none of those who love me should undo; and I pray God to bless these marriages for the good of my kingdom and my descendants, and to let these children look on with calmer eyes than their fathers did." Having said this, he wept and joined the children's right hands together, then kissed each one affectionately and dismissed the council.

Antipater at once turned pale and showed his distress to everyone; for he supposed that the honor paid the orphans by his father meant the overthrow of his own position, and that he would again be in danger for everything, if Alexander's sons had Archelaus and Pheroras the tetrarch as their allies. He weighed his own unpopularity against the nation's pity for the orphans, and how eager and lasting the Jews' memory was for the brothers who had perished because of him. He resolved, then, to break off the betrothals by every means.

He was afraid to approach his harsh and quick-to-suspect father by cunning, so he ventured to come to him directly and beg him not to strip him of the honor he had been granted, nor let him keep the name of king while the power belonged to others; for he would never control affairs, he said, if Alexander's son gained Archelaus as grandfather and Pheroras as father-in-law. He pleaded, since the royal family was so large, that the marriages be rearranged; for the king had nine wives, and seven children by them: Antipater himself by Doris; Herod by Mariamme, the high priest's daughter; Antipas and Archelaus by Malthace the Samaritan, and a daughter Olympias, whom his own nephew Joseph had married; by Cleopatra of Jerusalem, Herod and Philip; by Pallas, Phasael. He had other daughters too, Roxane and Salome, the one by Phaedra, the other by Elpis. Two of his wives were childless, a niece and a great-niece. Besides these there were the two daughters of Alexander and Aristobulus by Mariamme. With the family so crowded, Antipater begged that the marriages be changed.

The king was bitterly angered when he perceived Antipater's disposition toward the orphans, and the thought struck him concerning the murdered brothers, that these children too might one day become material for Antipater's slanders. So at that time he answered him harshly and drove him away, but afterward, won over again by his flattery, he relented, and married him to Aristobulus's daughter, and his son to Pheroras's daughter.

One can gauge how much Antipater's flattery achieved in these matters from Salome's failure in similar circumstances. Though she was his sister, and though she begged repeatedly, through Livia the wife of Caesar, to be given in marriage to Syllaeus the Arab, Herod swore he would treat her as his bitterest enemy if she did not give up her pursuit, and in the end married her, against her will, to a certain Alexas, one of his friends; and of her daughters he married one to Alexas's son, the other to Antipater's uncle on his mother's side. Of Mariamme's granddaughters, one married her aunt's son Antipater, the other her uncle's son Phasael.

Having broken off the orphans' hopes, and having arranged the marriages to his own advantage, Antipater sailed on as if his hopes rested on secure ground; and, adding to his wickedness a new confidence, he became unbearable, for being unable to shed the hatred each man bore him, he sought his safety instead by making himself feared. Pheroras too helped him in this, now that he was, as it were, already a settled king.

There also arose a faction among the women at court, which stirred up fresh disturbances. Pheroras's wife, joined by her mother and sister and by Antipater's mother too, behaved with great insolence throughout the palace, and even dared to insult two of the king's daughters, for which Herod above all had come to detest her; yet, hated as they were by everyone else, they held their ground. Only Salome opposed their unity, and told the king that their alliance boded no good for his affairs. When they learned of her accusation, and of Herod's anger, they gave up their open meetings and displays of friendship, and instead pretended to quarrel with one another when the king was listening; Antipater joined in this pretense too, openly clashing with Pheroras. But in secret they met and held nighttime revels, and the watchfulness this required only deepened their unity. Salome, however, knew everything that was going on and reported it all to Herod.

