Pontius Pilate: A Novel

by Paul L Maier

  But it was no longer a question of himself and the Baptizer. It was now a public matter of state, confirmed by oath, due to his own carelessness and Herodias’s fiendish stratagem. He would settle scores with her later. But what to do now?

  Chuza was at his side, whispering, “Excellency, I would not consider myself legally or morally bound by that oath, for your intention was to provide the young Salome a gift of great monetary value. Now surely the head of—”

  “I gave her my word.”

  “Fear the people, then, Excellency. They consider John a prophet.”

  Salome now tilted her head upward and stared directly into the eyes of Antipas with an unmistakably challenging expression. Her mien spoke eloquently what remained unspoken: “I dare you to break your word, Tetrarch Herod Antipas, in front of all your guests.”

  Pilate, at the outer edge of that stare, caught the smirk of success spelled out by Salome’s limpid blue eyes and firmly pressing, perfect lips. But he did not intervene. He had overheard Chuza’s advice to Antipas, and it was obviously correct. Only a fool would fail to heed it, and the Tetrarch of Galilee and Perea was no fool.

  But Pilate was a Roman, a practical man who could temper absolutes to suit circumstances, as Rome herself had been doing for the last seven hundred years. Here in the East, however, absolutes were not so easily adjusted, and the spoken word was thought to have a reality all its own. For this reason the Jews never expressed the truest name of their deity, Yahweh, believing it would intrude on the divine itself. Similarly, the “Law of the Medes and Persians,” once enunciated, could not be retracted.

  “I gave my word,” Antipas muttered, looking up and down the tables at what was left of his comissatio. It was the steel look in the eyes of his chief officers from Galilee that decided the issue for him. To back down on his oath would expose weakness in front of the very men he could least afford to have see it. Summoning a guard, he gave him the command.

  “No!” Chuza cried, but a look from Antipas silenced him. Pilate was aghast, a feeling of disgusted helplessness numbing him.

  Suddenly the silent halls of the cavernous castle resounded with a cry from below: “Repent, Antipas! The kingdom of God is at hand! The Messiah has—” The words were cut off.

  The gory trophy was brought in on a platter, as requested, and handed to Salome. The head, propped in an upright position, still fastened its open eyes on Antipas with prophetic fury. Pilate was nauseated. Chuza wept. Salome turned about and carried the reddening platter to her mother. Antipas’s birthday party was over.

  Pilate and Procula prepared to leave early the next morning, two days sooner than planned. Just before their departure, Chuza finally managed to see them privately.

  “What were you trying to tell me yesterday morning?” Pilate asked the steward.

  “Oh…nothing,” he said mournfully, “too late now.”

  “But what was it?”

  “I wanted to ask you to use your influence with the tetrarch to secure the release of John the Baptizer. He was a prophet of God.”

  “It was a disgusting, nasty business. Reminds me of the time when Cicero’s head was impaled on a spear in the Forum, and Antony’s wife stuck pins into the tongue which had attacked her husband. Women can be the most vengeful of creatures…But why was the young Salome so hostile to the Baptizer?”

  “Like mother, like daughter. John insisted that Herodias was living in sin with Antipas, which would make Salome the daughter of a harlot.”

  “Why didn’t you alert me sooner? I didn’t even know the prophet was at Machaerus.”

  “You didn’t? Couldn’t you hear him singing hymns each night?”

  “So he was the one…”

  “Yes,” Chuza said mournfully. Then he brightened. “But John did not live in vain. He was the forerunner of the Messiah. He has come, Excellency, he has come!”

  “Who has come?”

  “The Messiah. Already he’s preaching in Galilee and working great wonders.”

  Pilate took leave of Chuza, mystified by the fanaticism of the land. Here was the presumably sensible chief steward of a neighboring government, who witnessed the execution of one prophet one evening, then declared for a new one the very next morning.

  Antipas and Herodias saw them off, somewhat apologetic for the events of the previous night. Pilate’s thanks were just barely tactful.

