Claudius the God (3 page)

A year or so later there was a boundary dispute between Sidon and Damascus; and the Damascenes, knowing how much Flaccus had come to depend on Herod for advice in arbitrating on matters of this sort - because of Herod’s remarkable command of languages and his capacity, inherited no doubt from his grandfather Herod, for sifting the contradictory evidence given by Orientals - sent a secret deputation to Herod offering him a large sum of money, I forget how much, if he would persuade Flaccus to give a verdict in their favour. Aristobulus found out about this, and when the case was over, settled in favour of Damascus by the persuasive pleading of Herod, he went to Herod and told him what he knew, adding that he now expected payment of the shipping debt. Herod was so angry that Aristobulus was lucky to escape with his life. It was quite clear that he could not be frightened into paying back a single penny, so Aristobulus went to Flaccus and told him about the bags of gold that would shortly be arriving for Herod from Damascus. Flaccus intercepted them at the City gate and then sent for Herod, who, in the circumstances, could not deny that they were sent in payment for services rendered in the matter of the boundary dispute. But he put a bold face on it and begged Flaccus not to regard the money as a bribe, for he had, while giving evidence in the case, kept strictly to the truth: Damascus had justice on its side. He told Flaccus, too, that the Sidonians had also sent him a deputation whom he had dismissed, telling them that he could do nothing to help them, for they were in the wrong.

‘I suppose Sidon didn’t offer you so much money as Damascus,’ sneered Flaccus.

‘Please do not insult me,’ Herod virtuously replied.

I refuse to have justice in a Roman court bought and sold like merchandise.’ Flaccus was thoroughly vexed.

‘You judged the case yourself, my Lord Flaccus,’ said Herod.

‘And you made a fool of me in my own court,’ Flaccus raged. ‘I have done with you. You can go to Hell for all I care, and by the shortest road.’

‘I am afraid that it will be the Taenaran road,’ said Herod, ‘for if I die now I won’t have a farthing in my purse to pay the Ferryman.’ (Taenarum is the southermost promontory of the Peloponnese, where there is a short cut to Hell which avoids the River Styx. It was by this way that Hercules dragged the Dog Cerberus to the Upper World. The thrifty natives of Taenarum bury their dead without the customary coin in the mouth, knowing that they will not need it to pay Charon their ferryfare.) Then Herod said, ‘But, Flaccus, you must not lose your temper with me. You know how it is. I didn’t think that I was doing wrong. It is difficult for an Oriental like myself, even after nearly thirty years of City education, to understand your noble Roman scruples in a case of this sort. I see the matter in this light: the Damascenes were employing me as a sort of lawyer in their defence, and lawyers at Rome are paid enormous fees and never keep nearly so close to the truth, when presenting their cases, as I did. And certainly I did the Damascenes a good service in presenting their case so lucidly to you. So what harm could there have been in taking the money, which they quite voluntarily sent me? It’s not as though I publicly advertised myself as having influence with you. They flattered and surprised me by suggesting that it might be so Besides, as the Lady Antonia, that most extraordinarily wise and beautiful woman, has frequently pointed out to me But it was no use appealing even to Flaccus’s regard for my mother. He gave Herod twenty-four hours law and said that if at the end of that time he was not well on his way out of Syria he would find himself up before the tribunal on a criminal charge.

HEROD asked Cypros, ‘Where in the world are we to go now?’

Cypros answered miserably: ‘So long as you don’t ask me to humble myself again by writing begging letters that I would almost rather die than write, I don’t care where we go. Is India far enough away from our creditors?’

Herod said, ‘Cypros, my queen, we’ll survive this adventure as we have survived many others and live to a prosperous and wealthy old age together. And I give you my solemn word that you’ll have the laugh against my, sister Herodias before I have finished with her and her husband.’

‘That ugly harlot,’ Cypros cried with truly Jewish indignation. For, as I told you, Herodias had not only committed incest by marrying an uncle but had divorced him in order to marry her richer and more powerful uncle Antipas. The Jews could make certain allowances for the incest, because marriage between uncle and niece was a common practice among Eastern royal families - the Armenian and Parthian royal families especially - and the family of Herod was not of Jewish origin. But divorce was regarded with the greatest disgust by every honest Jew (as, formerly, by every honest Roman) as being shameful both to the husband and to the wife; and nobody who had been under the disagreeable necessity of getting divorced would consider it the first step towards remarriage. Herodias had, however, lived long enough at Rome to be able to laugh at these scruples. Everyone at Rome who is anyone gets divorced sooner or later. (Nobody, for instance, could call me a profligate, and yet I have divorced three wives already and may come to divorcing my fourth.) So Herodias was most unpopular in Galilee.