He blazed into anger, especially against Pheroras's wife, since Salome accused her more than the rest. So he gathered a council of friends and relatives and brought many charges against the woman, including the insult to his own daughters, and that she had paid the Pharisees money to work against him and had bewitched his brother into hostility toward him with drugs. Finally he turned his speech to Pheroras, telling him to choose one of two things, either to remain his brother or to keep his wife. When Pheroras said he would sooner give up his life than his wife, Herod, not knowing what to do, turned to Antipater and ordered him to have no dealings with Pheroras's wife, or with Pheroras himself, or with anyone belonging to her. Antipater did not openly disobey the order, but secretly spent his nights with them; and fearing the watchful Salome, he arranged, through his friends in Italy, to have himself sent to Rome. For they wrote that Antipater ought after so long a time to be sent to Caesar, and Herod, without delay, sent him off with a splendid retinue and a great sum of money, and had him carry the will, in which Antipater was named king, and Antipater's successor was to be Herod, the son of Mariamme the high priest's daughter.

Syllaeus the Arab also sailed to Rome, having disregarded Caesar's orders, and meaning to contest with Antipater the case which Nicolaus had more speedily won. He also had no small quarrel with Aretas, his own king; for he had killed several of Aretas's friends, including Soaemus, one of the most powerful men in Petra. He had bribed Fabatus, Caesar's steward, with large sums, and used him as an ally even against Herod. But Herod, giving more, drew Fabatus away from Syllaeus, and through him collected what Caesar had ordered paid. Syllaeus, paying nothing, went so far as to accuse Fabatus before Caesar, saying he was steward not of Caesar's interests but of Herod's. Fabatus, angered by this—he was still held in the highest honor by Herod—betrayed Syllaeus's secrets, telling the king that Syllaeus had bribed his bodyguard Corinthus, whom he should be on guard against.

The king believed him; for Corinthus had indeed been raised in the kingdom, though by birth an Arab. He at once arrested not only Corinthus but two other Arabs found with him, one a friend of Syllaeus, the other a tribal chief. Under torture they confessed that they had persuaded Corinthus, for a large sum of money, to kill Herod. These men, after examination, were sent on to Rome by Saturninus, governor of Syria.

Herod did not let up pressing Pheroras to separate from his wife, nor did he stop devising some means of punishing the woman, having many reasons for his hatred, until at last, in extreme anger, he banished both her and his brother. Pheroras, content with the insult, withdrew to his own tetrarchy, swearing that the only end to his exile would be Herod's death, and that he would never return while his brother lived; nor did he come back even when his brother fell ill, though urgently summoned, for Herod wished to leave him certain instructions, believing he was about to die. But Herod, against expectation, recovered, and soon after Pheroras fell ill himself, and Herod proved gentler than before; indeed he came to him and nursed him with sympathy. Yet this did not overcome the illness, for after a few days Pheroras died. Though Herod had loved him to the last, it was even rumored that he himself had had him poisoned. He had the body brought to Jerusalem, proclaimed the deepest mourning for the whole nation, and gave him a most splendid funeral. Such was the end that came to one of the murderers of Alexander and Aristobulus.

The penalty now passed to the true author, Antipater, beginning with Pheroras's death. Some of Pheroras's freedmen came to the king in distress, saying that his brother had been destroyed by poison; that his wife had brought him something unusually prepared, and that as soon as he ate it he fell ill; that two days before, her mother and sister had brought in a woman skilled in drugs from Arabia, supposedly to prepare a love-potion for Pheroras, but that instead she had given him something deadly, procured through Syllaeus, to whom this woman was known. Struck by these many suspicions, the king put maidservants and some free women to torture. One of the women, in her agony, cried out: "May God, who rules earth and heaven, punish the one responsible for these evils among us—Antipater's mother!"

Seizing on this lead, the king pursued the truth further. The woman revealed the friendship between Antipater's mother and Pheroras and his wives, and their secret meetings, and that Pheroras and Antipater used to drink with these women on their way back from the king, letting no servant or maid, man or woman, be present through the whole night. One of the free women made this disclosure. Herod then had the slave women tortured separately, one by one, and all of them told the same story as before, and added that Antipater had arranged with Pheroras that Antipater would go to Rome and Pheroras withdraw to Perea; for they had often said to one another that once Alexander and Aristobulus were gone, Herod would turn next against them and their wives, since after Mariamme and her children he would spare no one else, so that it was better to flee as far as possible from the beast. They said too that Antipater, often complaining to his mother, said that he himself was already gray, while his father grew younger every day, and that he might well die before he even began his true reign—and even if his father should die at some point, when indeed would that be?

