Jerusalem. The Biography

brothers defeated the rebellion – but the Parthians were a different matter. Jerusalem was crowded with pilgrims – it was the Feast of Weeks – as Maccabean supporters opened the gates for the Parthian prince Pacorus * and his protégé Antigonos. Jerusalem celebrated the return of the Maccabees.
    The Parthians pretended to play the honest broker between Herod and Antigonos. Instead they lured Herod’s brother Phasael into a trap. Herod faced elimination as the Parthians looted the city and then handed power to Antigonos as king of Judaea and high priest. † He mutilated his uncle Hyrcanus, cutting off his ears, to disqualify him from the high priesthood. As for Herod’s brother Phasael, he was either murdered or dashed out his own brains.
    Herod had lost Jerusalem and his brother. He had backed the Romans, but it was the Parthians who had conquered the Middle East. A mercurial man, he was surely cyclothymic, if not a manic depressive. But his will to power, pungent intelligence, greed for life and instinct for survival were ferocious. He almost cracked up, but he overcame his nerves. By night, he gathered his entourage for a desperate escape, and a bid for power.
    HEROD: ESCAPE TO CLEOPATRA
     
    Herod, accompanied by his retinue – 500 concubines, his mother, sister, and, most importantly, his fiancée, the Maccabee princess Mariamme – galloped out of Jerusalem into the barren Judaean hills. King Antigonos,furious that Herod had escaped with his concubines (clearly the harem offered as payment to the Parthians) sent his cavalry in pursuit. As he fled through the hills, Herod again broke down and tried to commit suicide, but his guards snatched his raised sword. Soon afterwards Antigonos’ horsemen caught up with his caravan. Herod recovered his confidence and defeated them. Leaving his entourage in the impregnable mountain fortress of Masada, he himself escaped to Egypt.
    Antony had already left for Rome, but Herod was welcomed by Queen Cleopatra, who offered him employment in a bid to keep him in Alexandria. Instead Herod sailed for Rome, accompanied by his fiancée’s little brother, Jonathan, a Maccabean prince who was his candidate for the Judaean throne. But Antony, who was now planning a war to expel the Parthians, realized that this was no job for a child; it would require Herod’s ruthless competence.
    Antony and Octavian, his partner in ruling the empire, escorted Herod to the Senate where he was declared king of Judaea and Roman ally:
rex socius et amicus populi Romani
. The newly minted King Herod walked out of the Senate flanked by Octavian and Antony, the two pillars of the world, quite a moment for a half-Jew half-Arab from the mountains of Edom. His relationship with these two men would be the foundation of his forty-year reign of terror and magnificence. However, he was a long way from ruling a kingdom: the Parthians still occupied the east; Antigonos reigned in Jerusalem. To the Jews, Herod was a Roman stooge and Idumean mongrel. He would have to fight for every inch of his kingdom, and then Jerusalem. 37

40 BC – AD 10
     
    THE FALL OF ANTIGONOS: LAST OF THE MACCABEANS
     
    Herod sailed to Ptolemais, mustered an army and started to conquer his kingdom. When rebels held out in impregnable caves in Galilee, he lowered his troops in chests held by chains and, armed with hooks, these soldiers fished out his opponents and sent them hurtling into the canyons below. But Herod needed Antony’s support to take Jerusalem.
    The Romans were driving back the Parthians. In 38 BC , Antony himself was besieging a Parthian fortress at Samosata (south-eastern Turkey) when Herod marched north to offer, and ask for, help. The Parthians had ambushed Antony when Herod counter-attacked and saved the baggage-train. The bluff Antony welcomed Herod like an old comrade, affectionately hugging him in front of his army, paraded in honour of the young king of Judaea. The grateful Antony despatched 30,000 infantry and 6,000 cavalry to besiege Jerusalem in Herod’s name. As the Romans pitched camp just north of the Temple, Herod married the seventeen-year-old Mariamme. After a forty-day siege, the Romans stormed the outer wall. Two weeks later, they burst into the Temple, ravaging the city ‘like a company of madmen’, cutting down the Jerusalemites in the narrow streets. Herod had to bribe the Romans to stop the slaughter – and then sent the captured Antigonos to Antony who solicitously beheaded the last