HEROD I, KING OF JUDEA
Cruel, paranoid and held in the grips of madness, Herod I ruled the ancient kingdom of Judea with an iron fist, brutally slaying any who opposed him.
Herod of Idumea was born into one of the most volatile regions of the ancient world. He learned to fear rivals, suspect betrayal and watch his back. The Romans had taken over much of his homeland and solidified their grip on the area through unpopular puppet kings. Rebellion was in the air and from a young age Herod was forced to pick sides – work with the invaders or fight for an independent homeland. His father was a high-ranking official of King Hyrcanus II and had the ear of the Roman senate, so used this prestigious position to grant Herod a governorship in 49 BCE in the province of Galilee. Herod knew this position came from powerful Roman patronage and he made sure the Romans knew he would continue supporting them if they backed him in instigating a brutal regime in Galilee for the glory of the Roman Empire.
Unfortunately for Herod, not everyone shared his astute sense of accommodation when it came to the Romans. In 40 BCE, the puppet king Hyrcanus died and was replaced by Antigonus, who quickly set about ejecting the Roman garrisons from Judea and exterminating any native who had conspired with them against their own people. Herod quickly lost his power and position. He was forced to flee into the night and, lacking anywhere else to go, travelled to the heart of the Roman Empire to beg Caesar to help him.
Herod’s presence in Rome was not unusal; many high-ranking foreigners travelled to the city to seek patronage and aid from the Roman senators who decided the fate of kingdoms. What was unusual was how unpopular Herod was within the city. The Jewish population saw him as a tyrannical traitor, the Romans as an incompetent beggar. The decision by the senate to make Herod king of the Jews was only made through a lack of a better option. As far as Caesar and the senators were concerned, Judea needed a leader who was strong and loyal to the Roman cause. Herod was neither strong nor particularly loyal, but he understood power and the protection Rome could offer him if he became their puppet and did their bidding.
With thousands of Roman legionnaires behind him and one of Rome’s greatest war heroes, Mark Antony, by his side, Herod marched proudly back to his homeland as a conqueror in 37 BCE. He would not be satisfied with a mere governorship this time; he wanted ultimate power. He decided to ignore the outlying provinces and concentrate his forces around Jerusalem with the approval of Antony.
The siege lasted for 40 days. The defenders were desperate to hold onto their newfound freedom from Roman oppression, but in the end the walls were breached and thousands of bloodthirsty Roman warriors stormed the city. They slaughtered men, women and children, brutally slaying the people who dared defy Caesar’s will. Herod was outraged; he wanted to subdue the population, not butcher them, and he knew all of Judea would never forget the Jewish blood spilled that day. His complaints to Antony fell on deaf ears – as far as he was concerned, this was all in a day’s work.
Antony left Herod in the smouldering ruins of his new kingdom with just enough Roman guards to keep an eye on him. Herod would now be taking his orders direct from Rome. Immediately, Herod self-styled himself as high ruler of what remained of Jerusalem and Judea. His subjects were less than convinced; his claim to the throne was based on little more than the Roman bodyguards surrounding him. As a way of gaining some respect after putting his own people to the sword, he married his second wife – a Hasmonean princess called Mariamne – in 32 BCE. Mariamne came from an old Judean family that could trace its origins back to the conquest of Alexander the Great, and so Herod hoped the marriage would give his rule an increased appearance of legitimacy among his suspicious subjects.
The marriage failed to gain the love of the people, and as he began to settle down to the task of ruling his unhappy kingdom, he felt more vulnerable. He feared assassination at every turn, particularly from his own family. He had his brother-in-law from his first marriage drowned in his own pleasure pool because he feared the Romans would prefer him as ruler of Judea. Then in 31 BCE, Herod received word that Rome had become engulfed in a power struggle between Octavian Caesar and Herod’s old friend Antony. Like all vassals reliant on Rome’s goodwill, Herod was forced to take sides, and in keeping with his preference for backing the strongest player, he chose Antony. The odds were very much stacked in Antony’s favour, but he lost the struggle nonetheless, so Herod found himself in a very awkward position; the man in charge of Rome was the man he sided against. He sent a number of grovelling letters to Octavian promising his undying loyalty in return for being allowed to keep his job as king of the Jews. Octavian reluctantly allowed him to remain king, again more through a lack of a better option than any reflection on Herod’s skill as a leader.