So he would be left with only the briefest enjoyment of the succession, since the hydra's heads kept sprouting again -- the sons of Aristobulus and Alexander. His father had also stripped him of any hope for his own children, since it was not one of Antipater's own sons but Herod, Mariamme's son, whom he had named successor after his death. And in this too his father must think himself thoroughly worn down, since he intended to leave the will as it stood -- he would see to it, Antipater said, that none of that generation was left alive. Herod, though the most child-hating of all fathers who ever lived, hated his brother far more: he had given him a hundred talents just to stop speaking with Pheroras. When Pheroras asked what harm he had done him, Antipater answered that he wished Herod would take everything from them and let them live, if only naked. But there was no escaping so murderous a beast, one with whom no one could even show open affection for another. "Even now we meet each other only in secret," he said, "but we shall meet openly once we find in ourselves the courage and the strength of men."

This was what the women said under torture, and also that Pheroras had planned to flee with them to Petra. Herod believed everything they said, on account of the hundred talents, since only with Antipater had he discussed that matter. His anger fell first on Doris, Antipater's mother: he stripped her of every ornament he had given her -- and there were many talents' worth -- and banished her a second time. Pheroras' wives, having been reconciled, he now treated kindly despite the torture. But he was shaken with fear, and every suspicion set him ablaze; he dragged many who were not guilty into torture, afraid he might overlook one of the guilty. In the midst of this he turned

to Antipater the Samaritan, who was the steward of Antipater's estate. Torturing him, he learned that Antipater had sent for a deadly poison from Egypt through one of his companions, Antiphilus; that Theudion, Antipater's uncle, had received it from him and handed it over to Pheroras -- for Antipater had instructed him to kill Herod while he himself was in Rome, safely removed from suspicion -- and that Pheroras

had entrusted the poison to his wife. The king summoned her at once and ordered her to bring what she had received. She went out as if to fetch it, but threw herself from the roof, forestalling both the exposure and the abuse she expected from the king. By the providence of God, it seems, who was pursuing Antipater, she did not fall on her head but to one side, and so survived. When she was brought to him,

the king revived her -- for she had been stunned by the fall -- and asked why she had thrown herself down, swearing that if she told the truth he would free her from all punishment, but if she held anything back he would tear her body apart with torture and not even leave it a grave. To this the woman, pausing a moment, said: "Why indeed should I still spare the secrets of Pheroras, now that he is dead, or protect the man who has destroyed us all,

Antipater? Listen, O king, and let God be witness with you to my truth, God who cannot be deceived. When you sat weeping beside the dying Pheroras, he called me to him and said: 'How greatly, wife, I misjudged my brother's feelings toward me -- hating the one who loved me so, and plotting to kill the one who, even now that I am dying, is not at ease about me. But I

already pay the penalty for my impiety. You, take the poison you keep against him, left with us by Antipater, and destroy it quickly before my eyes, so that I may not carry the avenging fiend with me even to Hades.' At his command I brought it and, before his eyes, poured out most of it into the fire, but I kept back a little for myself, against the unknown and against my fear of you."

So saying, she produced the box, which still held a small amount of the poison. The king then turned the torture on Antiphilus's mother and brother, and they too confessed that Antiphilus had brought the box from Egypt and that he had received the poison from his brother, a physician practicing in Alexandria. And now the avenging spirits of Alexander and Aristobulus went about searching out and exposing every hidden thing, dragging into the inquiry even those furthest removed from suspicion.

