by Paul L Maier
Pilate heard nothing more from Sejanus on the standards affair. Evidently his carefully worded explanation of the incident had been satisfactory. But the source of Sejanus’s information still troubled him. No one likes to be watched.
Pursuing his suspicion, Pilate began to take the measure of his co-rulers in Palestine. Intelligence proved easy to acquire. “A secret whispered in Jerusalem one day is shouted in Galilee the next,” a local adage had it. In fact, there were few secrets in the land.
From all reports, Philip, tetrarch in northeast Palestine, was a rather pleasant fellow, honorable, just, and peaceable. A moderate who had no enemies, Philip was easily the paragon of Herod’s progeny. He quite literally brought justice to the people. As he traveled with friends about the countryside, servants would set up his portable tribunal wherever and whenever adjudication was required.
“How does he feel toward Rome?” Pilate inquired, his consistent, crucial query.
“Romanophile,” was the assuring reply.
That Philip’s sympathies were strongly pro-Roman was evident from the names of two of his cities, Caesarea Philippi and Bethsaida Julias, and from two of his copper coins, which bore images of Augustus and Tiberius. Pilate wished that he had had that information earlier at the time of the standards affair. What were several military medallions compared to whole issues of iconic coinage, minted by a half-Jew? But since most of Philip’s subjects were gentile, they took little offense at the coppers.
With this background, Pilate expected no trouble from Philip. The two had met in Jerusalem and found each other almost congenial. They parted with mutual invitations for state visits to Caesarea and Caesarea Philippi.
Genetics, Pilate decided, were partially responsible for the enormous difference between Philip and Antipas. The two were only half brothers. And unlike Philip, Antipas had had a near taste of royalty in being named heir to the throne in Herod’s third will. The fourth had handed the crown to Archelaus, but now that he was in exile, only Roman Judea interposed between Antipas and most of his father’s former realm.
Antipas’s strategy, Pilate surmised, would be to impress Rome with his administration of Galilee, to discredit the Roman prefects wherever possible, and to conciliate the Judeans as potential subjects. His policies of ingratiating himself with Tiberius and Sejanus, his feverish “Tiberianizing” of capitals, seas, and coinage in his realm, and what must have been his recent report to Sejanus, embarrassing Pilate on the standards episode, all suited this pattern handsomely. He was playing a shrewd waiting game. For thirty-one years now, Antipas had successfully ruled Galilee and the Transjordan, while the government of Judea had changed hands five times. Might Rome not prefer continuity also for Judea? Might Tiberius not finally revert to using a buffer king in the tradition of Herod the Great to cushion the shocks between Roman and Jew? Doubtless, Antipas was grooming himself for such a role…Or was he imputing false motives to the tetrarch, Pilate wondered. He had better test the situation soon.
He discovered that a younger half brother of Antipas named Herod-Philip (not to be confused with the tetrarch Philip) was living in Caesarea as a private citizen. From him, Pilate learned that Antipas was planning to sail to Rome on business. Deciding that it was high time he invited the tetrarch to Caesarea for a friendly visit, Pilate dispatched a letter to the Galilean capital, well-laced with cordiality, inviting Antipas and his wife to dinner at the palace on the eve of his departure, since he would be sailing from Caesarea. The guests would include brother Herod-Philip and his family.
Antipas was pleased to accept, though his wife, the Arabian princess, sent her regrets. “Since I wouldn’t be returning with her,” Antipas explained after his arrival, “she preferred to come another time.”
Herod Antipas seemed older than Pilate had anticipated—he was now in his early fifties—but he looked very much the son of Herod the Great. The Herodian features—rectangular visage, square chin, deep-set eyes—were obviously dominant genes, since his half brother Herod-Philip, born of a different mother, shared them also.
Both were dressed as sophisticates of the Hellenistic East, though purple hems and signet ring betrayed the tetrarch, while Herod-Philip appeared merely the prosperous Levantine businessman which he was. Herod-Philip seemed a trifle uxorious, however, and took elaborate pains to see that his wife, Herodias, as well as their daughter, Salome, were carefully introduced to everyone.
