Herod and Agrippa in Ionia

When Herod had dealt with these matters and learned that Marcus Agrippa had sailed again from Italy into Asia, he hurried to him and begged him to come to his kingdom and enjoy what he might rightly expect from one who had been his guest and was his friend. He pressed the request hard, and Agrippa agreed and came to Judea. Herod left nothing undone that might please him. He entertained him in his newly built cities and showed him the buildings he had put up, and he provided all sorts of the finest and most costly delicacies for him and his friends, at Sebaste and at Caesarea, by the harbor he had built, and at the fortresses he had raised at great expense, Alexandrium, Herodium and Hyrcania. He also took him to the city of Jerusalem, where all the people met him in their festival clothes and received him with acclamations. Agrippa offered a hecatomb of sacrifices to God and feasted the people, leaving out none of the finest delicacies to be had. He enjoyed himself so much there that he stayed many days with them and would gladly have stayed longer, except that the season made him hurry away: winter was coming on, he thought it unsafe to put to sea any later, and he had to return to Ionia. [a]

So Agrippa left, after Herod had given many presents to him and to the leading men with him. King Herod spent the winter in his own dominions and in the spring hurried to join him again, knowing that Agrippa planned a campaign at the Bosporus. He sailed by way of Rhodes and Cos and put in, thinking he would overtake Agrippa near Lesbos; but there a north wind caught him and kept his ships from putting out to sea, so he spent many days at Chios. There he treated kindly a great many people who came to him and won them over with royal gifts. He saw that the city’s colonnade had fallen down. It had been thrown down in the war with Mithridates, and being a very large and fine building, it was not as easy to rebuild as the rest; yet he provided a sum not only large enough for the purpose but more than enough to finish the building, and he told them not to neglect the colonnade but to rebuild it quickly, so that the city might recover its proper adornment. When the high winds had dropped, he sailed to Mytilene and from there to Byzantium. Hearing that Agrippa had sailed beyond the Cyanean Rocks, he made all possible haste to overtake him and caught up with him near Sinope in Pontus. The sailors caught sight of him sailing in most unexpectedly, but his arrival gave them great joy, and there were many friendly greetings between the two. Agrippa thought he had received the greatest possible proof of the king’s kindness and goodwill toward him, since the king had made so long a voyage, at just the right moment, to help him, and had left the government of his own dominions, thinking it more worth his while to come to him. Herod was everything to Agrippa: in the conduct of the war, a great help in civil affairs, and an adviser in particular matters. He was also a pleasant companion when Agrippa relaxed, and the only one of all who shared everything with him: his hardships because of his goodwill, and his pleasures because of the respect Agrippa had for him. When the affairs in Pontus for which Agrippa had been sent there were finished, they decided not to return by sea, but passed through Paphlagonia and Cappadocia; from there they traveled across Greater Phrygia, came to Ephesus, and then sailed from Ephesus to Samos. The king conferred a great many benefits on every city he came to, as each needed them. He did not fail those who lacked either money or kind treatment: the money he supplied out of his own purse, and he also interceded with Agrippa for all who sought his favor, and so managed things that no petitioner failed in any request to him. Agrippa was himself of a good disposition and very generous, ready to grant any request that might benefit the petitioners, provided it did no harm to others. The king’s wishes carried great weight as well, and kept spurring on Agrippa, who was himself ready to do good. For Herod reconciled him to the people of Ilium, with whom he was angry; paid the money that the people of Chios owed to Caesar’s procurators and had them released from their tribute; and helped all the others as their various needs required. [c]