Despite having survived one of the most destructive civil wars in Rome’s his ory, Herod remained uneasy. He alienated his wife after placing her under guard to prevent her from claiming the throne for the Hasmoneans if he died during the fighting. He heard more rumours of threats against his life and became increasingly convinced Mariamne would try to grab power by killing him in revenge for having her arrested. Herod’s behaviour became increasingly erratic and he fell into a strange psychotic state of paranoia. He became so convinced Mariamne was going to kill him that he had her beheaded. A soon as the axe fell, he came around from his delusion and realised he’d made a terrible mistake. He wept uncontrollably for weeks and began hallucinating visions of his dead wife screaming in agony in the corridors of his palace.
In an effort to turn his mind away from these terrifying visions, he began to construct a grand temple designed to be the envy of the ancient world. Construction started just after the death of Mariamne, and was only halted briefly after a great famine struck the city. When Caesar’s aide Marcus Agrippa visited the city in 15 BCE, he was amazed at the temple’s construction and how modern Jerusalem looked. Agrippa held court with Herod, and Herod, knowing that weakness in front of the Romans could be dangerous, managed to hide his precarious mental state. This was all for show, though; he was a man edging ever closer to madness.
After Agrippa left for the gates of Rome, Herod quickly returned to the depths of paranoia. He brutally slaughtered any who spoke out against his regime and the country lived in fear of his violent mood swings. He burned live a group of rabbis and their who had pulled down a Roman imperial eagle in a building in Jerusalem. He then executed wo of his eldest sons because he thought they were plotting against him. By 4 BCE, he feared he had become so unpopular that no one would mourn his passing after he died. In a fit of depraved madness, he ordered the families of the nobility throughout the kingdom to attend him on pain of death. He had them rounded up and placed under guard in the city’s hippodrome. The guards were ordered to murder them when he died so his death would be mourned.
As the families in the hippodrome huddled together, terrified at the prospect of being put to death as a sacrifice to the passing of their own king, Herod was racked with pain on his deathbed. Suffering from kidney failure and paranoid delusions that had finally left him senseless, he saw visions of Mariamne, tortured by her mutilated face. When Herod died screaming in agony in 4 BCE, the holy men of Jerusalem proclaimed that his horrific death was “the penalty that God was exacting of the king for his great impiety.” Herod’s sister countermanded the order to kill the Judean families and the kingdom celebrated; Herod the mad and wicked was finally dead.
Life in the Time of Herod
Roman rule
The Middle East, which consisted of the Jewish and pagan kingdoms located around the coastline of the Mediterranean, was influenced and controlled by the Roman rulers through vassals and puppet kings. The Romans coveted the kingdoms for their resources, as well as to guard the eastern flank of the empire from the ever-present threat of the Persians.
Culture shock
Herod’s kingdom was made up of a number of different tribes that settled in the area or who were cast out of Persia over the previous three centuries. Contrasting cultures were active in the region, some adopting Judaism while others followed Roman, Greek or pagan traditions, creating deep social divides.
Fractured
Due to the fractious nature of Judean society, many areas within the kingdom that Herod ruled did not recognise him as a legitimate king. Herod himself had very little in the way of military muscle to keep the different communities in line and often had to rely on his Roman patrons to subdue the population.
Political games
Herod’s position as a Roman vassal was not an easy one. Roman politics were going through a radical transformation during this period, which involved violent civil wars. Herod had to make sure he was backing the right man, or if he wasn’t, change sides quickly enough to avoid being disposed of.
Rebel groups
Due to the brutal repression under Herod through the Roman legions stationed in Judea, a number of rebel groups sprung up, bent on ending his reign of terror for good. These groups were forced to fight a guerrilla war, as they could not raise a standing army that could.
Defining Moments:
Fall of Jerusalem (37 BCE)
Herod, with the help of a number of Roman legions supplied by Mark Antony, invades Judea and lays siege to Jerusalem. The walls are surrounded and huge siege engines are built to devastate the populace hiding within the city. After 40 days of fighting, the townspeople begin to weaken through starvation and Herod breaches the walls. When the Romans storm the city, they butcher the population. This angers Herod because his reputation would now be tarnished by the Romans’ actions. Despite Herod’s desire to appease the population after the siege, he still has the popular Antigonus executed because he represents a threat.