These were the first women of the Herodian clan Pilate and Procula had ever seen, and during the dinner they watched them with curious fascination. Herself a granddaughter of Herod the Great, Herodias showed the family lineaments to good advantage. She was a rather handsome woman, Pilate thought, although Procula later insisted that her lavish makeup and almost male aggressiveness detracted from the impression she tried to make.
About halfway through dinner, Procula came to the shocking realization that the Herod-Philip–Herodias marriage was between uncle and niece, since Herod-Philip was half brother to Herodias’s father. Salome, the product of this demi-incest, was a lissome, precocious sixteen-year-old. Maybe the nub of her firm, Herodian chin projected a shade too far to call the girl beautiful, but there was a sensuality about her that made Pilate almost uncomfortable.
Diplomatic niceties, lubricated by generous supplies of wine, commanded the first half of Pilate’s feast. “How long do you plan to stay in Rome?” he asked Antipas.
“Several months. I need technical advice on several new projects I’ve in mind for Tiberias…And how do you find Judea, Prefect?”
Antipas was edging up to it, so why not plunge in directly? “Except for a little problem about where we can carry Tiberius’s picture and where not—fine!” Pilate smiled.
A round of laughter relieved the tension. The guests seemed grateful that the host himself had brought up the matter of his celebrated blunder.
“Amazing how different Jerusalem and Caesarea are,” Pilate continued. “Here even the images of Sejanus among our standards cause no difficulty.”
“It’s rather easy to run afoul of Jews,” commented Antipas good-naturedly. “My error was worse than yours, Pilate. When I started building Tiberias, everything went fine—stadium, forum, walls—everything, that is, except an oversight by my surveyors which extended the marketplace directly over an ancient cemetery. We had to exhume and transfer the dead.”
“No great error. Why the difficulty?” Pilate inquired.
“For pious Jews, any contact with a cemetery or the dead causes ritual impurity. What I intended was a Jewish capital for Galilee. What I’m building is a forbidden city.”
“How did you ever populate it?” asked Procula.
“I’m still in the process. We’re importing people from the countryside who aren’t so squeamish about evacuated cemeteries. Poorer Jews also seem less concerned.”
“My brother Antipas is also a great emancipator,” Herod-Philip volunteered, with a smirk. “He’s freed droves of bondservants and slaves in order to manufacture townspeople. He even built homes for them in Tiberias…under the condition that they wouldn’t move out of town.”
It was a borderline reference, born of wine running in his veins, which did not please Antipas. Angrily, Herodias went to his defense. “At least,” she bit her words, “Antipas built a city, as tetrarch of Galilee, while you live off the inheritance from your father as a nobody!”
Pilate exchanged a shocked glance with Procula. Herod-Philip, glaring at his wife, took a long draft from his goblet. Then he lowered it slowly and replied, “My inheritance? Oh, yes. But I could have lived much better off my original inheritance.”
“What Father means, Prefect, is that Herod’s first will had named him as successor to the throne,” Salome intruded.
“Only in case your Uncle Antipater died,” Herodias corrected the record.
“You may think it impudent of me to speak of ‘Herod’ rather than ‘Grandfather,’” Salome explained to Pilate, “but, you see, Herod is also my great-grand
father on my mother’s side, so I don’t know which name to—”
“All right, child, all right!” Herodias interrupted.
A long pause descended on the conversation, which had nearly degenerated into a family squabble.
“Uncle Antipas,” Salome suddenly chirped, “do you suppose you’ll ever become king instead of tetrarch?”
Silence virtually thundered at the ingenuous query. Antipas reddened.
“My, how you prattle, child!” Herodias covered.
“I’ll tell you when Antipas will become king!” Herod-Philip called out, a little unsteadily from drink.
“When?” Herodias snapped.
“The first.”
“The first of what?” she snarled.
“The first chance he gets!” tittered Herod-Philip, until he discovered that he was laughing alone. Then another deadly silence descended.
“Salome, why don’t you play the lyre for us like a good daughter,” Herodias urged.