So it was discovered that even Mariamme, the high priest's daughter, had knowledge of the plot, for her brothers, under torture, testified to this against her. The king punished the son for his mother's daring as well: he struck Herod, her son, from the will, though he was Antipater's designated successor. On top of this

Bathyllus too was drawn into the inquiry, the final proof of all that had been plotted against Antipater. He was a freedman of his, and he had brought yet another poison -- the venom of asps and the juices of other reptiles -- so that if the first poison should fail, Pheroras and his wife might arm themselves with this against the king. As a mere byproduct of his boldness against his father, Antipater had also brought along the

letters fabricated against his brothers. Archelaus and Philip, the king's sons, were being educated at Rome, already young men and full of spirit. Eager to remove these two, who kept reviving in his prospects, Antipater forged letters against them in the names of their friends at Rome, while others he persuaded to write, corrupting them with money, saying that they spoke much abuse against their father and openly lamented Alexander

and Aristobulus, and grew indignant at being recalled -- for their father had already sent for them, and this was what most troubled Antipater. Even before his journey, while he was still in Judea, he had been buying up such letters against them from Rome, and approaching his father as though above suspicion, he would defend his brothers, calling some of what was written false and other parts merely the errors of youth.

At the same time, having given great sums of money to those who wrote against his brothers, he tried to confuse the inquiry, buying up costly garments, embroidered coverlets, silver and gold cups, and many other treasures, so that by the sheer scale of this spending he might disguise the wages he had paid for those letters -- he had in fact spent two hundred talents, and of these

the greatest pretext was his lawsuit against Syllaeus. Now that all of this, even the smaller matters, had come to light amid the greater evil -- when every torture cried out his father's murder and every letter cried out a second fratricide -- still no one arriving from Rome reported to him what had happened in Judea, although seven months had passed between the exposure and his return. So great

was the hatred everyone bore him. Perhaps too the avenging spirits of his murdered brothers stopped the mouths of those who meant to report it. In any case he wrote from Rome announcing the good news of his own swift arrival, and that Caesar had released him with honor. The king, eager to get the plotter into his hands, and afraid he might somehow learn the truth beforehand and be on his guard, wrote back a false, friendly letter, urging him to hurry, and saying that he would deal with the complaints against his mother once Antipater had pressed on with speed -- for Antipater was not unaware of his mother's banishment.

Earlier, in fact, he had received the letter about Pheroras' death while at Tarentum, and made a great show of mourning, which some praised as filial devotion; but it seems, rather, that his confusion arose from his plot having failed, and that he was not weeping for Pheroras

but for his own agent. By now some fear of what he had done was creeping over him, that the poison might somehow be discovered. Then, in Cilicia, he received the letter from his father mentioned above, and pressed on at once; but as he was putting in at Celenderis, a certain foreboding about his mother's misfortunes seized him, his soul already divining them on its own. Some

of the more cautious among his friends advised him not to go to his father until he had learned clearly why he had banished his mother, for they feared it might add to the accusations against her. But the less thoughtful, more eager to see their homeland than mindful of Antipater's own interest, urged him to press on and not, by delay, give his father grounds for suspicion

or his accusers an opening -- for even now, they said, if anything had stirred against him, it had happened during his absence; surely no one would have dared it had he been present. It would be absurd, they said, to be deprived of manifest goods for the sake of unclear suspicions, and better to hand himself over to his father at once and secure the kingship that hung on him alone. He yielded to this advice -- for it was his fate driving him on -- and crossing over,

he put in at Sebastos, the harbor of Caesarea. What met him there, against all expectation, was a great emptiness: everyone turned aside, and no one dared approach him. He had always been hated equally by all, but now the hatred found the freedom to show itself; and many were turned away besides by fear of the king, since every city was already full of the rumor against Antipater, and Antipater alone was ignorant of what concerned him.