  With no effort on his part, he was leaving Machaerus in a much stronger political position than Antipas. Their rivalry, in fact, was now over, with Pilate the victor. Drawing subsidies from the temple might look bad in Jewish eyes, and killing rioters even worse; but these were mere foibles compared with executing a prophet of God. News of the dramatic demise of the Baptizer was all over Palestine in a week.

  Chapter 12

  The year 31 A.D. dawned auspiciously for the prefect of Judea, now in his fifth year of office. The land was prosperous and quiet. For months no demonstrations had disrupted the calm. To be sure, several Zealot leaders in Galilee continued agitating their followers, but they were Antipas’s problem.

  The tetrarch had other difficulties, Pilate learned. His Galileans so hated Herodias and Salome for their roles in John’s execution that they never ventured far from Tiberias without a large bodyguard. Salome soon left Galilee entirely. The tetrarch Philip, evidently, was thoroughly smitten with the girl and finally married her. It was a normally abnormal romance for the House of Herod, half niece marrying half uncle. But with the blood of a prophet quite literally on her hands, anything else Salome did would look quite acceptable by comparison.

  Early that year, Pilate and Procula explored Egypt as guests of their friends, the prefect Gaius Galerius and his wife. The foursome took an extended trip up the Nile on Cleopatra’s refurbished royal barge to view the monuments at Luxor and Thebes, imposing in their incredible proportions. During much of the excursion, Galerius chatted excitedly about his nephew, a brilliant young equestrian who was now cutting a widening swath of success through Rome as a Stoic philosopher. His name was Seneca.

  As it happened, however, this would be the final happiness for Galerius. After sixteen years of distinguished service to Rome as prefect of Egypt, he took sick shortly after Pilate’s visit and resigned his office, hoping to return to Rome before death. But on the voyage home he died.

  Saddened, Pilate wondered if Galerius’s successor in Egypt might alter the military power structure of the Empire so far as Sejanus was concerned. The new prefect was Vitrasius Pollio, who was unknown to Pilate. But such speculation was now unnecessary. Sejanus had achieved a long-cherished goal. He was elected consul for the year 31, the highest office of the old Republic, and with the emperor himself as colleague. It was an almost tacit declaration that the praetorian commander was indeed heir apparent.

  There were other clues that the purple mantle of empire was all but draped around the shoulders of Sejanus. Agrippina’s son, Nero, a former heir to the throne, had committed suicide on the isle of Pontia. Gone was any possibility of Tiberius relenting in his favor, as Sejanus had feared in his letter to Pilate. Now also, at last, the princeps sanctioned Sejanus’s betrothal to his niece and daughter-in-law, Livilla, that long-standing romance on which Tiberius had at first frowned. The marriage would tie Sejanus into the imperial blood line.

  One day it was all but official. Tiberius recommended that the Senate confer the proconsular imperium on Sejanus, and it was done. This promoted him to virtual half emperor, since it was by means of the proconsular authority that Tiberius could legally govern the empire beyond Rome. Constitutionally, Pilate could now take his orders from either Tiberius or Sejanus. In fact, only the tribunician power was lacking for Sejanus to be joint emperor with Tiberius. For the prerogatives of tribune would make the prefect, like the princeps, personally inviolate, and with full executive veto powers to boot.

  Procula’s father wrote that Sejanus’s mansion was now so jammed with followers that one of his large couches had broken down under the crowds s
eated in his waiting room. With the same dispatch came a letter from the great one himself, in which Sejanus raised Pilate’s salary from 100,000 to 200,000 sesterces per year, awarding him the grade of a ducenarius. This promotion, Sejanus hoped, would inspire Pilate to even greater efforts in Judea. The last, Pilate presumed, would mean more anti-Semitic directives from Rome. But a doubling of one’s salary was always welcome.

  It was her father’s letter which gave Procula the idea of returning to Rome for a vacation at home. Gaius Proculeius was not well, and his lines betrayed a wistful desire to see his daughter again. Pilate encouraged her to make the trip.