“Oh yes, please do, Salome,” Procula added.
“Must I, Mother?”
In a pleasant singsong voice which only barely disguised the urgency, Herodias said, “You must.”
Pouting, Salome moved to her task. While the performance would have won no trophies at the Panathenaea festival, it did serve Herodias’s purpose in changing the mood and direction of the dinner party. At one point, Pilate almost thought he saw Antipas giving his brother a brief jab in the shin as they reclined to listen to the recital.
Later that night, after the guests had gone, host and hostess were reviewing the evening, their usual after-party hobby. “I begin to understand Herod-Philip,” said Procula. “With a wife like that, one who delights in humiliating him publicly, small wonder he cuddled his wine goblet as his dearest friend.”
“True, though he certainly did his own bit to exhibit the soiled family laundry. And wasn’t it surprising how Antipas revealed his blunder at Tiberias?”
“And what about Salome’s innocent question?”
“And Antipas’s reaction? Wonderful!” They laughed.
“Pilate,” Procula asked in a more serious tone, “how did you manage to stay in such good control of yourself all evening while they were all getting drunk and loose-lipped?”
“Not too difficult,” he replied grandly, as if he had been waiting all evening for that question. Walking over to a cabinet, he pulled out a large, silver wine flagon which his steward had used earlier that evening to keep all goblets brimming. “Look closely into the neck of the flagon. See its double throat? The larger passage leads to a main reservoir, which was filled with the strongest vintage I could find in the palace wine cellar. The other leads to a smaller chamber, which contained a color-matched grape juice. See this valve? One flick and it opens one throat while closing the other, and vice versa, with no one the wiser.”
“Pilate, you didn’t…”
“Precisely. Now, you know I love my wine, but this evening we had a little work to do. So, with the steward’s deft hand, it was wine for everyone, grape juice for me. They had the loose tongues; I had the information.”
“Why did you let me have wine, then?”
“My pet, you drink like a sparrow.”
“Well, we do know a good deal more about our friends, the Herods…Something else struck me about Antipas. Did you notice it, too?”
“Yes, if we’re thinking about the same thing.”
“The way his eyes fastened on Herodias?”
“And hers on his.”
“It was almost indecent.”
“It was indecent.”
They prepared for bed; but, before falling asleep, Procula offered a final comment. “Pilate, you don’t have portraits of Sejanus on any of your regimental standards, do you?”
“No.”
“Well, why did you tell Antipas you did?”
“You’ll find out shortly.”
That interim proved to be two months, when another letter arrived from Sejanus. Pilate seized on the following and read it jubilantly to his wife:
…The Jews, as you know, do not wish me well, so it is doubly appropriate that you are flying my medallion in Judea as an object lesson…
“I never wrote Sejanus about posting his standards. It seems we’ve authenticated our suspected channel of information.”
“But what if Sejanus checks on whether his medallion really is hanging from your ensigns?”
“He won’t. Why should he? But if it comes to that, we can fall back on the governor’s pennant he gave me. Antipas will just have gotten his facts garbled about the image.”
One day, soon after Antipas’s return from Rome, the scandal broke across Palestine in fury, horrifying the orthodox and scandalizing even liberals. Antipas had fallen hopelessly in love with Herodias, and she, fired by ambition, reciprocated. In flagrant violation of Jewish law, she divorced her husband, and Antipas his Arabian wife; they then married each other. Hebrew scripture also forbade marrying a brother’s wife, and, to compound the scandal, Herodias was also Antipas’s niece. While marriage of uncle and niece was actually permissible under Jewish law—Herodias had taken the same route with her first husband—such a union was thought incestuous by Antipas’s gentile subjects.
In the settlement, Salome would live with her mother at Tiberias, though she could visit her father periodically at Caesarea. Herod-Philip was too disgusted to contest the affair. Apparently, he despised Antipas with all the enthusiasm that only Herodian siblings could generate. Other rumors had it that he was in fact relieved to be rid of Herodias.