No one had ever been escorted more splendidly when he sailed for Rome, nor received with less honor. He already sensed the disasters at home, but out of cunning he still concealed it, and though dead with fear within, he forced his face to look composed. There was no longer any flight, no slipping away from what surrounded him, and even there nothing certain about home was reported to him, for fear

of the king's threats. Yet a brighter hope remained: perhaps nothing had been discovered, or if something had, he might disguise it with shamelessness and cunning -- the only provisions left for his survival. Fortified with these, then, he came to the palace without his friends, for they were insulted and shut out at the very first gate. Varus, the governor of Syria, happened to be inside.

Antipater went in to his father and, emboldened by his own audacity, drew near to embrace him. But Herod thrust out his hands and turned his head aside. "This too," he cried, "is a parricide's doing -- wanting to embrace me when he stands accused of such crimes! Away, most impious of heads -- do not touch me until you have cleared yourself of the charges. I grant you a court and a judge who has arrived just in time,

Varus. Go now and prepare your defense for tomorrow -- I give you that much time for your schemes." To this, unable to answer anything in his confusion, Antipater withdrew, and his mother and wife, coming to him, related to him all the proofs that had been brought forward. Then, recovering himself, he set about considering his defense. The next day the king gathered a council of

his relatives and friends, and summoned Antipater's friends as well. He himself presided together with Varus, and ordered all the accusers brought in. Among those brought in were also some servants of Antipater's mother, arrested not long before, carrying a letter from her to her son, which read: "Since all those matters have been discovered by your father, do not come to him unless

you can obtain some support from Caesar." When these had been brought in along with the others, Antipater entered, and falling face down before his father's feet, said: "I beg you, father, do not condemn me beforehand, but give me an unbiased hearing for my defense; I will prove myself innocent, if you are willing." But Herod, shouting at him to be silent, said to Varus: "That you, Varus,

and every righteous judge will condemn Antipater as utterly corrupt, I am certain. But I fear that you too may come to hate my own fortune, and judge me deserving of every calamity for having fathered such sons. Yet I ought all the more to be pitied for this, that I was so devoted a father to such wretched creatures. My earlier sons, when they were still young, I honored with royal rank and, besides their upbringing at Rome, made them

friends of Caesar, and objects of envy to other kings -- yet I found them plotting against me, and they are dead, mostly through Antipater's doing; for it was he, being young and my successor, for whom above all I was securing safety. But this vile beast, having gorged itself on my forbearance, could not endure me any longer -- for he thought I had lived too long, and my old age weighed on him, and he could not bear to become king unless

by killing his father. And rightly so, in his reckoning, since I had brought him back from the obscurity to which he had been cast down, and had set aside the sons born to me by a queen to declare him my successor. I confess to you, Varus, my own madness: I turned those sons against myself, cutting off their just hopes for Antipater's sake. And what benefit did I ever give them equal to what I gave him? To him, while I still lived,

I all but yielded my authority, and openly named him successor to the throne in my will; I assigned him fifty talents in income of his own, I lavished my money on him without limit, and when he sailed for Rome just now I gave him three hundred talents, and out of my whole family I commended him alone to Caesar as my savior. What did those other sons do so impious as Antipater? Or what

proof was ever brought against them to match what convicts this one as a plotter? Yet the parricide has dared to speak, and hopes once more to cloak the truth with his tricks. Varus, you must be on your guard -- I know the beast, and I foresee already the show of credibility to come, and the counterfeit lamentation. This is the one who once urged me, while Alexander still lived, to be on my guard and not trust my body to everyone; this is the one who

used to escort me even to my bed, watching that no one lie in wait for me there; this is the keeper of my sleep and the provider of my peace of mind, the one who consoled my grief over those I had put to death and weighed the loyalty of my surviving sons, my shield, my bodyguard. When I recall, Varus, his cunning in each of these roles, and his hypocrisy, disbelief in my own survival comes over me, and

