Antipater Sent to Rome

Now that Antipater had cut off the orphans’ hopes and arranged the marriages to his own advantage, he pressed ahead as though his hopes were secure. Adding confidence to his wickedness, he became unbearable; since he could not rid himself of the hatred everyone felt for him, he sought his safety in being feared. Pheroras worked with him, as if he were already secure as king. A league of women also formed at court, which stirred up fresh disturbances. Pheroras’s wife, with her mother and her sister, and Antipater’s mother along with them, behaved outrageously in the palace. She even dared to insult the king’s two daughters, and for this above all the king held her in disfavor; yet though he hated these women, they ruled over all the others. Salome alone opposed their harmony, and denounced their gatherings to the king as bad for his affairs. When the women learned of her accusation and of Herod’s anger, they stopped meeting openly and showing one another friendship. Instead they pretended to quarrel with one another whenever the king could hear, and Antipater joined in the pretense, clashing with Pheroras in public. But they held secret meetings and nighttime revels, and being watched only bound them more closely together. Salome, however, knew everything they did, and reported it all to Herod. [a]

Herod was inflamed with anger, above all against Pheroras’s wife, since Salome accused her most. So he called together a council of his friends and relatives and accused the woman of many things, among them her insults to his daughters, and charged that she had supplied the Pharisees with pay to work against him, and had turned his brother into his enemy by binding him with potions. At last he turned to Pheroras and told him to choose one of two: his brother or his wife. When Pheroras said he would sooner part with his life than with his wife, Herod did not know what to do, and turned to Antipater. He ordered him to have nothing to do with Pheroras’s wife, or with Pheroras himself, or with anyone of hers. Antipater did not break this order openly, but he spent the nights with them in secret. Afraid of Salome’s watching, he arranged through his friends in Italy to go away to Rome. They wrote that Antipater ought to be sent to Caesar for a time, and Herod, without any delay, sent him off with a splendid retinue and a great deal of money, and gave him his will to carry. In it Antipater was named king, and after Antipater, Herod, the son of Mariamne the high priest’s daughter, was named his successor. [b]

Syllaeus the Arab also sailed to Rome, in defiance of Caesar’s orders, to contend against Antipater over the case he had argued earlier against Nicolaus. He was also in no small conflict with Aretas, his own king, for he had killed others of Aretas’s friends, and Soaemus, one of the most powerful men in Petra. With a great deal of money he had won over Fabatus, Caesar’s steward, and was using him as an ally against Herod as well. But Herod gave Fabatus more, drew him away from Syllaeus, and through him began to exact what Caesar had ordered Syllaeus to pay. Syllaeus paid nothing, and went further and accused Fabatus before Caesar, saying that he was a steward who served not Caesar’s interests but Herod’s. Fabatus was angered at this, and since he was still held in the highest honor by Herod, he betrayed Syllaeus’s secrets. He told the king that Syllaeus had bribed his bodyguard Corinthus, and that he must keep watch on the man. The king believed him, for Corinthus, though raised in Herod’s kingdom, was an Arab by birth. He had him arrested at once, and not him alone, but two other Arabs found with him, one a friend of Syllaeus and the other a tribal chief. Under torture these confessed that they had persuaded Corinthus, for a large sum of money, to kill Herod. They were examined again before Saturninus, the governor of Syria, and sent on to Rome. [d]

Herod did not stop pressing Pheroras to be rid of his wife, but he could not think of a way to punish the woman herself, though he had many reasons to hate her. At last, in his fury, he drove her out of his kingdom, and his brother with her. Pheroras was content to take the insult, and went off to his own tetrarchy, swearing that his exile would have only one end, Herod’s death, and that he would never return to him while he lived. Indeed, he did not come back even when his brother fell ill, though Herod sent for him urgently, wanting to leave him some instructions, since he expected to die. But Herod unexpectedly recovered. Not long afterward Pheroras fell ill, and Herod showed himself the more moderate of the two: he came to him and cared for him with sympathy. But his care could not overcome the illness, and after a few days Pheroras died. Although Herod loved him to his last day, the rumor still went around that he had killed him too, by poison. He had the body brought to Jerusalem, proclaimed the greatest mourning for him throughout the nation, and gave him a most splendid funeral. Such was the end that overtook one of the murderers of Alexander and Aristobulus. [f]