The only person to emerge from the sordid affair with personal honor intact was the innocent wife of Antipas, princess-daughter of the Arabian King Aretas. She had learned of her husband’s plans with Herodias almost as soon as they were contrived. Instead of making a scene, she adroitly asked if she might not spend a brief vacation at Machaerus, a palace-fortress overlooking the Dead Sea. Unaware that she knew his intentions, Antipas readily agreed. But since Machaerus lay on the border between his domains and those of her father, it was simple work for one of Aretas’s officers to spirit the princess away from the castle and back to the safety of her childhood home at Petra.
The old hostility between King Aretas and the House of Herod now blazed anew. With a righteously angry father determined to avenge his daughter’s honor, bloodshed seemed inevitable.
In the duel for respectability and leadership in Palestine, the prefect of Judea was now clearly ahead of the tetrarch of Galilee and Perea. And Pilate had several plans for remaining in front. By blending firmness with conciliation, he would try again to win the people of Judea for his cherished program of Romanizing Palestine.
* This inscription is authentic. In the summer of 1961, an Italian archaeological expedition found a two-by-three-foot stone with this enormously important inscription while excavating at Caesarea—the first epigraphic evidence of the existence of Pilate to be discovered. For further discussion, see the Notes.
Chapter 8
Late in the summer of A.D. 28, Pilate took Procula on the sixty-mile trip to Jerusalem. For her first visit, he intentionally avoided a Jewish festival, so that she would have a chance to see the city rather than milling masses of people.
Their route led south along the fertile Plain of Sharon to Lydda, then diagonally southeast up through winding hills toward Jerusalem. Only a small cavalry escort accompanied them, since this visit was to be unofficial, and, hopefully, unobtrusive. Pilate’s fiscal officer and a small committee of city engineers from Caesarea were part of the entourage.
Hardly a cloud was overhead, a vast blue purchased at the expense of a parched countryside. No rain fell in Palestine during the summer months, and Judea demonstrated the result. Its pinkish-beige soil had turned to powder, and the only remaining green in the landscape was furnished by the hearty pine, a drab and very thirsty green. Sheep, goats, and other livestock clustered at waterholes which had shrunk to muddy saucer-shaped depressions.
When Jerusalem finally appeared beyond a high ridge, the city seemed more like a mirage shimmering upward in the heat, a glistening sight quite painful to the eye. Its lime-white walls and buildings formed too stark a contrast in reflecting the afternoon sun against a background of brown hills and azure sky.
Procula confessed that it was one of the most fascinatingly odd-shaped cities she had ever seen. Whereas most metropolises had their focus of importance in a central citadel, marketplace, or forum, Jerusalem had apparently shoved hers off to one side. Nothing in the center of the city compared to the broad rectangular area wedged into its northeastern corner. This was the sprawling temple enclave, bordered by a maze of colonnaded porticoes and gates, which occupied nearly a quarter of Jerusalem. To the Jews, this was the center of the world. In the middle of the uncluttered terrace and gleaming in Hellenistic style, yet Semitic opulence, stood the great temple itself.
But just northwest of it was an architectural error, the Tower Antonia, so-named by Herod for his patron, Mark Antony. “That ugly fortress doesn’t belong there,” Procula objected. And it was true. The Antonia, while not ugly, was clearly out of place in its setting. It was a square citadel, a turret rising from each of its corners, with the colors of Pilate’s second cohort fluttering from the battlements. The fact that this stronghold was taller than the temple and dominated the sacred precinct had magnified Jewish irritation at the time of the standards affair. Nature was partially responsible, the base of the Antonia being a sharp butte of living rock which had always loomed over the temple area; and to protect the city, that rocky rise had been fortified long before Rome arrived in Judea.
Pilate and Procula were still at the summit of a suburban ridge, a splendid vantage point for viewing the whole of Jerusalem. “It’s clear that Herod’s been here,” Procula observed. “Look at the theater over there.”
“Yes, and there’s a hippodrome just south of the city. And see the little Greek forum just off the west wall of the temple? Back of that colonnade there’s even a gymnasium.”