I marvel at how I escaped so grave a plotter. But since some fiend is emptying my house and continually raising up my dearest ones against me, I will weep for my unjust fate and groan in private over my desolation, but no one who thirsts for my blood will escape, even if the proof should come to touch every one of my children." Saying this, he broke off, overcome by his own agitation, and signaled to Nicolaus,

one of his friends, to present the proofs. Meanwhile Antipater, raising his head -- for he had remained thrown down before his father's feet -- cried out: "You yourself, father, have made my defense for me. How can I be a parricide, when you yourself admit I have always been your guardian? You call my devotion a monstrous pretense and hypocrisy. How could a man so cunning in

"...in other things so foolish as not to realize that so great a defilement, once contrived, is not easy to hide even from men, let alone from the judge in heaven, who cannot be evaded, who watches over everything and is present everywhere? Or did I not know the fate of my brothers, whom God pursued in this way for their scheming against you? What, then, provoked me against you? Hope of the kingdom? But I was already king. Suspicion of hatred? For was I not loved? Some other fear from you? No — it was you I was guarding, and for that I was feared by others. Want of money? And who had more license to spend than I? For if I had become the most depraved of all men and had the soul of a savage beast, father, I would not have been overcome by your kindnesses — you who brought me back, as you yourself said, preferred me above so many children, and declared me king while you still lived, and by the very excess of your other favors made me an object of envy.

"Wretched me, for that bitter journey abroad — how much time I gave to envy, how long a reprieve to those plotting against me! Yet it was for you, father, and for your struggles that I went abroad, so that Syllaeus might not despise your old age. Rome is my witness to my devotion, and Caesar, guardian of the world, who often called me a lover of my father. Take, father, the letters from him. These are more trustworthy than the slanders spoken here; these are my only defense; by these tokens I prove my affection for you. Remember that I did not sail willingly, knowing the hostility toward me lurking within the kingdom. You, father, destroyed me against your own will, forcing me to give envy its opportunity for slander.

"I stand ready for the proofs; I stand ready, though I have suffered nothing anywhere, on land or sea, I who am called a patricide. But do not yet love me for that. I have already been condemned, both before God and before you, father. And condemned as I am, I beg you not to trust the tortures of others — let the fire be brought against me instead, let the instruments pass through my own entrails, let no cry of pity spare this vile body. For if I am truly a patricide, I ought not to die without torture."

Such were his words, cried out amid lament and tears, and they moved everyone else, even Varus, to pity; only Herod's rage kept him from tears, for he knew the charges to be true. At this point Nicolaus, at the king's command, after saying much beforehand against Antipater's villainy and pouring out the pity due him, delivered a bitter accusation, laying upon him all the crimes committed throughout the kingdom, but above all the murder of his brothers, showing that they had perished through his slanders. He said that Antipater had also been plotting against those who survived, as rivals to the succession; for the man who had prepared poison for his own father would hardly have spared his brothers.

Coming then to the proof of the poisoning, he produced the depositions in order, and railed bitterly concerning Pheroras — that Antipater had made him too a fratricide, and by corrupting those dearest to the king had filled his whole house with pollution. Having said much else besides and demonstrated it, he ended his speech. Varus then ordered Antipater to defend himself, but he said nothing more than that God was his witness that he had done no wrong, and lay there in silence. Varus, asking for the poison, gave it to one of the prisoners condemned to death to drink. When the man died at once, Varus, having kept his private conversations with Herod confidential and having written to Caesar about the proceedings of the council, departed after a single day. The king put Antipater in chains and sent men to Caesar to report the calamity.

After this, Antipater was found to have been plotting against Salome as well; for one of Antiphilus's servants arrived bearing letters from Rome, from Livia's maidservant, named Acme. In them she had written to the king that she had found among Livia's papers letters from Salome, and that she was sending them to him secretly out of goodwill. Salome's letters contained the bitterest abuse of the king and the gravest accusations. Antipater had forged these letters, and having corrupted Acme, had persuaded her to send them to Herod. But he was exposed by his own letter to her, for the woman had written back to him: "As you wished, I have written to your father in your name, and I sent those letters believing the king would not spare his sister once he read them. You would do well, once everything is settled, to remember what you promised."