  As Roman marriages went, theirs was proving a success. With a fifth anniversary nearing, a time when it was quite fashionable for each partner to be halfway through a second marriage, Pilate and Procula were remarkably happy. His trials as governor had tested their love, bringing stresses which Procula, in her sheltered life, had never known before. But facing them together had deepened their relationship, and they cheerfully admitted that they needed each other, especially in a far-off province like Judea.

  At times Pilate wondered if they would have been as faithful to one another had they remained in voluptuous Rome. Perhaps their virtue was sheltered by the insular position in which they found themselves in a foreign land. There simply was little opportunity to sin in Caesarea, at least with members of one’s own social stratum. Yet Procula was returning to Rome—alone. Pilate felt a ripple of concern, even a tinge of jealousy at that prospect. But, knowing his wife, he banished it immediately.

  Curiously, their quarrels were usually over matters of state, not personality. Procula was not the typical Roman wife, preoccupied with running the household or flitting from one social engagement to the next. Gifted with superior intelligence, she showed a lively interest in what her husband was doing, or leaving undone. In moments of crisis, she wanted most to offer her advice, but she was sensible enough to realize that precisely then Pilate would least tolerate any intrusion. So she supplied her ideas only when the government was running smoothly. While Pilate never formally acknowledged her help—that, she knew, would have been unmagisterial and un-Roman—Procula’s delight was to find some of her best suggestions incorporated from time to time.

  Their personalities were attuned by curious harmonies. Pilate was the realist; the calculating, ambitious, even opportunistic public official; the sub-emotional man; the religious neutral. She was the sensitive, imaginative idealist, with a creative focus toward the worlds of art, literature, and religion. What had held this polarity in balance was not simply romantic love—the romantic part of it was waning—but a flexible, mutual understanding, the undergirding necessary whenever a man and a woman must live together for life.

  There was one considerable flaw in their marriage: they had no children. The first year or two they had tried to avoid them, but now that they wanted a family, it was apparently denied them. Procula promised that she would consult the Proculeius family physician after her return to Rome.

  In late May, when the Mediterranean would be at its calmest, Procula set sail from Caesarea. Several tribunes’ wives and attendants accompanied her on the voyage to Rome. It would be some months before Pilate saw his wife again. Depending on her father’s illness, Procula might not return until the new year.

  Later that summer, three large, unidentified ships approached Caesarea. A lookout on a tower near the harbor mouth reported that the craft seemed to be teeming with armed men. In the ensuing alert, Pilate led an auxiliary cohort and a company of archers down to the waterfront. Ballistae were readied atop the towers rising from the jetty, catapulting machines which could shoot 150-pound stone balls over a range of three hundred yards.

  The harbor alert was a standard procedure against piracy. Although Pompey had driven the buccaneers off the Mediterranean a century earlier, random companies of maritime cutthroats might still descend on an unsuspecting town, plunder it, and make off with the spoils before help arrived.

  Pilate was about to order a warning shot across the bow of the lead ship when he saw it posting its colors—somewhat tardily. To his chagrin, these turned out to be Roman military standards. As the ships approached the narrows, a herald called across the water, “I-den-ti-fy your-selves!” Pirates had the nasty habit of using any disguise, even that of Roman legionaries, to put their victims off guard.

  “Cohors Secunda ltalica Civium Romanorum Voluntariorum!” was the shouted reply.

  Pilate’s face was transformed by a huge grin. The Latin for “Second Italian Cohort of Roman Citizen Volunteers” was perfect—he knew of such a unit—and as the ships slipped into the harbor of Caesarea, the Italian faces crowding the railings were unmistakable. Pilate’s cohort let out a cheer and scrambled to convert its image into that of an honor guard, while the artillery men sheepishly crawled out from behind their ballistae and waved greetings from the turrets.

  As the lead ship docked, a voice called down, “What were you trying to do, Prefect, sink your fellow Romans?”

  The comment came from the smiling face of a centurion leaning over the starboard gunwale.

  “Why you…you’re the courier…Cornelius, aren’t you?” said Pilate.

  “Honored that you remember me. Four years ago you invited me to return to Judea. So here I am.”

  “Salve, Cornelius! But why didn’t Rome tell me the Second Italian Cohort was being dispatched here? Or are you only visiting?”