Aristobulus went to Flaccus and said ‘In recognition of my services,, Flaccus, would you perhaps be generous enough to give me that confiscated money from Damascus? It would, almost cover the debt that Herod owes me - the shipping fraud that I told you about some months ago.’

Flaccus said: ‘Aristobulus, you have done me no service at all. You have been the cause of a breach between me and my ablest adviser, whom I miss more than I can tell you. As a matter of governmental discipline I had to dismiss him, and as a matter of honour I cannot recall him; but if you had not brought that bribe to light nobody would have been any the wiser and I would still have had Herod to consult on complicated local questions which absolutely baffle a simple-minded Westerner like myself. It’s in his blood, you see. I have, in point of fact, lived far longer in the East than he has, but he instinctively knows in cases where I can only clumsily guess.’

‘What about myself?’ asked Aristobulus. ‘Perhaps I can fill Herod’s place?’

‘You, little man?’ Flaccus cried contemptuously. ‘You haven’t the Herod touch. And, what’s more, you’ll never acquire it. You know that, as well as I do.’

‘But the money?’ asked Aristobulus.

‘If it’s not for Herod, still less is it for you. But to avoid all ill-feeling between you and me I am going to send it back to Damascus.’ He actually did this. The Damascenes thought that he must have gone mad.

After a month or so Aristobulus, being out of favour at Antioch, decided to settle in Galilee, where he had an estate. It was only a two-days journey from here to Jerusalem, a city which he liked to visit on all the important Jewish festivals, being more religiously inclined than the rest of his family. But he did not wish to take all his money with him to Galilee, because if he happened to quarrel with his uncle Antipas he might be forced to go away in a hurry, and Antipas would be just so much the richer. He therefore decided to transfer most of his credit from a banking firm at Antioch to one at Rome and wrote to me as a trustworthy family friend, giving me authority to invest it in landed property for him as opportunity should present itself.

Herod could not return to Galilee and he had also quarrelled with his uncle Philip, the Tetrarch of Bashan, over a question of some property of his father which Philip had misappropriated; and the Governor of Judaea with Samaria - for Herod’s eldest uncle, the King, had been removed for misgovernment some years previously and his kingdom proclaimed a Roman province - was Pontius Pilate, one of his creditors. Herod did not wish to retire permanently to Edom - he was no lover of deserts and. his chances of a welcome in Egypt by the great Jewish colony at Alexandria were inconsiderable. The Alexandrian Jews are very strict in their religious observances, almost stricter than their kinsmen at Jerusalem,’ if that were possible, and Herod from living so long at Rome had fallen into slack habits, especially in the matter of diet. The Jews are forbidden by their ancient law-giver Moses, on hygienic grounds, I understand, to eat a variety of ordinary meat foods not merely pork - one could make a case against pork, perhaps - but hare and rabbit, and other perfectly wholesome meats. And what they do eat must be killed in a certain way. Wild duck that has been brought, down by a sling-stone, or a fowl that has had its neck wrung, or venison got by bow and arrow, are forbidden them. Every animal that they eat must have had its throat cut and have been allowed to bleed to death. Then, too, they must make every seventh day a day of absolute rest their very household servants are forbidden to do a stroke of work, even cooking or stoking the furnace. And they have days of national mourning in commemoration of ancient misfortunes, which often clash with Roman festivities. It had been impossible for Herod while he was living at Rome to be at the same time both a strict Jew and a popular member of high society; and so-he had preferred the contempt of the Jews to that of the Romans. He decided not to try Alexandria or waste any more of his time in the Near East, where every door seemed closed to him. He would either take refuge in Parthia, where the king would welcome him as a useful agent in his designs against the Roman province of Syria, or he would return to Rome and throw himself upon my mother’s protection: it might be just possible to explain away the misunderstanding with Flaccus., He rejected the idea of Parthia, because to go there would mean a complete breach with his old life, and he had greater confidence in the power of Rome than in that of Parthia; and besides it would be rash to try to cross the Euphrates the boundary between Syria and Parthia - without money to bribe the frontier guards, who were under orders to allow no political refugee to pass. So he finally chose Rome.

