HEROD THE GREAT

HEROD THE GREAT

 Herod was a monster, one of the most treacherous monsters of the many which have sprung from the burning deserts of the East. He was not a Jew, nor a Greek, nor a Roman. He was an Idumean, a barbarian who prostrated himself before Rome, and imitated the Greeks the better to secure his dominion over the Jews. Son of a traitor, he had usurped the kingdom of his sovereign from the last unfortunate Hasmonaeans. To legalize his treachery he married their niece, Mariamne. After­wards, on a baseless suspicion, he had her killed. It was not his first crime. He had had his brother-in-law, Aristobulus, treacherously drowned. He had condemned his other brothers-in-law, Joseph and Hyrcanus the Second (last of the conquered dynasty). Not content with having killed Mariamne, he put her mother, Alexandra, to death as well, and finally, the sons of Baba, merely because they were distant relatives of the Hasmonaeans. In the meantime he amused himself with burn­ing alive Juda of Sarafaus and Matthew of Margoloth with other heads of the Pharisees. Later, afraid that the sons he had had by Mariamne would wish to avenge their mother, he had them strangled. Himself at the point of death he gave the order to kill a third son, Archelaus. Voluptuous, suspicious, impious, greedy of gold and of glory, he never knew peace at home, in Judea or in his own heart. In order that he might bury the recollection of his assassinations he gave the Roman people a present of three hundred talents to spend in festivals. He humiliated himself before Augustus to make him the ac­complice of his infamies and, dying, left him ten thousand drachmas and, in addition, a ship of gold and one of silver for Livia.
This half-civilized Arab attempted to appease the Greeks and the Jews. He succeeded in bribing the degenerate pos­terity of Socrates so that in Athens they put up a statue to him, but the Jews hated him to the day of his death. It did him no good, in their eyes, to build up Samaria and restore the temple of Jerusalem. He was always, for them, the heathen and the usurper.
Apprehensive like all ageing evil-doers, and like all new-made princes, he shivered at every fluttering leaf, every shift­ing shadow. Superstitious like all Orientals, naïve of omens and soothsayers, he readily believed the three wise men when they said, that led by a star, they had come from the interior of Chaldea towards the country which he had fraudulently stolen. Any pretender to the throne, even a fan­tastic one, could make him tremble, and when he knew from the wise men that a King of Judea was born, his uneasy, bar­barian's heart gave a great leap of fear. Seeing that the as­trologers did not come back to tell him the place where the new nephew of David had appeared, he ordered that all the boy babies of Bethlehem should be killed.