IF there be sufficient ground for the plausible conjecture which identities Agrippa I. and Cypros with the king and queen who figure in the two following anecdotes of the Talmud, we shall see that the part he had to play was not always an easy one, and even led to serious complications.
i. The Talmud relates that on one occasion, at a festival, a lizard was found in the royal kitchen. It appeared to be dead, and if so the whole banquet would have become ceremonially unclean. The king referred the question to the queen, and the queen to Rabban Gamaliel. He asked whether it had been found in a warm or a cold place. “In a warm place,” they said. “Then pour cold water over it.” They did so. The lizard revived, and the banquet was pronounced clean. So that, the writer complacently adds, the fortune of the entire festival depended ultimately on Rabban Gamaliel.1
ii. The other story is more serious. It appears that at a certain Passover the king and queen were informed by their attendants that two kinds of victims—a lamb and a kid— either of which was legal—had been killed for them, and they were in doubt as to which of the two was to be regarded as preferable. The king, who considered that the kid was preferable, and was less devoted to the Pharisees than his wife, sent to ask the high priest Issachar of Kephar– Barchaï, thinking that since he daily sacrificed victims, he would be sure to know. Issachar, who was of the same haughty, violent, luxurious temperament as all the numerous Sadducean high priests of the day, made a most contemptuous gesture in the king’s face, and said that, if the kid was preferable, the lamb would not have been ordained for use in the daily sacrifice. Indignant at his rudeness, the king ordered his right hand to be cut off. Issachar, however, bribed the executioner, and got him to cut off the left hand. The king, on discovering the fraud, had the right hand cut off also.2 It is thus that the story runs in the Pesachim, and further on it is said that when the doubt arose the king sent to the queen, and the queen to the Rabban Gamaliel, who gave the perfectly sensible answer that as either victim was legal, and as the king and queen had been perfectly indifferent in giving the order for the Paschal victims to be slain, they could eat of the one which had been first killed.3
As this story was not very creditable to Agrippa I., we find a sufficient reason for the silence of Josephus in passing over the name of Issachar in his notices of the High Priests.4 His was not a name which could have sounded very agreeable in the ears of Agrippa II. The elder Agrippa seems to have been tempted in this instance into a violence which was not unnatural in one who had lived in the court of Tiberius, but which was a rude interruption of his plan of pleasing the priestly party, while Cypros took the Pharisees under her special patronage. Issachar seems to have come between Theophlus, son of Hanan, and Simon, son of Kanthera the Boethusian.5 Whatever may have been the tendencies of Cypros, and his own proclivities, it was important to Agrippa that he should retain the support of the sacerdotal aristocrats; and they were well pleased to enjoy, in rapid succession, and as the appanage of half–a–dozen families, the burden–some dignity of Aaron’s successor.
The Pharisees, on the other hand, recounted with pleasure the fact that no sooner had Agrippa arrived at Jerusalem than he caused to be suspended on the columns of the oulam, or Temple portico, the chain of massive gold which he had received from Gaius as an indemnification for his captivity;6 that he was most munificent in his presents to the nation; that he was a daily attendant at the Temple sacrifice; that he had called the attention of the Legate Petronius to the decrees of Claudius in favour of Jewish privileges, and had thereby procured the reprimand and punishment of the inhabitants of Dor,7 who had insulted the Jews by erecting in their synagogue a statue of the emperor. They had also told with applause that he carried his basket of first–fruits to the Temple like any ordinary Israelite;8 and that although every one had to give way in the streets to the king and his suite, yet Agrippa always yielded the right of road to a marriage or funeral procession.9 There were two stories on which they dwelt with peculiar pleasure. One was that on a single day—perhaps that of his arrival at Jerusalem—he offered a thousand holocausts, and that when they had been offered, a poor man came with two pigeons. The priest refused this sacrifice, on the pretext that on that day he had been bidden to offer none but royal victims; but he yielded to the poor man’s earnest solicitation on being told that the pigeons were brought in fulfilment of a vow that he would daily offer half the produce of his day’s work; and Agrippa warmly approved of this disobedience to his orders.10 On another occasion, at the Feast of Tabernacles, he received from the hands of the high priest the roll of the Law, and without seating himself, read the Lesson for the day, which was Deuteronomy 17:14–20. When he came to the words, “Thou mayest not set a stranger over thee which is not thy brother,” the thought of his own Idumæan origin flashed across his mind, and he burst into tears. But the cry arose on all sides, “Fear not, Agrippa; thou art our brother, thou art our brother.”11