And did he get there safely? You shall hear. He had not even enough ready money with him to pay for his sea-passage - he had been living on credit at Antioch and in great style; and though Aristobulus offered to lend him enough to take him as far as Rhodes, he refused to humble himself by accepting it. Besides, he could not risk booking his passage on a vessel sailing down the Orontes, for fear of being arrested at the docks by his creditors. He suddenly thought of someone from whom he could perhaps raise a trifle, namely, a former slave of his mother’s whom she had bequeathed in her will to my mother Antonia and whom my mother had liberated and set up as a corn-factor at Acre, a coastal city somewhat south of Tyre: he paid her a percentage of his earnings and was doing quite well. But the territory of the Sidonians lay between and Herod had, as a matter of fact, accepted a gift from the Sidonians as well as from the Damascenes; so he could not afford to fall into their hands. He sent a trustworthy freedman of his to borrow from this man at Acre and himself escaped from Antioch in disguise, travelling east, which was the one direction that nobody expected him to take, and so eluding pursuit. Once in the Syrian desert he made a wide circuit towards the south, on a stolen camel, avoiding Bashan, his uncle Philip’s tetrarchy, and Petraea (or, as some call it, Gilead, the fertile Transjordan an territory over which his uncle Antipas ruled as well as over Galilee), and skirting the farther end of the Dead Sea. He came safely to Edom, where he was greeted warmly by his wild kinsmen, and waited in the same desert fortress as before for his freedman to come with the money. The freedman succeeded in borrowing the money - 20,000 Attic drachmae, as the Attic-drachma is worth rather more than the Roman silver piece - this came to something over 900 gold pieces. At least, he had given Herod’s note of hand to that amount, in exchange; and would have arrived with the 20,000 drachmae complete if the corn-factor at Acre had not deducted 2,500, of which he accused Herod of having defrauded him some years previously. The honest freedman was afraid that his master would be angry with him for not bringing the whole amount, but Herod only laughed and said: ‘I counted on that twenty-five hundred to, secure me the balance of the twenty thousand. If the stingy fellow had not thought that he was doing a smart trick in making my note of hand: cover the old debt he would never have dreamed of lending me any money at all; for he must know by now what straits I am in.’ So Herod gave a great feast for the tribesmen and then made cautiously for the port of Anthedon, near the Philistine town of Gaza, where the coast begins; curving west towards Egypt. Here Cypros and her children were waiting in disguise on board the small trading-vessel in which they had sailed from Antioch and which had been chartered to take them on to Italy by way of Egypt and Sicily. Affectionate greetings between all members of the family thus happily reunited were just being exchanged when a Roman sergeant and three soldiers appeared alongside in a rowing-boat with a warrant for Herod’s arrest. The local military governor had signed this warrant, the reason for which was the non-payment to the Privy Purse of a debt of 12,000 gold pieces.

Herod read the document and remarked to Cypros: ‘I take this as a very cheerful omen. The Treasurer has scaled down my debts from forty thousand to a mere twelve. We must give him a really splendid banquet when we get back to Rome. Of course, I’ve done a lot for him since I have been out in the East, but twenty-eight thousand is a generous return.’

The sergeant interposed, ‘Excuse me, Prince, but really you can’t think about banquets at Rome until-you have seen the Governor here about this debt. He has orders not to let you sail until it’s paid in full.’

Herod said: ‘Of course I shall pay it. It had quite escaped my memory. A mere trifle. You go off now, in the rowing-boat, and tell His Excellency the Governor that I am entirely at his service, but that his kind reminder of my debt to the Treasury has come a little inconveniently. I have just been joined by my devoted wife, the Princess Cypros, from whom I have been parted for over six weeks. Are you a family man, Sergeant? Then you will understand how earnestly we two desire to be alone together. You can leave your two soldiers on board as a guard if you don’t trust us. Come again in the boat in three or four hours time and we’ll be quite ready to disembark. And here’s an earnest of my gratitude.’ He gave the sergeant 100 drachmae; upon which the sergeant, leaving the guard behind, rowed ashore without further demur. An hour or two later it was dusk and Herod cut the cables of the vessel and stood out to sea. He made as if to sail north towards Asia Minor but soon changed his course and turned southwest. He was making for Alexandria, where he thought he might as well try his luck with the Jews.