  “No. We’re assigned to Caesarea. The Prefect Sejanus wrote you about it some weeks ago, I understand.”

  “Strange! I never got word!”

  But he did when the arriving cohort delivered a bundle of communications from Rome, a sad commentary on the imperial mail service. The letter stated that Sejanus was finally adopting Pilate’s suggestion that a nucleus of Roman citizen troops be sent to such outposts as Judea, rather than having the governor rely entirely on local non-Roman auxiliaries. The new cohort, recruited from Italian volunteers, would add five hundred genuine Romans to Pilate’s military arm and so improve the security of the prefecture.

  Although as a centurion Cornelius was only a junior officer, Pilate soon found him more congenial than the newly arrived tribune who commanded the Italian Cohort. While he showed him no partiality in official or military matters—that would have created dangerous jealousies within his officers’ staff—Pilate soon came to depend on Cornelius for discreet, off-duty camaraderie. The centurion had a blazing wit and the kind of stability and common sense that Pilate had not really enjoyed in a fellow Roman since Gaius Galerius.

  In midsummer he had a special assignment for Cornelius. “This will be something of an intelligence operation,” he told him. “We’ve heard rumors of some kind of unrest developing up in Galilee—that’s the breeding ground for the insurgents in Palestine, the home of the Zealot party. And it’s been some time since we’ve learned what Herod Antipas and his subjects are up to.”

  “You mean Antipas might be behind this unrest?” Cornelius inquired.

  “Hardly! It’s just that his administration—or maladministration—helps create the climate both there and here. And when clouds form in Galilee, it rains in Judea. The Zealots do a little demonstrating up there, but they reserve their full fury for riots in Judea.”

  “Because Rome is in charge here.”

  “Exactly. For instance, just last month it came to bloodshed. Several Zealots were inciting the people to riot, from the very steps of the temple in Jerusalem. The gathering crowd insulted the guards at the Antonia, and it came to a clash. Several Galilean pilgrims were cut down. And who gets credit for all this?”

  “The prefect of Judea, of course.”

  “Precisely, even though I wasn’t there at the time. The Galileans are now martyrs, identified as ‘those whose blood Pilate mingled with their sacrifices.’”

  “Naturally. But what’s my role in your plan?”

  “Take the east highway for about twenty miles. You’ll come to our fronti
er post, a place called Legio. It controls the pass through the Carmel mountain range into the plains of Galilee. Since Legio is so close to the border of Galilee, it’s our listening post for what goes on there. Now, after you interview our frontier officers, use one of our Aramaic guides to inquire casually among the merchants using the Megiddo Pass.”

  “What sort of information are we after?”

  “Find out what Antipas is doing…how the people feel now about his beheading John, the desert prophet…and, particularly, what the new commotion is in Galilee. See if the Zealots are involved in it and what their plans are. Can Rome expect more trouble from them? If so, where? This kind of thing, plus whatever else you can learn.”

  Since Pilate was eager for answers, Cornelius’s absence seemed much longer than the three weeks he was actually gone. In the interim, Pilate received the first letters from Procula. The voyage was delightful, she wrote—no seasickness—and her father’s health was slowly improving. Rome was torrid but tolerable, since her girlhood friends were hosting a string of parties in her honor. She missed Pilate, and wouldn’t it be possible for him to join her in Rome later in the year, even for a short month?

  It was only after picking through the gossip and succulent morsels of news in her second letter that Pilate found the marrow he had sought. Tiberius was still on Capri. Rumor had it that he was finally going to confer the tribunician power on Sejanus. Procula chanced to meet the exalted prefect himself one afternoon in the Forum. Her letter continued:

  …Sejanus actually remembered me! He gallantly introduced me to the senators and clients surrounding him as “the beautiful wife of our efficient prefect of Judea.” Imagine! Then he asked about you and the Jews, and he even invited me to have dinner with him sometime. And guess what he said as they moved on: “Mark my words, countrymen. Rome will hear more of Pontius Pilatus.” So, dear husband, it looks as if you’re carrying winning colors in your political chariot race…