The Poison Meant for Herod

As soon as Pheroras was dead and his funeral was over, two of his freedmen, who had been much valued by him, came to Herod and begged him not to leave his brother’s murder unavenged, but to look into so unreasonable and unhappy a death. When he was moved by these words, for they seemed to him true, they said that Pheroras had dined with his wife the day before he fell sick, and that a certain potion had been brought to him in a kind of food he was not used to eating, and that when he had eaten it, he died of it. This potion had been brought out of Arabia by a woman, supposedly as a love potion, for that was what it was called, but in reality to kill Pheroras; for the Arabian women are skilled in making such poisons. The woman to whom they attributed this was admittedly one of the closest friends of Sylleus’s mistress. Both the mother and the sister of Pheroras’s wife had gone to the places where she lived and persuaded her to sell them this potion, and had come back bringing her with them the day before the supper. [a]

At this the king was provoked, and he put the women slaves to torture, and some free women with them. When the deed still did not come to light, because none of them would confess it, at last one of them, in the utmost agony, said only this: she prayed that God would send the same agonies on Antipater’s mother, who had been the cause of these miseries to all of them. This prayer led Herod to look into the matter more closely, and through the women’s tortures everything was discovered: their drinking parties, their secret gatherings, and the disclosure to Pheroras’s women of what Herod had said to his son alone. (What his father had charged Antipater to keep secret from Pheroras was a gift of a hundred talents.) It came out also what hatred Antipater bore his father. He complained to his mother of how very long his father lived, while he himself was almost an old man, so that if the kingdom should come to him it would not give him any great pleasure. A great many of his brothers, or his brothers’ children, were being brought up who might hope for the kingdom as well as he, and all this made his own hopes of it uncertain; for even now, if he himself should die, Herod had ordained that the government should go not to his son but rather to a brother. He had also accused the king of great cruelty and of the slaughter of his sons; and it was the fear that Herod would do the same to him that made him contrive this journey of his to Rome, and made Pheroras contrive to go to his own tetrarchy.

These confessions agreed with what his sister had told him, and went far to confirm her testimony and to free her from the suspicion of disloyalty to him. So the king, now sure of Antipater’s wickedness, took from Doris, his mother, all her fine ornaments, which were worth many talents, and then sent her away, and he made friends with Pheroras’s women. But the one who most of all inflamed the king against his son was a Samaritan named Antipater, the steward of Antipater the king’s son. Under torture he said, among other things, that Antipater had prepared a deadly potion and given it to Pheroras, wishing him to give it to his father during his absence, when he was too far away to have the least suspicion cast on him for it; that Antiphilus, one of Antipater’s friends, had brought the potion out of Egypt; and that it had been sent to Pheroras by Theudion, the brother of the mother of Antipater the king’s son, and in that way had come to Pheroras’s wife, her husband having given it to her to keep. [g]

When the king asked her about it, she confessed it; and as she was running to fetch it, she threw herself down from the roof. Yet she did not kill herself, because she fell on her feet. The king comforted her and promised pardon to her and her household on condition that they hid nothing of the truth from him, but threatened her with the utmost miseries if she proved ungrateful. So she promised and swore that she would speak out everything and tell how everything had been done. And she said what many took to be entirely true: “The potion was brought out of Egypt by Antiphilus, and his brother, who is a physician, procured it. When Theudion brought it to us, I kept it, because Pheroras entrusted it to me; and it was prepared by Antipater for you. So when Pheroras had fallen sick, and you came to him and cared for him, and he saw the kindness you had for him, his mind was overcome by it. So he called me to him and said to me, ‘Woman, Antipater has entrapped me in this affair of his father and my brother, by persuading me to a murderous intention against him and procuring a potion to serve it. So go and fetch my potion, since my brother appears to have still the same good disposition toward me that he had before, and I do not expect to live long myself, and I would not defile my forefathers by the murder of a brother; and burn it before my eyes.’ So I immediately brought it and did as my husband told me. I burned most of the potion; but a little of it was left, so that if the king should treat me badly after Pheroras’s death, I might poison myself and so escape my miseries.” When she had said this, she brought out the potion, and the box it was in, before them all. And another brother of Antiphilus, and his mother too, under the extremity of pain and torture, confessed the same things and acknowledged the box.

The high priest’s daughter, who was the king’s wife, was also accused of having known of all this and of having decided to conceal it. For this reason Herod divorced her and struck her son out of his will, in which he had been named as one who was to reign after him; and he took the high priesthood away from his father-in-law, Simon son of Boethus, and appointed Matthias son of Theophilus, a native of Jerusalem, high priest in his place.

While this was going on, Bathyllus, Antipater’s freedman, also came from Rome, and under torture he was found to have brought another potion, to put into the hands of Antipater’s mother and of Pheroras, so that if the first potion did not work on the king, this one at least might carry him off. Letters also came from Herod’s friends at Rome, written with Antipater’s approval and at his prompting, accusing Archelaus and Philip of slandering their father over the killing of Alexander and Aristobulus and of pitying themselves as well, as though, because they had been sent for to come home (for their father had already recalled them), they too were to be destroyed. Antipater’s friends had procured these letters with large bribes. But Antipater himself wrote to his father about them. He laid the heaviest charges against them, yet he entirely excused them of any guilt, saying they were only young men, and so put their words down to their youth. He said also that he had himself been very busy with the affair of Sylleus and with winning favor among the great men, and for that reason had bought splendid ornaments to present to them, which had cost him two hundred talents. One may wonder how it came about that, while so many accusations were being laid against him in Judea during the seven months before this, he was told of none of them. The reasons were that the roads were closely guarded, and that men hated Antipater; for there was nobody who would run any risk himself to gain him any advantage. [m]