1. Many a public man whose life is a constant battle finds a balm for all his wounds and a refuge from all his cares in the love which welcomes him the moment he crosses the threshold of his own home. But Herod the Great never knew that earthly paradise which is created by the mutual love of husband and wife, of parents and children. Like Henry the Eighth, whom he greatly resembled, he had many wives, and Josephus' story of his domestic feuds is one of the most sordid records of crime which have come down from ancient times. His court was full of spies and slanderers who played upon his worst passions, and in one of his fits of jealous rage he gave orders for the execution of the beautiful, beloved, and innocent Mariamne, who walked in noble silence to her lonely death. The result was what might have been expected.
No sooner was she dead than the furies of remorse “took their seats upon Herod's midnight pillow.” Overcome with anguish, torn by the pangs of regret for her whom he had so intensely loved, haunted by her ghost, he caught the pestilence which was raging among his subjects. Under pretence of desiring to hunt, he retired to Samaria, where his strength was so prostrated, and his reason so entirely unhinged for a time, that many expected his death.
Perhaps the most affecting and convincing testimony to Mariamne's great character was Herod's passionate remorse. In a frenzy of grief he invoked her name, he burst into wild lamentations, and then, as if to distract himself from his own thoughts, he plunged into society; he had recourse to all his favourite pursuits; he gathered intellectual society round him; he drank freely with his friends; he went to the chase. And then, again, he gave orders that his servants should keep up the illusion of addressing her as though she could still hear them; he shut himself up in Samaria, the scene of their first wedded life, and there, for a long time, attacked by a devouring fever, hovered on the verge of life and death. Of the three stately towers which he afterwards added to the walls of Jerusalem, one was named after his friend Hippias, the second after his favourite brother, Phasael, but the third, most costly and most richly worked of all, was the monument of his beloved Mariamne.1 [Note: A. P. Stanley, History of the Jewish Church, iii. 376.]
Oh, Mariamne! now for thee
The heart for which thou bled'st is bleeding;
Revenge is lost in agony,
And wild remorse to rage succeeding.
Oh, Mariamne! where art thou?
Thou canst not hear my bitter pleading:
Ah! could'st thou-thou would'st pardon now,
Though Heaven were to my prayer unheeding.
And is she dead?-and did they dare
Obey my frenzy's jealous raving?
My wrath but doom'd my own despair:
The sword that smote her's o'er me waving.-
But thou art cold, my murder'd love!
And this dark heart is vainly craving
For her who soars alone above,
And leaves my soul unworthy saving.
She's gone, who shared my diadem;
She sunk, with her my joys entombing;
I swept that flower from Judah's stem,
Whose leaves for me alone were blooming;
And mine's the guilt, and mine the hell,
This bosom's desolation dooming;
And I have earn'd those tortures well,
Which unconsumed are still consuming!1 [Note: Byron, Hebrew Melodies.]
2. Herod recovered, but only to imbrue his hands again and yet again in innocent blood. Mariamne's two sons, Alexander and Aristobulus, who inherited her beauty and gloried in their Asmonæan descent, naturally grew up without any love for the murderer of their mother, and the gulf between them and their father gradually widened until at last he asked Augustus' leave to put the hapless youths to death. The Emperor gave cold permission to have their case tried at Berytus, where Herod appeared in person as the frantic accuser of his own sons. A reluctant verdict was given against them, and they were strangled at Samaria, where Herod had married their mother, the fair young Mariamne, nearly thirty years before.
Macrobius, who wrote in the beginning of the fifth century, narrates (Saturn. ii. 4) that Augustus, having heard that Herod had ordered his own son to be slain in Syria, remarked: “It is better to be Herod's swine (ὗς) than his son” (υἱος). In the Greek text there is a bon mot and a relationship between the words used that etymologists may recognize even in English. The law among the Jews against eating pork is hinted at, and the anecdote seems to contain extra-biblical elements.2 [Note: J. J. Tierney, in the Catholic Encyclopœdia, vii. 290.]
3. From that time forth Herod's mind was haunted by the ghosts of his sons as well as that of their mother. But every crime he committed seemed to be the prelude to yet another. His eldest son Antipater, the evil-minded prince who had poisoned his father's mind against his half-brothers, now regarded his own succession to the throne as assured. But his ill-concealed joy at the prospect of soon wearing a crown was duly reported to the dying tyrant, who, five days before his own miserable end, gave the command that his son should be executed and his body cast into an unhonoured grave. And it is said that in a last fit of madness he left orders-happily never carried out-that all the most distinguished men of the nation should forthwith be summoned to Jericho, shut up in the hippodrome, and massacred by his soldiers, that so his funeral might be accompanied with genuine lamentations of the whole people, who hated him.
It is inconceivable that anyone should ever love such a man. Sophocles says wisely that “the gifts of enemies are no gifts,” and Herod learned the bitter truth of these words. He was one of the greatest “benefactors” of his age, and scores of cities at home and abroad-some of them, such as Sebaste and Cæsarea, founded and built by himself-basked in the sunshine of his princely favour. He made Judæa a first-rate kingdom; he vastly increased its wealth; he put down brigandage with a high hand, making life and property safe; he obtained many edicts in favour of the Jews; in particular, he won for them exemption from military service, and immunities which secured the due performance of their religious rites. But it was all to no purpose. His labour was lost, because it was not love's labour. The nation remained stubbornly unregardful of those magnificent boons, and brooded so fiercely on his infractions of their Law that latterly he did not even care to attempt the impossible task of trying to win their approval. In his own country the king of the Jews lived and moved amid a chaos of hatreds. He may well have exclaimed in the words which are put into the lips of another Jewish king, “All is vanity and vexation of spirit,” though it is doubtful if he ever got so far as the disillusioned poet who said:
