HEROD

Herod is perhaps the only figure in ancient Jewish history who has been loathed equally by Jewish and Christian posterity, because both Talmudic rabbis (100–600 ce) and evangelists and church fathers remembered him as bloodthirsty and tyrannical; the rabbis, for good measure, also recalled an episode of necrophilia. It does indeed seem not unlikely that Herod was on the whole an unlovable person, and even his court historian Nicolaus of Damascus could not conceal his degeneration into paranoid cruelty in old age. Herod is the best attested of all ancient Jews, of all Roman client kings, probably one of the best attested of all Romans, Josephus having devoted over four books of his oeuvre to the king’s life and career (Jewish War 1; Ant. 14–17), though some of the information is contradictory and probably much of the rest is unreliable. Still, we can say much more about him than bland expressions of unnuanced moral judgement.

We should begin precisely by putting some of that moral judgement back in its historical place. Herod was ruthless and cruel, but he was the heir of such figures as Aristobulus I, who murdered nearly his entire family, and Alexander Jannaeus, the aforementioned king who drank cocktails on his balcony together with his concubines as thousands of his subjects were executed below; and he was the contemporary and client of such figures as Pompey, Julius Caesar, Mark Antony and Gaius Octavius (Octavian Caesar/Augustus) whose tendency to mass murder dwarfed anything to be found in the east. What all these men, including Herod, shared was a lack of legitimacy – all lived in a turbulent era of political realignment in the Mediterranean basin, in conditions which favoured the extremely violent. In the best cases such people might learn to overcome their tendencies, but a widely publicized potential to wreak havoc was certainly a powerful political asset even for the greatest state-builder of the time, Augustus.