Trouble in Rome (31 BCE)
A Roman civil war threatens to engulf Judea in factional fighting and Herod must decide which man to support – Octavian Caesar or his old friend Mark Antony. Antony’s force, stationed in Egypt, appears to be the strongest, so initially Herod sides with him. After Antony’s defeat, Herod endears himself to Octavian, pledging his loyalty to the new Roman leader. While Octavian is not convinced of Herod’s honesty, he recognises that he has served Rome well in the past, so allows Herod to stay on as king of Judea as long as he can control the population.
Death of Herod (4 BCE)
Herod dies in March or April 4 BCE after succumbing to ‘Herod’s evil’, thought to be kidney disease and gangrene. He had already executed two of his eldest sons after another bout of paranoid madness, and he leaves Judea in open rebellion against Roman authority. The divided communities that make up the Judean state immediately demand independence, and only the presence of Roman legions under Octavian subdue the population adequately for Herod’s three remaining sons to rule a third of the kingdom each under Roman patronage.
A Biblical Connection
Herod has been reviled in the Bible as a monstrous tyrant who threatened the life of the baby who Christians believe was the son of God. Jesus of Nazareth’s birth came at the end of Herod’s reign, when his psychotic episodes had become increasingly dangerous to the people he suspected were plotting treason against him. According to the Bible, it was during one of these paranoid episodes that he heard word of a child being born proclaimed as the ‘king of the Jews’. This was highly threatening as far as Herod was concerned, as he had never been fully accepted by his Jewish subjects as their true king and any kind of usurpation from another individual claiming to be their ruler had to be destroyed. He went into a fit of rage, ordering all the sons of Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus, murdered in what became known as the ‘Massacre of the Innocents.’ While the Bible is not considered historically accurate by scholars, Herod’s violent reaction was alluded to by Roman sources writing after the event, and archaeologists have speculated the massacre occurred at some point in 5 BCE, a year before Herod died. His actions have since been immortalised through the story of the Nativity, and his reputation for uncompromising brutality has never been forgotten i In a fit of n Christian traditions.
By Chris Fenton in "All About History", issue n.14,2014, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.
Herod of Idumea was born into one of the most volatile regions of the ancient world. He learned to fear rivals, suspect betrayal and watch his back. The Romans had taken over much of his homeland and solidified their grip on the area through unpopular puppet kings. Rebellion was in the air and from a young age Herod was forced to pick sides – work with the invaders or fight for an independent homeland. His father was a high-ranking official of King Hyrcanus II and had the ear of the Roman senate, so used this prestigious position to grant Herod a governorship in 49 BCE in the province of Galilee. Herod knew this position came from powerful Roman patronage and he made sure the Romans knew he would continue supporting them if they backed him in instigating a brutal regime in Galilee for the glory of the Roman Empire.
Unfortunately for Herod, not everyone shared his astute sense of accommodation when it came to the Romans. In 40 BCE, the puppet king Hyrcanus died and was replaced by Antigonus, who quickly set about ejecting the Roman garrisons from Judea and exterminating any native who had conspired with them against their own people. Herod quickly lost his power and position. He was forced to flee into the night and, lacking anywhere else to go, travelled to the heart of the Roman Empire to beg Caesar to help him.
Herod’s presence in Rome was not unusal; many high-ranking foreigners travelled to the city to seek patronage and aid from the Roman senators who decided the fate of kingdoms. What was unusual was how unpopular Herod was within the city. The Jewish population saw him as a tyrannical traitor, the Romans as an incompetent beggar. The decision by the senate to make Herod king of the Jews was only made through a lack of a better option. As far as Caesar and the senators were concerned, Judea needed a leader who was strong and loyal to the Roman cause. Herod was neither strong nor particularly loyal, but he understood power and the protection Rome could offer him if he became their puppet and did their bidding.
With thousands of Roman legionnaires behind him and one of Rome’s greatest war heroes, Mark Antony, by his side, Herod marched proudly back to his homeland as a conqueror in 37 BCE. He would not be satisfied with a mere governorship this time; he wanted ultimate power. He decided to ignore the outlying provinces and concentrate his forces around Jerusalem with the approval of Antony.
