Джеймс Миченер - The Source

For some time Herod shivered alone in his palace in Caesarea, undecided as to whether or not he should murder Mariamne’s sons, and Shelomith and I tried to persuade him not to do so, but whenever he looked at my wife waves of regret swept over him and he would subside into tears, bewailing his lost princess and his queen; but when this sorrow overtook him it served only to intensify his determination to kill her sons as well, so I forbade my wife to see him again, trusting that by myself I could restrain his vengeance.

“Turn your sons loose,” I pleaded. “Release the three hundred Jews.”

I might have succeeded except for an old soldier who frequented the palace. Herod gave him trivial jobs out of gratitude for the old man’s help in earlier campaigns, and this veteran grew bold enough to warn Herod face-to-face against his plan for murdering his sons: “Take care! The army hates your cruelty. There isn’t a private who doesn’t side with your sons. And many of the officers openly curse you.”

“Which ones would dare?” Herod cried, and the foolish old man rattled off their names.

When this occurred I lost all chance of controlling the king. He dispatched his bodyguard to arrest everyone named, then threw the old soldier upon the rack, torturing him beyond endurance, twisting and turning his body, jerking him until his joints came apart and bones cracked. The veteran made confessions that were valueless, but Herod accepted them. Assembling a mob he had the accused officers brought before him. In a wild speech, bursting with passion and lust, he built up a story of conspiracy and guilt that terrified the populace. “Your kingdom is threatened,” he told them, and at the height of his oratory he screamed, “These are the guilty ones. Slay them!” And the mob swept in with clubs and wrenching hands. Dozens who knew no guilt of any kind were torn apart that day, their heads crushed while their king danced up and down, screaming, “Kill them! Kill them!”

How many Jews did Herod slay in his years of madness? How many columns did he erect during his years of greatness? Neither number can be identified. I, who attended only a few of the massive slaughters, must have witnessed with my own eyes six or eight thousand of the kingdom’s best people hacked to death. One senseless incident: a woman getting her hair curled by slaves spoke against the massacres. A maid reported her and she was put to the torture. She spewed out the names of sixty accomplices, to what, no one ever knew. These in turn were tortured upon the rack, with African and German soldiers leaning on the screws, and they implicated hundreds of others. So all were slain without trial for a crime that had not even been contemplated or named. Their wealth went into the coffers of the king, for their families even down to children two months old were also slain.

How many Jews did Herod slay? How many great minds did he drive to oblivion? How much of the power of our kingdom was destroyed? I could not even guess, but the slain great ones are not to be numbered in thousands. We must think, rather, of tens of thousands, and always the best men and the best women of our nation. I am amazed that the Jews still have persons capable of collecting taxes or drafting laws, but I am not amazed that Shelomith and I have finally been caught in Herod’s web. Who informed upon us? I cannot guess. What was our crime? It’s impossible even to speculate. Perhaps a woman grew tired of her lover, and on the rack, as the Circassians bore down upon her, she uttered names from some distant recollection. I ask Shelomith what she thinks of this theory and she replies, “It’s as good as any other we’ve proposed.”

How terrible the tragedy became! Of my friends, one in three fell to the tyrant: Antigonus dragged down by the rumor of a fishmonger; Barnabas slain because he held land the king wanted; Shmuel, the uncle of my wife and a trusted Jew, beheaded on the accusation of a drunken Greek sailor; Leonidas, Marcus and Abraham, all dead for no reason that I know; the poet Lycidas and the songwriter Marcellus slain as members of a conspiracy whose outlines were not defined; Isaac and Yokneam dead merely because they owned silver. I could continue but the roll call is meaningless, for any family in Judaea could equal it, with different names sacrificed to different charges.

Why have the Romans allowed this madman to persecute his own people in this manner? Judaea is far from Rome and of little consequence, really. Years ago with my help Herod charmed Caesar Augustus, and in the intervening decades the Roman emperor has been willing to support Herod so long as the latter maintains discipline along the borders of the empire. Reports filter back to Rome, of course, but they are charges made against a king of the scarlet and lodged before an emperor of the purple, so Augustus always sides with Herod. Once a commissioner sent out to Caesarea confided to me, as a fellow Roman, “Does it really matter, one way or the other, if most of the brilliant Jews are killed off? Won’t it be easier for us to rule if they’re eliminated?” So Herod was not only permitted to destroy the nation but actually encouraged to do so.

A few weeks ago, however, events took a turn that will probably make even Rome notice the terror that has overtaken its stiff-necked Judaean outpost. Long ago Herod as a gesture of ultimate defiance to the Jews, who hated him as much as he despised them, caused to be erected over the main gate of the temple a wooden image of a Roman eagle, the first statuary that had defiled the temple since the days of Antiochus Epiphanes, and for years the faithful Jews were impotent to do anything about the infuriating symbol. When it was first erected I did not understand Jews as well as I do now, and I did not anticipate their permanent resentment against this affront to their religion; now, thanks to Shelomith, I think I understand.

At any rate, some days ago two loyal priests harangued their students to the point where a group of young men suspended themselves by ropes from a high point and chopped down the Roman eagle. Throughout Jerusalem the devout began to cheer, and I think there might have been a riot except that Herod’s African and German mercenaries descended upon the mob and arrested the two priests and about forty scholars, who were dragged before the king. His rage was beyond reason, for he saw that what the Jews were doing against him would place them into direct conflict with Rome, and this would put his crown in jeopardy. When that wooden eagle toppled he could feel his crown tottering. In blind fury he struck back. The two priests and the three boys who chopped down the eagle were burned alive before the temple gates. The other forty were to be herded into a small enclosure, where African soldiers were turned upon them until all bodies were hacked apart. The eagle would be replaced with a larger one, Herod informed Augustus, so that Rome need not fear. Herod would kill a million Jews, if it were necessary, to keep Caesar Augustus placated.

Publicly he bragged to Rome, but secretly he was embittered by the antagonism of his Jews, and he declined into his fatal illness. Sensing that he was about to die he begged me to accompany him to hot baths on the other side of the Jordan, at a spot where sweet waters issue out of the rocks and flow into the Dead Sea, that lake of bronze. Callirhoe, the place is called, and as our entourage paraded along the bleak, deserted lands east of Jerusalem in search of it, I felt that we were dead men marching across the landscapes of hell, and Herod must have shared my thoughts, for he forced the soldiers to draw the blinds about his litter so that he need not see the desolation which so precisely matched the mourning of his spirit. At night, when our camp was pitched, he talked with me in Greek of the philosophers he had known, of the Greek beauty that had impressed him so deeply throughout his life, and he said with a dry cackle in his throat, “You and I were the best Greeks of all, Myrmex. Rome thinks of us as Romans, but we fooled them. Not even Caesar Augustus could buy my soul, for it is Greek.” I was surprised at his use of the word soul , for this was a Hellenistic word not familiar to Jews, nor was the concept it represented, but it summarized his attitude toward life. Inspired by our hopeful conversations, he gained strength as we marched, but at Callirhoe, that lovely oasis with the musical name, which sick men reach after days in the desert, the local doctors prescribed a hot bath in a tub of almost bubbling oil.