While Agrippa and Herod were in Ionia, a great crowd of Jews who lived in its cities came to them. Seizing the opportunity and the freedom of speech now given them, they laid before them the injuries they suffered. They were not allowed to observe their own laws; by the ill treatment of the judges they were compelled to appear in lawsuits on their holy days; they were robbed of the money they used to lay up for Jerusalem; and they were forced into military service and into other public duties that obliged them to spend their sacred money. From these burdens they had always been freed by the Romans, who had always allowed them to live by their own laws. When this outcry was raised, the king asked Agrippa to hear their case and appointed Nicolaus, one of his friends, to plead for these privileges of theirs. So when Agrippa had seated the leading Romans and such kings and rulers as were present as his council, Nicolaus stood up and pleaded for the Jews as follows: [i]

“Most excellent Agrippa, all those in distress must of necessity turn to those who have the power to free them from the injuries they suffer, and the present petitioners come before you with great confidence. They have often obtained your favor before, as fully as they could wish, and now they only ask that you who gave those favors will see that what you have already granted is not taken away from them. We received these favors from you, who alone have the power to grant them, but they are being taken from us by people no greater than ourselves, people we know to be subjects just as we are. Certainly, if we have been granted great favors, it is to our credit that we obtained them, since we were found to deserve them; and if those favors are only small ones, it would be shameful of the givers not to confirm them to us. As for those who obstruct the Jews and treat them with contempt, it is plain that they insult both the receivers, by refusing to count as worthy men those to whom their own excellent rulers have borne witness, and the givers, by wanting the favors already granted to be revoked. Now if anyone were to ask these Gentiles themselves which of two things they would rather give up, their lives or the customs of their forefathers, their processions, their sacrifices, the festivals they celebrate in honor of those they suppose to be gods, I know very well that they would choose to suffer anything at all rather than see any of their forefathers’ customs abolished. Indeed, a great many of them have gone to war for that very reason, so anxious are they not to transgress in such matters. And in fact we measure the happiness that all mankind now enjoys through you by this very thing: that each of us is allowed to worship and to live as our own institutions require. Yet though they would not want to be treated so themselves, they try to compel others to conform to them, as though it were not as great an impiety to profane and abolish the religious rites of others as to neglect their own toward their gods. Now let us consider another point. Is there any people, or city, or community of men to whom your government and the power of Rome does not appear the greatest blessing? Is there anyone who could wish to undo the favors it has granted? No one is so mad. For there is no one who has not shared in those favors, both publicly and privately; and indeed those who take away what you have granted can have no assurance that every one of the grants you have made to them may not be taken from them too. Those grants of yours can never be valued highly enough. For if they compare the old governments under kings with your present rule, then besides the great number of benefits this government has bestowed on them for their happiness, this one thing outweighs all the rest: they find themselves no longer in a state of slavery, but of freedom. Now the privileges we ask for, even when we are at our most prosperous, are not such as to deserve envy. We are indeed prosperous through you, but only in common with others, and all we ask is to keep our religion without hindrance. That is not in itself a privilege anyone should envy us, and it is to the advantage of those who grant it; for if the Deity delights in being honored, it must delight in those who allow it to be honored. None of our customs is inhuman; all of them tend to piety and are hallowed by the righteousness we are used to practicing. Nor do we hide the precepts by which we govern our lives; they are reminders of piety and of friendly dealings among people. The seventh day we set apart from labor; it is dedicated to learning our customs and laws, since we think it right to reflect on them, as on anything else that is good, so that we may avoid sin. Anyone who examines our observances, then, will find that they are good in themselves and also ancient, though some think otherwise, so that those who have received them cannot easily be brought to give them up, out of the honor they pay to the long time they have religiously kept them. Our adversaries, however, take these privileges from us unjustly. They violently seize our money that is owed to God and called sacred money, and they do it openly, like men robbing a temple. They impose taxes on us, haul us before tribunals on holy days, and then demand other such obligations of us, not because the contracts require it or for their own advantage, but to insult our religion, as they know as well as we do; and they have given themselves up to a hatred that is neither just nor theirs to act on. For your rule, now one over all, makes goodwill effective and leaves ill will powerless for those who would choose it instead. This, then, is what we beg of you, most excellent Agrippa: that we may not be ill treated; that we may not be abused; that we may not be hindered from following our own customs, nor be stripped of our goods, nor be forced by these men to do what we ourselves force no one to do. For these privileges of ours are not only just, but were granted to us by you in the past. We can read you many decrees of the senate about these matters, and the tablets that contain them, which are still preserved in the Capitol. It is evident that they were granted after you had proof of our loyalty toward you, though they would be binding even if there had been no such loyalty. For you have preserved to people what they possessed, not to us only but to almost all mankind, and have added greater advantages than they could have hoped for, and so your rule has become a great benefit to them. If anyone tried to list all the prosperity you have conferred on every nation, which they enjoy through you, he could never finish his speech. But to show that we are not unworthy of all the advantages we have obtained, it will be enough for us, to say nothing of other things, to speak freely of this king who now governs us and who now sits among your council. In what instance of goodwill toward your house has he fallen short? What mark of loyalty to it has he left out? What token of honor has he not devised? What occasion for helping you has he not seized at the very first? What, then, prevents your kindnesses from being as many as his great services to you have been? Perhaps, too, it is not right to pass over in silence the courage of his father Antipater, who, when Caesar made his expedition into Egypt, came to his aid with two thousand armed men and proved second to none, either in the battles on land or in the handling of the fleet. And why should I say how much weight those soldiers carried at that critical moment, or how many and how great the gifts were with which Caesar honored them? I ought indeed to have mentioned before now the letters Caesar wrote to the senate, and how Antipater received honors and the citizenship of Rome. These things show both that we received these favors by our own deserts, and that on that account we ask you to confirm them. We had reason to hope for them from you even if they had not been given us before, both because of our king’s disposition toward you and yours toward him. Further, we have been told by the Jews who were there with what kindness you came into our country: how you offered the most perfect sacrifices to God and honored him with remarkable vows, how you gave the people a feast and accepted their own gifts of hospitality to you. We ought to regard all these kind entertainments, given both by our nation and to our city, to a man who is ruler and manager of so much of the public business, as signs of the friendship you have returned to the Jewish nation, a friendship won for them by the family of Herod. So we remind you of these things in the presence of the king, now sitting beside you, and we ask for nothing more than this: that what you yourselves have given us you will not allow others to take away from us.”

