After Agrippa’s Death

In this way King Agrippa ended his life. He left behind him a son, Agrippa, who was in his seventeenth year, and three daughters. One of them, Berenice, aged sixteen, was married to Herod, her father’s brother. The other two, Mariamne and Drusilla, were still unmarried girls; the first was ten years old, and Drusilla six. Their father had promised them in marriage: Mariamne to Julius Archelaus son of Chelcias, and Drusilla to Epiphanes, the son of Antiochus king of Commagene. But when it became known that Agrippa had died, the people of Caesarea and of Sebaste forgot his kindnesses and behaved like the bitterest of enemies. They hurled abuse at the dead king that is not fit to repeat. Those of them who were serving as soldiers at the time, and there were many, went off, seized the statues of the king’s daughters, and with one accord carried them into the brothels. There they set them up on the roofs and insulted them in every way they could, doing things too indecent to describe. They also lay down in the public places and held feasts for the whole populace, wearing garlands and perfumes, pouring libations to Charon, and drinking toasts to one another over the king’s death. They forgot not only Agrippa, who had shown them great generosity, but also his grandfather Herod, who had built their cities and had constructed harbors and temples for them at splendid expense. [a]

At this time Agrippa, the son of the dead king, was at Rome, being brought up in the household of Claudius Caesar. When Caesar learned that Agrippa had died and that the people of Sebaste and Caesarea had insulted him, he grieved for him and was angry with the ungrateful cities. He was eager to send the younger Agrippa at once to succeed to the kingdom, wishing at the same time to keep the oaths that had been sworn. But those of his freedmen and friends who had great influence with him talked him out of it. They said it was dangerous to entrust so great a kingdom to one so very young, who had not yet passed out of boyhood and would be unable to bear the cares of governing it, since a kingdom is a heavy burden even for a grown man. Caesar thought what they said was reasonable. So he sent Cuspius Fadus as governor of Judea and of the entire kingdom, paying the dead king the honor of not bringing Marsus, who had quarreled with him, into his kingdom. Above all, he had decided to write to Fadus to rebuke the people of Caesarea and Sebaste for their insults to the dead king and their drunken outrage against his living daughters. He was also to transfer the cavalry squadron of the Caesareans and Sebastenes, and the five cohorts, to Pontus, to serve there, and to choose an equal number of soldiers from the Roman legions in Syria to fill their place. Yet those who were ordered to move did not go. They sent envoys to Claudius, appeased him, and obtained leave to remain in Judea. These were the men who in the times that followed became the beginning of the greatest disasters for the Jews, sowing the seeds of the war under Florus. That is why Vespasian, when he had conquered the country, removed them from the province, as we shall relate shortly. [d]