1. Such a conqueror and such a ruler ought to have been one of the happiest of men. But the suspicious, crafty, ruthless tyrant who rises before our imagination as we read the opening of the First Gospel was manifestly a stranger to happiness. And when we turn to the vivid pages of Josephus and Tacitus, it is the same unhappy face that meets us, the same gloomy character that we find portrayed. Herod began his reign in the usual Oriental fashion, by putting to death all his former opponents and all his possible rivals. He gave orders that forty-five of the most wealthy and prominent Asmonæans-i.e., of the Maccabean family which the Romans had deprived of the kingship-should be executed, and their estates confiscated to fill his empty treasury. His agents showed themselves so greedy as to shake the dead bodies in order that any gold hidden in their shrouds might be disclosed. His next step was to slay the whole Sanhedrin with the exception of Pollio and Sameas, who had rendered him some service. And these acts of vengeance and cruelty were but the first of the many dark crimes which stain for ever the records of his reign.
It seemed to be his firm determination that no man should be great and no man honoured in his kingdom except himself. Any popularity but his own was in his eyes a crime. In order to strengthen his position, he married the beautiful Asmonæan princess Mariamne, whom he loved with all the ardour of his passionate nature. He was persuaded by her to set aside the high priest Ananel, and to appoint her brother Aristobulus, a lad in his seventeenth year, to the sacred office. As a scion of the heroic Maccabean family, Aristobulus was received by the Jews with demonstrations of joy. And when he had to perform the religious ceremonies at the Feast of Tabernacles, he did so with perfect grace and decorum, standing before the people in the blue and white and gold-embroidered robes of his office, with the golden plate gleaming on his forehead over his dark and flowing locks, and the jewelled Urim upon his breast. But the acclamations of the assembled multitude were the poor boy's death-doom.
The youthful high priest was invited to his mother's palace among the groves of Jericho-the fashionable watering-place, as it had become, of Palestine. Herod received the boy with his usual sportiveness and gaiety. It was one of the warm autumnal days of Syria, and the heat was yet more overpowering in that tropical valley. In the sultry noon the high priest and his young companions stood cooling themselves beside the large tanks which surrounded the open court of the palace, and watching the gambols and exercises of the guests or slaves, as, one after another, they plunged into these crystal swimming-baths. Among these was the band of Gaulish guards, whom Augustus had transferred from Cleopatra to Herod, and whom Herod employed as his most unscrupulous instruments. Lured on by these perfidious playmates, the princely boy joined in the sport, and then, as at sunset the sudden darkness fell over the gay scene, the wild band dipped and dived with him under the deep water; and in that fatal “baptism” life was extinguished. When the body was laid out in the palace the passionate lamentations of the princesses knew no bounds. The news flew through the town, and every house felt as if it had lost a child. The mother suspected, but dared not reveal her suspicions, and in the agony of self-imposed restraint, and in the compression of her determined will, trembled on the brink of self-destruction. Even Herod, when he looked at the dead face and form, retaining all the bloom of youthful beauty, was moved to tears-so genuine, that they almost served as a veil for his complicity in the murder. And it was not more than was expected from the effusion of his natural grief that the funeral was ordered on so costly and splendid a scale as to give consolation even to the bereaved mother and sister.
2. Great without being good, Herod was little to be envied. There is no happiness without love, and, alike as a king, as a husband, and as a father, he alienated all those whose affection he ought to have won. Under his government Judæa became the greatest of all the Eastern kingdoms allied with Rome, but he made no secret of the fact that he did not love, and never could love, the Jews. He openly announced that he cared less for them than for his heathen subjects. We cannot wonder, therefore, that all the material benefits which he conferred upon them were received with cold admiration and little gratitude. He appeared to think that so long as his loyalty to Rome-a loyalty dictated by nothing higher than selfish prudence-secured for him the patronage of the great ones of the earth, he could dispense with the affection of the people whom he governed. “Let them hate so long as they fear” has been the scornful dictum of tyrants in all ages. But happiness has never been purchased on these terms. Herod's case was not unlike that of the Emperor Tiberius, who, in the midst of all his power and glory, confessed to the Roman Senate his utter misery. “Nor was it unadvisedly,” comments the historian Tacitus, “that the wisest of all men (Plato) was wont to affirm that, if the hearts of tyrants were bared to view, wounds and lacerations would be seen in them; for as the body is torn by stripes, so is the heart by cruelty, lusts, and evil purposes.”
Herod had up to this time moulded circumstances to his will with an almost superhuman energy and capacity; but henceforth ambition led him into entanglements in which retributive Destiny became too strong for him. He could not escape the adamantine link which indissolubly unites sin to punishment. Poets of every age have felt that
Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,
Our fatal shadows that walk by us still;
that
Our deeds still travel with us from afar,
And what we have been makes us what we are.
No stroke of policy seemed more consummate than that which united the King in marriage with the lovely Mariamne, whose grandfather he had ousted and whose father he had helped to slay; but that consummation of his good fortune contained in it every germ of his unspeakable retribution. Out of the event which looked like his most brilliant success, adversity formed “the iron scourge and torturing hour” of his remorse and ruin. In the volume of human life, says George Sand, “is found no more disastrous page than that on which are inscribed the two words-‘gratified desires!' ”1 [Note: F. W. Farrar, The Herods, 84.]