When Nicolaus had made this speech, the Greeks offered no opposition, for this was not an inquiry as in a court of law, but an intercession to prevent further violence against the Jews. Nor did the Greeks make any defense of themselves or deny what they were supposed to have done. Their only plea was that the Jews, by living in their country, wronged them in every way. But the Jews showed that they were natives of the place, and that while they honored their own customs they lived there without doing the Greeks any harm. So when Agrippa saw that they had been oppressed by violence, he gave this answer. Because of Herod’s goodwill and friendship, he said, he was ready to grant the Jews whatever they asked of him; their requests seemed to him just in themselves; and if they asked for anything more, he would not hesitate to grant it, provided it did no harm to the Roman government. But since their request was only that the privileges already given them should not be revoked, he confirmed to them that they might continue to observe their own customs without anyone doing them the least injury. When he had said this, he dismissed the assembly. Herod then stood up, greeted him, and thanked him for the kind disposition he had shown them. Agrippa took this very graciously, greeted him in return, and embraced him; after which he departed. The king decided to sail from Samos to his own country. He took his leave of Agrippa and went on his voyage, and with favorable winds he landed at Caesarea within a few days. From there he went to Jerusalem and called all the people together to an assembly, with not a few there from the countryside as well. He came before them and gave them a detailed account of his whole journey and of the affairs of all the Jews in Asia, and of how, through him, they would live free from injury in time to come. He also told them of all the good fortune he had met with and of how he had administered the government without neglecting anything for their advantage. And since he was in high spirits, he now remitted to them a quarter of their taxes for the past year. They were so pleased with his favor and his speech that they went their way with great gladness, wishing the king every happiness. [n]