There were other tendencies which would win for Agrippa the approval of the people no less than that of the Pharisees. Such, for instance, were his early abolition of a house–tax in Jerusalem, which had been felt to be particularly burdensome; and his construction of a new quarter of the Holy City, which was called Bezetha.12 The Rabbis, indeed, refused to accord to the new district the sanctity of the old, because it had not been inaugurated by the presence of a king, a prophet, the Urim and Thummim, a Sanhedrin of seventy–one, two processions, and a choir.13 It is far from improbable that this addition to Jerusalem was mainly intended to strengthen its natural defences, and that Agrippa had formed the secret intention of making himself independent of Rome. If so, his plans were thwarted by the watchful jealousy of Vibius Marsus,14 who had succeeded Petronius as Praefect of Syria. He wrote and informed the Emperor of the suspicious proceedings of Agrippa, and an Imperial rescript commanded the suspension of these building operations. Petronius had been on terms of intimacy with Agrippa, but Marsus distrusted and bitterly offended him.15 After the completion of the magnificent theatre, and other buildings which he had presented to Berytus, he was visited by a number of neighbouring princes—Antiochus, King of Commagene, Sampsigeramus of Emesa, Cotys of Lesser Armenia, Polemo of Pontus, and his brother Herod, King of Chalcis. It is probable that these royal visits were not of a purely complimentary character, but may have been the nucleus of a plot against the Roman power. If so, their machinations were scattered to the winds by the contemptuous energy of the Praefect, who felt a truly Roman indifference for the gilded impotence of these Oriental vassals. As the gathering took place at Tiberias, he went thither, and Agrippa, in whose character, as in that of all his family, there was a large vein of ostentation,16 went seven furlongs out of the city to meet him, with the five other kings in his chariot. Marsus did not like the look of this combination, and sent his servants to the kings with the cool order that they were all to make the best of their way at once to their respective homes. It was in consequence of this deliberate insult that, after the death of Agrippa, Claudius, in respect to his memory, and in consequence of a request which he had received from him, displaced Marsus, and sent C. Cassius Longinus in his place.17
AgrippaIIandBernice
Not a spark of true patriotism seems ever to have been kindled in the breast of Agrippa II. He was as complete a renegade as his friend Josephus,18 but without his versatility and genius. He had passed all his early years in the poisoned atmosphere of such courts as those of Gaius and Claudius, and was now on excellent terms with Nero. The mere fact that he should have been a favourite with the Messallinas, and Agrippinas, and Poppæas, of a palace rife with the basest intrigues, is sufficient to condemn him. His appointments to the High–priesthood were as bad as those of his predecessors, and he incurred the displeasure of the Jews by the arbitrary rapidity of the constant changes which he made. Almost the only specific event which marked his period of royalty was a dispute about a view from a window. In a thoroughly unpatriotic and irreverent spirit he had built a banquet–hall in Herod’s palace at Jerusalem, which overlooked the Temple courts. It was designed to serve the double purpose of gratifying the indolent curiosity of his guests as they lay at table, by giving them the spectacle of the Temple worship in its most sacred details, and also of maintaining a certain espionage over the movements of the worshippers, which would at any moment enable him to give notice to the Roman soldiers if he wished them to interfere. Indignant at this instance of contemptible curiosity and contemptible treachery, the Jews built up a counter wall to exclude his view. Agrippa, powerless to do anything himself, invoked the aid of the Procurator. The wall of the Jews excluded not only the view of Agrippa, but also that of the commandant in the tower of Antonia, and Festus ordered them to pull it down. The Jews resisted this demand with their usual determined fury, and Festus so far gave way that he allowed them to send an embassy to Rome to await the decision of the Cæsar. The Jews sent Ishmael Ben Phabi the high priest, Helkias the treasurer, and other distinguished ambassadors, and astutely gaining the ear of Poppæa—who is believed to have been a proselyte, but if so, was a proselyte of whom the Jews ought to have been heartily ashamed—obtained a decision in their favour. Women like Poppæa, pantomimists like Aliturus—such were in these days the defenders of the Temple for the Jews against their hybrid kings! We hear little more of Agrippa II. till the breaking out of the war which ended in the destruction of Jerusalem. As might have been expected, he, like Josephus, like Tiberius Alexander, and other eminent renegades, was found in the ranks of the Roman invaders, waging war on the Holy City. He probably saw the Temple sink amid its consuming fires. Like Josephus he may have watched from a Roman window the gorgeous procession in which the victor paraded the sacred spoils of the Temple, while the wretched captives of his countrymen—
“Swelled, slow–pacing by the car’s tall side,
The Stoic tyrant’s philosophic pride.”
