Archelaus Before Caesar

Archelaus himself went down to the coast with his mother and his friends Poplas, Ptolemy and Nicolaus, leaving Philip behind as steward of the palace and guardian of his household affairs. Salome went too, together with her children, and so did the king’s nephews and sons-in-law. In appearance they were going to support Archelaus in his claim to the succession; in reality they meant to accuse him of the lawless acts committed at the temple. [a]

At Caesarea they were met by Sabinus, the procurator of Syria, who was on his way up to Judea to take charge of Herod’s wealth. Varus arrived and stopped him from going any further; Archelaus had sent for Varus, pleading with him earnestly through Ptolemy. For the time being, then, to oblige Varus, Sabinus neither hurried to the fortresses nor sealed up the treasuries of Herod’s money against Archelaus, but promised to keep quiet until Caesar had reached his decision, and stayed at Caesarea. But as soon as those who stood in his way had left — Varus for Antioch, while Archelaus set sail for Rome — he hurried to Jerusalem and took over the palace. He summoned the commanders of the garrisons and the stewards and tried to search through the accounts of the money and to take over the fortresses. The guards, however, did not neglect Archelaus’s orders. They stayed at their posts guarding everything, and declared that they held them for Caesar rather than for Archelaus. [b]

Meanwhile Antipas too set out to contest the kingdom, claiming that the will in which he had been named king carried more weight than the codicil. Salome had promised to support him, and so had many of the relatives sailing with Archelaus. He brought his mother with him, and Ptolemy, the brother of Nicolaus, who was thought to carry weight because of the trust Herod had placed in him, for he had been the most honored of Herod’s friends. But Antipas relied most of all on Irenaeus the orator, for his skill in speaking; that is why he brushed aside those who advised him to give way to Archelaus as the elder brother and as the one named in the codicil. At Rome all the relatives who hated Archelaus shifted their support to Antipas. What each of them wanted above all was self-rule under a Roman governor; but if that failed, they wanted Antipas as king. [c]

Sabinus also helped them in this by letters in which he accused Archelaus before Caesar and praised Antipas highly. Salome’s party drew up their charges and handed them to Caesar; after them Archelaus wrote out the main points of his claims and sent them in through Ptolemy, together with his father’s ring and his accounts. Caesar considered privately what each side had to say, as well as the size of the kingdom, the amount of its revenue and the number of Herod’s descendants, and first read the letters Varus and Sabinus had sent about these matters. Then he assembled a council of leading Romans, in which he gave the first seat to Gaius, his adopted son, the child of Agrippa and of his own daughter Julia; and he gave the parties leave to speak. [d]

Then Salome’s son Antipater, the most formidable speaker among Archelaus’s opponents, rose and accused him. He said that Archelaus was only now contending for the kingdom in words, but had long since become king in deeds, and was now making a mockery of Caesar’s hearing. He had not waited for Caesar to judge the succession. After Herod’s death he had secretly sent agents to put the diadem on his head; he had sat on the throne and done business as king; he had changed the ranks of the army and handed out promotions; he had granted the people everything they asked of him as their king, and had set free men his father had imprisoned on the gravest charges. And now he had come to ask his master for the shadow of a kingship whose body he had already seized for himself, making Caesar lord not of realities but of names. He taunted him further with having made a mockery of his mourning for his father, putting on a sorrowful face by day and drinking himself into revelry by night; it was this, he said, that had roused the crowd to anger and to riot. The main weight of his whole speech he laid on the number of those slaughtered around the sanctuary. They had come for a festival, he said, and had been savagely butchered beside their own sacrifices; such a heap of dead had been piled up in the temple as not even a foreign war, falling on them unannounced, would have piled up. It was because his father foresaw this cruelty, he said, that he had never thought him worthy even of the hope of the throne, until he was sicker in mind than in body, no longer capable of sound reasoning, and did not even know whom he was naming as successor in the codicil — and that though he could find no fault with the heir named in the will, which he had written when he was sound in body and his mind was free of every passion. Yet even if one gave the sick man’s judgment greater weight, Archelaus had voted himself out of the kingship by his lawless acts against it. For what kind of king would he be once he received the throne from Caesar, when he had killed so many before he received it?

After going on at length in this way, and bringing forward most of the relatives as witnesses to each of the charges, Antipater ended his speech. Then Nicolaus rose on Archelaus’s behalf. He declared that the slaughter in the temple had been unavoidable, for those killed had become enemies not only of the kingdom but also of Caesar, who was its judge. As for the other charges, he showed that the accusers themselves had advised the very acts they now complained of. But he claimed that the codicil should carry the greater weight above all because in it Herod had appointed Caesar to confirm the successor. For a man sane enough to yield his authority to the master of the world was surely not mistaken in his judgment about an heir; the one who knew whom to choose as the appointer was sane also in choosing the one appointed. [e]

When Nicolaus had finished, Archelaus came forward and fell at Caesar’s knees without a word. Caesar raised him up very kindly and made it plain that he thought him worthy to succeed his father, but he announced nothing definite. He dismissed his council for that day and considered by himself what he had heard: whether he ought to make one of those named in the wills the successor, or divide the realm among all Herod’s family, since the number of those involved seemed to call for support.