The siege lasted for 40 days. The defenders were desperate to hold onto their newfound freedom from Roman oppression, but in the end the walls were breached and thousands of bloodthirsty Roman warriors stormed the city. They slaughtered men, women and children, brutally slaying the people who dared defy Caesar’s will. Herod was outraged; he wanted to subdue the population, not butcher them, and he knew all of Judea would never forget the Jewish blood spilled that day. His complaints to Antony fell on deaf ears – as far as he was concerned, this was all in a day’s work.
Antony left Herod in the smouldering ruins of his new kingdom with just enough Roman guards to keep an eye on him. Herod would now be taking his orders direct from Rome. Immediately, Herod self-styled himself as high ruler of what remained of Jerusalem and Judea. His subjects were less than convinced; his claim to the throne was based on little more than the Roman bodyguards surrounding him. As a way of gaining some respect after putting his own people to the sword, he married his second wife – a Hasmonean princess called Mariamne – in 32 BCE. Mariamne came from an old Judean family that could trace its origins back to the conquest of Alexander the Great, and so Herod hoped the marriage would give his rule an increased appearance of legitimacy among his suspicious subjects.
The marriage failed to gain the love of the people, and as he began to settle down to the task of ruling his unhappy kingdom, he felt more vulnerable. He feared assassination at every turn, particularly from his own family. He had his brother-in-law from his first marriage drowned in his own pleasure pool because he feared the Romans would prefer him as ruler of Judea. Then in 31 BCE, Herod received word that Rome had become engulfed in a power struggle between Octavian Caesar and Herod’s old friend Antony. Like all vassals reliant on Rome’s goodwill, Herod was forced to take sides, and in keeping with his preference for backing the strongest player, he chose Antony. The odds were very much stacked in Antony’s favour, but he lost the struggle nonetheless, so Herod found himself in a very awkward position; the man in charge of Rome was the man he sided against. He sent a number of grovelling letters to Octavian promising his undying loyalty in return for being allowed to keep his job as king of the Jews. Octavian reluctantly allowed him to remain king, again more through a lack of a better option than any reflection on Herod’s skill as a leader.
Despite having survived one of the most destructive civil wars in Rome’s his ory, Herod remained uneasy. He alienated his wife after placing her under guard to prevent her from claiming the throne for the Hasmoneans if he died during the fighting. He heard more rumours of threats against his life and became increasingly convinced Mariamne would try to grab power by killing him in revenge for having her arrested. Herod’s behaviour became increasingly erratic and he fell into a strange psychotic state of paranoia. He became so convinced Mariamne was going to kill him that he had her beheaded. A soon as the axe fell, he came around from his delusion and realised he’d made a terrible mistake. He wept uncontrollably for weeks and began hallucinating visions of his dead wife screaming in agony in the corridors of his palace.
In an effort to turn his mind away from these terrifying visions, he began to construct a grand temple designed to be the envy of the ancient world. Construction started just after the death of Mariamne, and was only halted briefly after a great famine struck the city. When Caesar’s aide Marcus Agrippa visited the city in 15 BCE, he was amazed at the temple’s construction and how modern Jerusalem looked. Agrippa held court with Herod, and Herod, knowing that weakness in front of the Romans could be dangerous, managed to hide his precarious mental state. This was all for show, though; he was a man edging ever closer to madness.
After Agrippa left for the gates of Rome, Herod quickly returned to the depths of paranoia. He brutally slaughtered any who spoke out against his regime and the country lived in fear of his violent mood swings. He burned live a group of rabbis and their who had pulled down a Roman imperial eagle in a building in Jerusalem. He then executed wo of his eldest sons because he thought they were plotting against him. By 4 BCE, he feared he had become so unpopular that no one would mourn his passing after he died. In a fit of depraved madness, he ordered the families of the nobility throughout the kingdom to attend him on pain of death. He had them rounded up and placed under guard in the city’s hippodrome. The guards were ordered to murder them when he died so his death would be mourned.
As the families in the hippodrome huddled together, terrified at the prospect of being put to death as a sacrifice to the passing of their own king, Herod was racked with pain on his deathbed. Suffering from kidney failure and paranoid delusions that had finally left him senseless, he saw visions of Mariamne, tortured by her mutilated face. When Herod died screaming in agony in 4 BCE, the holy men of Jerusalem proclaimed that his horrific death was “the penalty that God was exacting of the king for his great impiety.” Herod’s sister countermanded the order to kill the Judean families and the kingdom celebrated; Herod the mad and wicked was finally dead.