After that he fell into merited obscurity, and ended a frivolous life by dishonoured old age.
Such was the prince who came to salute Festus, and he was accompanied by his sister, who was unhappily notorious even among the too notorious ladies of rank in that evil time. Berenice was the Lucrezia Borgia of the Herodian family. She was beautiful, like all the princesses of her house. Before the age of sixteen she had been married to her uncle Herod of Chaleis, and being left a widow before she was twenty, went to live in Rome with her equaily youthful brother. Her beauty, her rank, the splendour of her jewels, the interest and curiosity attaching to her race and her house, made her a prominent figure in the society of the capital, and a diamond, however lustrous and valuable, was enhanced in price if it was known that it had once sparkled on the finger of Berenice, and hat been a present to her from her brother.19 The relations between the two gave rise to the darkest rumours, which gained credence, because there was nothing to contradict them in the bearing or character of the defained persons. So rife indeed did these stories become, that Berenice looked out for a new marriage. She contracted an alliance with Polemo II., King of Cilicia, insisting, however, that he should save her from any violation of the Jewish law by submitting to the rite of circumcision.20 Circumcision, not conversion, was all that she required. So true is the charge brought alike by St. Paul in his Epistles, and by the writers of the Talmud, that the reason why the Jews insisted upon circumcision was only that they might have whereof to glory in the flesh. The lowering of the Gentile fasces in token of external respect was all that they cared for, and when that was done, the Ger might go his own vile way—not improbably to Gehenna.21 Circumcision to them was greater than all affirmative precepts, and was therefore exalted above love to God or love to our neighbour.22 No doubt it cost Polemo something to accept concision, in order to satisfy the orthodox scrupulosity of an abandoned Jewess; but her wealth was an inducement too powerful to resist. It was hardly likely that such a marriage could last. It was broken off very rapidly by the elopement of Berenice, after which Polemo immediately repudiated every shadow and semblance of allegiance to the Jewish religion, and Berenice returned to the house of her brother, until her well–preserved but elderly beauty, added to the munificence of her presents, first won the old Vespasian, and then his son Titus.23 The conqueror of Judæa was so infatuated by his love for its dishonoured princess that he took her with him to Rome, and seriously contemplated making her a partner of his imperial throne.24 But this was more than the Romans could stand, far gone as they were in servitude and adulation. The murmurs which the rumoured match stirred up were so wrathful in their indignation, that Titus saw how unsafe it would be to wed a Jewess whose name had been dragged through the worst infamy. He dismissed her— invitusinvitam—and we hear of her no more. Thus in the fifth generation did the sun of the Herodian house set in obscure darkness, as it had dawned in blood; and with it set also the older and purer splendour of the Asmonæan princes. They had mingled the honourable blood of Judas the Maccabee with that of Idumæan adventurers, and the inheritors of the grandest traditions of Jewish patriotism were involved in a common extinction with the representatives of the basest intrigues of Jewish degradation.