When this letter was discovered, along with the letters forged against Salome, a suspicion fell upon the king that the letters against Alexander too might have been forgeries, and he was overcome with grief at the thought that he had nearly killed his own sister because of Antipater. He no longer put off taking vengeance for it all. Though set on moving against Antipater, he was checked by a grave illness; but concerning Acme and the schemes contrived against Salome he wrote to Caesar. He also asked for his will and rewrote it, now naming Antipas king and passing over the elder sons, Archelaus and Philip — for Antipater had slandered them too. To Caesar, along with the customary gifts of money, he assigned a thousand talents; to his wife, children, friends, and freedmen, about five hundred; and to everyone else he distributed no small part of his land and wealth. His sister Salome he honored with the most splendid gifts of all. These were the changes he made to his will.

His illness advanced toward the worse, since his ailments had come upon him in old age together with despondency; he was by now nearly seventy, and his spirit had been brought low by the calamities concerning his children, so that even in health he took no pleasure in anything sweet. What made the intensity of his illness still worse was that Antipater still lived, whom he meant, once recovered, to kill without delay. In the midst of these calamities a popular uprising also arose against him. There were two teachers in the city thought especially exacting in their knowledge of the ancestral laws, and for this reason held in the greatest esteem by the whole nation — Judas, son of Sepphoraeus, and another, Matthias, son of Margalus. Not a few of the young men attached themselves to them as they expounded the laws, and day after day the two men gathered around themselves what amounted to an army of the young.

These men, learning that the king was sinking under his despondency and his illness, spread word among their followers that now was the most fitting time to avenge God and tear down the works set up in defiance of the ancestral laws. For it was forbidden, they said, that there be in the temple any image, or bust, or work bearing the likeness of any living creature. Now the king had set up over the great gate a golden eagle, and it was this that the teachers now urged the young men to cut down, saying it was a noble thing, even if some danger should follow, to die for the ancestral law; for those who died in this way would have souls that remained immortal and a perception of good things that endured forever, while the base, ignorant of their own wisdom, loved life too much out of ignorance and preferred a death from illness to a death through virtue.

Together with their words it was also rumored that the king was dying, so that the young men set about the undertaking with still greater boldness. At midday, then, with many people moving about the temple, they let themselves down from the roof on thick ropes and began cutting down the golden eagle with axes. Word of this was reported at once to the king's commander, who hurried up with a considerable force, arrested about forty of the young men, and brought them down to the king. When he asked them first whether they had dared to cut down the golden eagle, they admitted it. When he asked next who had ordered it, they answered: the ancestral law. And when he asked why they were so cheerful though about to be put to death, they said, as they were led off to be killed, that they would enjoy greater blessings after death.

At this the king, in his excess of rage overcoming even his illness, went out to an assembly, and after accusing the men at length as temple-robbers who under pretext of the law were attempting something greater, he demanded to punish them beyond the ordinary penalty, as impious men. The people, fearing that the inquiry might reach a great many, begged him to punish first those who had proposed the deed, then those caught carrying it out, and to let his anger toward the rest go no further. The king, with difficulty, was persuaded, and he burned alive those who had let themselves down from the roof, together with the two teachers, and handed the rest of those arrested over to his attendants to be killed.

From that point his whole body was overtaken by the disease, which divided itself among a variety of afflictions: the fever was not violent, but the itching over the whole surface of his skin was unbearable, and there were continuous pains in the bowels, swellings in the feet as of a man with dropsy, inflammation of the lower abdomen, and — worse still — a gangrene of the genitals that bred worms, together with labored, difficult breathing and convulsions in every limb, so that those given to prophecy declared his sicknesses a punishment for the teachers. Yet, wrestling with so many afflictions, he still clung to life, hoped for recovery, and devised remedies; crossing the Jordan, he made use of the hot springs at Callirrhoe, whose waters flow down into the Dead Sea and are sweet enough to drink.