*********************
Life in the Time of Herod
Roman rule
The Middle East, which consisted of the Jewish and pagan kingdoms located around the coastline of the Mediterranean, was influenced and controlled by the Roman rulers through vassals and puppet kings. The Romans coveted the kingdoms for their resources, as well as to guard the eastern flank of the empire from the ever-present threat of the Persians.
Culture shock
Herod’s kingdom was made up of a number of different tribes that settled in the area or who were cast out of Persia over the previous three centuries. Contrasting cultures were active in the region, some adopting Judaism while others followed Roman, Greek or pagan traditions, creating deep social divides.
Fractured
Due to the fractious nature of Judean society, many areas within the kingdom that Herod ruled did not recognise him as a legitimate king. Herod himself had very little in the way of military muscle to keep the different communities in line and often had to rely on his Roman patrons to subdue the population.
Political games
Herod’s position as a Roman vassal was not an easy one. Roman politics were going through a radical transformation during this period, which involved violent civil wars. Herod had to make sure he was backing the right man, or if he wasn’t, change sides quickly enough to avoid being disposed of.
Rebel groups
Due to the brutal repression under Herod through the Roman legions stationed in Judea, a number of rebel groups sprung up, bent on ending his reign of terror for good. These groups were forced to fight a guerrilla war, as they could not raise a standing army that could.
*********************
Defining Moments:
Fall of Jerusalem (37 BCE)
Herod, with the help of a number of Roman legions supplied by Mark Antony, invades Judea and lays siege to Jerusalem. The walls are surrounded and huge siege engines are built to devastate the populace hiding within the city. After 40 days of fighting, the townspeople begin to weaken through starvation and Herod breaches the walls. When the Romans storm the city, they butcher the population. This angers Herod because his reputation would now be tarnished by the Romans’ actions. Despite Herod’s desire to appease the population after the siege, he still has the popular Antigonus executed because he represents a threat.
Trouble in Rome (31 BCE)
A Roman civil war threatens to engulf Judea in factional fighting and Herod must decide which man to support – Octavian Caesar or his old friend Mark Antony. Antony’s force, stationed in Egypt, appears to be the strongest, so initially Herod sides with him. After Antony’s defeat, Herod endears himself to Octavian, pledging his loyalty to the new Roman leader. While Octavian is not convinced of Herod’s honesty, he recognises that he has served Rome well in the past, so allows Herod to stay on as king of Judea as long as he can control the population.
Death of Herod (4 BCE)
Herod dies in March or April 4 BCE after succumbing to ‘Herod’s evil’, thought to be kidney disease and gangrene. He had already executed two of his eldest sons after another bout of paranoid madness, and he leaves Judea in open rebellion against Roman authority. The divided communities that make up the Judean state immediately demand independence, and only the presence of Roman legions under Octavian subdue the population adequately for Herod’s three remaining sons to rule a third of the kingdom each under Roman patronage.
********************
A Biblical Connection
Herod has been reviled in the Bible as a monstrous tyrant who threatened the life of the baby who Christians believe was the son of God. Jesus of Nazareth’s birth came at the end of Herod’s reign, when his psychotic episodes had become increasingly dangerous to the people he suspected were plotting treason against him. According to the Bible, it was during one of these paranoid episodes that he heard word of a child being born proclaimed as the ‘king of the Jews’. This was highly threatening as far as Herod was concerned, as he had never been fully accepted by his Jewish subjects as their true king and any kind of usurpation from another individual claiming to be their ruler had to be destroyed. He went into a fit of rage, ordering all the sons of Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus, murdered in what became known as the ‘Massacre of the Innocents.’ While the Bible is not considered historically accurate by scholars, Herod’s violent reaction was alluded to by Roman sources writing after the event, and archaeologists have speculated the massacre occurred at some point in 5 BCE, a year before Herod died. His actions have since been immortalised through the story of the Nativity, and his reputation for uncompromising brutality has never been forgotten i In a fit of n Christian traditions.
By Chris Fenton in "All About History", issue n.14,2014, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.
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