Jerusalem. The Biography

visited and paid honour to the Temple and so did Augustus. [He then thanks Caligula for favours granted but] I exchange all [those benefits] for one thing only – that the ancestral institutions be not disturbed. Either I must seem a traitor to my own or no longer be counted your friend as I have been; there is no other alternative. *
     
    Even if the stark bravado of this ‘death or freedom’ is exaggerated, this was a risky letter to write to Caligula – yet the king’s intervention did apparently save Jerusalem.
    At a feast, the emperor thanked King Agrippa for the help he had given him before his accession, offering to grant him any request. The king asked him not to place his image in the Temple. Caligula agreed.
    HEROD AGRIPPA AND EMPEROR CLAUDIUS:
ASSASSINATION, GLORY AND WORMS
     
    After recovering from a strange illness in late 37, the emperor became increasingly unbalanced. During the next years, the sources claim he committed incest with his three sisters, prostituted them to other men and appointed his horse as a consul. It is hard to assess the truth of these scandals, though his actions certainly alienated and terrified much of the Roman elite. He married his sister, then, when she became pregnant, supposedly ripped the baby out of her womb. Kissing his mistresses, he mused, ‘And this beautiful throat will be cut whenever I please’ and told the consuls, ‘I only have to give one nod and your throats will be cut on the spot.’ His favourite bon mot was ‘if only Rome had one neck’, but unwisely he also liked to tease his macho Praetorian Guards with saucy passwords such as ‘Priapus’. It could not go on.
    At midday on 24 January 41, Caligula, accompanied by Herod Agrippa,was leaving the theatre through a covered walkway when one of the Praetorian tribunes drew his sword and cried, ‘Take this!’ The swordblow hit Caligula’s shoulder, almost filleting him in half, but he kept shouting, ‘I’m still alive.’ The conspirators cried, ‘Strike again,’ and finished him off. His German bodyguards marauded through the streets, the Praetorian Guardsmen ransacked the imperial palace on the Palatine Hill and murdered Caligula’s wife, dashing out the brains of his baby. The Senate mean-while tried to restore the republic, ending the despotism of the emperors.
    Herod Agrippa took control of Caligula’s body, winning time by declaring that the emperor was still alive but wounded, while he led a squad of Praetorians to the palace. They noticed a stirring behind a curtain and discovered the lame, stammering scholar, Claudius, Caligula’s uncle and son of Agrippa’s family friend Antonia. Together, they acclaimed him as emperor, carrying him to their camp on a shield. Claudius, a republican, tried to refuse the honour, but the Jewish king advised him to accept the crown and persuaded the Senate to offer it to him. No practising Jew, before or since, even in modern times, has ever been so powerful. The new Emperor Claudius, who proved a steady, sensible ruler, rewarded his friend by presenting him with Jerusalem and the whole of Herod the Great’s kingdom, as well as granting him the rank of consul. Even Agrippa’s brother received a kingdom.
    Herod Agrippa had left Jerusalem as a penniless ne’er-do-well; he returned as king of Judaea. He made a sacrifice in the Temple, and dutifully read Deuteronomy to the gathered people. The Jews were moved when he wept for his own mixed origins and dedicated Caligula’s gold fetters, the symbol of his good fortune, to the Temple. ‘The holy city’, which he saw as ‘the mother-city’ not just of Judaea but of Jews across Europe and Asia, was won over by this new Herod, whose coins called him ‘Great King Agrippa, Friend of Caesar’. Outside Jerusalem he lived like a Roman-Greek king, but when he was in the city he lived as a Jew and sacrificed each day in the Temple. He beautified and fortified the expanding Jerusalem, adding a Third Wall to enclose the new Bezetha suburb – the northern section of which has been excavated.
    Yet even Agrippa struggled to manage Jerusalem’s tensions: he appointed three successive high priests in two years and acted against the Jewish Christians. This may have coincided with Claudius’ crackdown on the Jewish Christians in Rome – they were expelled for disorders ‘at the instigation of Chrestus’ (Christ). ‘Now about this time’, says the Acts of the Apostles, ‘Herod the king stretched forth his