Jerusalem. The Biography

hands to vex certain of the church,’ and had James beheaded (not Jesus’ brother but the disciple of that name). He also arrested Peter, whom he planned to execute afterPassover. Peter somehow survived: the Christians hailed this as a miracle but other sources suggest that the king simply released him, possibly as a gift to the crowds.
    Agrippa’s making of emperors had gone to his head, for he called a summit of local kings to Tiberias without asking Roman permission. The Romans were alarmed and ordered the kings to disperse. Claudius halted the building of any more Jerusalem fortifications. Afterwards, Agrippa was holding court like a Greek god-king in gold-encrusted robes in the forum of Caesarea when he was taken ill with stomach pains: ‘he was eaten of worms’, says the Acts of the Apostles. The Jews sat in sackcloth praying for his recovery but in vain. Agrippa had the charisma and sensitivity to conciliate Jewish moderates, Jewish fanatics and Romans; there died the only man who might have saved Jerusalem. 50
    HEROD AGRIPPA II: NERO’S FRIEND
     
    The king’s death unleashed riots. Though his son and namesake Agrippa II was only seventeen, Claudius wanted to give him the kingdom, but he was advised that the boy was too young to govern his inflammable inheritance. Instead the emperor restored direct rule by Roman procurators and granted the late Agrippa’s brother, King Herod of Chalcis, the right to appoint high priests and manage the Temple. For the next twenty-five years, Jerusalem was run in an ambiguous partnership between Roman procurators and Herodian kings but they could not soothe the turbulence caused by a succession of prophetic charlatans, ethnic conflicts between Greeks, Jews and Samaritans, and the widening gap between the rich, pro-Roman grandees and the poorer, religious Jews.
    The Jewish Christians, the Nazarenes, led by Jesus’ brother James, and their so-called
presbyteroi
or elders, survived in Jerusalem where the original disciples worshipped as Jews in the Temple. But Jesus was far from the last of the preachers who challenged Roman order: Josephus lists the eruption of one pseudo-prophet after another, most of them executed by the Romans.
    The procurators did not help matters. Like Pilate, their reaction to this efflorescence of prophets was to massacre their followers while squeezing the province for profit. One year, at Passover in Jerusalem, a Roman soldier exposed his bottom to the Jews, causing a riot. The procurator sent in soldiers who started a stampede in which thousands suffocated in the narrow streets. A few years later, when fighting broke out between Jews and Samaritans, the Romans crucified many Jews.Both sides appealed to Rome. The Samaritans would have succeeded but young Herod Agrippa, who was being educated in Rome, won over Claudius’ powerful wife, Agrippina: the emperor not only backed the Jews but ordered the Roman tribune at fault to be humiliated in Jerusalem and then executed. Like his father with Caligula, Agrippa II was popular not only with Claudius but with his heir, Nero. When his uncle Herod of Chalcis died, Agrippa was made king of that Lebanese fiefdom with special powers over the Temple in Jerusalem.
    In Rome, the now senile Claudius was poisoned by Agrippina, * supposedly with a plateful of mushrooms. The new teenaged emperor Nero awarded Agrippa II more territories in Galilee, Syria and Lebanon. Agrippa gratefully renamed Caesarea Philippi, his capital, Neronias and advertised his warm relations with Nero on his coins with the legend ‘Philo-Caesar’. However, Nero’s procurators tended to be corrupt and clumsy. One of the worst was Antonius Felix, a venal Greek freedman who, writes the historian Tacitus, ‘practised every kind of cruelty and lust, wielding the power of a king with the instincts of a slave’. As he was the brother of the secretary to Claudius and (for a time) to Nero, the Jews could no longer appeal to Rome. King Agrippa’s scandalous sisters personified the corruption of the elite. Drusilla, who ‘exceeded all women in beauty’, was married to the Arab king Azizus of Emesa, but Felix ‘conceived a passion for her. She being unhappy and wishing to escape the malice of her sister Berenice’ eloped with Felix. Berenice, who had been Queen of Chalcis (married to her uncle), left her latest husband, the King of Cilicia, to live with her brother: Roman rumours suggested incest. Felix milked Judaea for money while ‘a