There the physicians decided to warm his whole body with hot oil, lowering him into a tub filled with it; he collapsed, and his eyes rolled back as though he were dead. When his attendants raised an outcry he was revived by the sound, but from then on, having given up hope of recovery, he ordered fifty drachmas distributed to each of the soldiers, and large sums of money to his officers and friends. Returning to Jericho himself, he arrived already in the grip of melancholy, and, all but defying death itself, pressed on toward a monstrous scheme: gathering the leading men from every village throughout all Judea, he ordered them shut up in the place called the hippodrome.

Then, summoning his sister Salome and her husband Alexas, he said: "I know the Jews will celebrate my death as a festival, but it is in my power to be mourned by other means and to have a splendid funeral, if you are willing to carry out my orders. As soon as I breathe my last, have these guarded men killed at once, surrounding them with soldiers, so that all Judea and every household will weep for me, however unwillingly." Such were his instructions.

Letters then arrived from the envoys in Rome, announcing that Acme had been put to death by Caesar's order, and that Antipater had been condemned to death — though they added that if his father preferred to banish him instead, Caesar would permit it. This lifted his spirits a little, but then, worn down by lack of food and a spasmodic cough, overcome by his pains, he resolved to anticipate his fate. Taking an apple, he asked for a small knife, since he was in the habit of peeling it before eating; then, looking around to see that no one was there to stop him, he raised his right hand as if to strike himself. But his cousin Achiabus ran up and stopped him, seizing his hand. At once a great wailing rose through the palace, as though the king were dead, and Antipater, hearing it, quickly took heart and, overjoyed, begged his guards, with a bribe of money, to release him by loosening his chains.

But the officer not only refused but ran to the king and reported the plot. Herod cried out more violently than his illness allowed, and, sending his bodyguards at once, had Antipater killed. He ordered the body buried at Hyrcania, and once more revised his will, naming Archelaus, his eldest son, as successor, and Antipater's brother Antipas as tetrarch. Five days after his son's execution he died, having reigned thirty-four years from the time he overthrew Antigonus and took control of affairs, and thirty-seven from the time the Romans declared him king. In every other respect he had enjoyed good fortune, if any man ever did, who from a private citizen won a kingdom and, having kept it so long, left it to his own children — but in his household affairs he was the most unfortunate of men.

Before news of his death became known, Salome, going out with her husband, released the prisoners the king had ordered killed, telling them the king had changed his mind and was sending each of them home. Once they had gone, she and her husband then announced the death to the soldiers and gathered them, together with the rest of the people, into an assembly in the amphitheater at Jericho. There Ptolemy, entrusted with the king's signet ring, came forward, first pronounced the king blessed, then addressed the crowd, and read out the letter the king had left for the soldiers, in which he urged at length their loyalty to his successor. After the letter, he opened and read the codicils, in which Philip was made heir of Trachonitis and the neighboring territories, Antipas — as already said — tetrarch, and Archelaus declared king.

To Archelaus he had entrusted the task of carrying his own signet ring to Caesar, along with the sealed arrangements of the kingdom; for Caesar was to be the final authority over all his dispositions and the guarantor of his will, while everything else was to stand according to the earlier will. At once a shout went up from those rejoicing with Archelaus, and the soldiers, company by company, came forward with the people, promising their loyalty and praying also for God's blessing on him; after this they turned to the burial of the king. Archelaus spared nothing in magnificence, bringing out the whole royal array to accompany the body in procession: the bier was of solid gold, studded with jewels, its coverlet of embroidered purple, and on it the body itself lay wrapped in purple; a diadem rested on the head, and above it a golden crown, with the scepter beside the right hand.

Around the bier walked his sons and the multitude of his kinsmen, followed by the bodyguards and the Thracian company, the Germans and the Gauls, all arrayed as for war. Behind them marched the rest of the army, fully armed, following their commanders and captains in good order, and after them five hundred household servants and freedmen carrying spices. The body was carried seventy stadia to the Herodium, where, in keeping with his instructions, it was buried. And such was the end of Herod's story.

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