Herodias and Her Daughter

S. Mark vi. 14–29

Herod Antipas was only “king” by courtesy. His father had originally intended to bequeath his whole kingdom to him, but he altered his will on his deathbed, and, dividing it into four portions, left one only to him, two to his brother Archelaus, and the remainder to his half-brother Philip. His right designation, therefore, was that which he more usually receives of “tetrarch.” Herod the Great had been engaged in a long and troublesome war with a powerful border tribe, ruled over by an Arabian prince or Emir called Aretas. When at last it was brought to a close, it was an article in the conditions of peace that the princess of the Damascenes should marry one of his sons. Antipas was selected for the unhappy union. Being based upon political convenience, with no pretence of real affection, it was destined to be broken when the strain came. Another of his half-brothers, Philip, who had been disinherited from any share in the kingdom, had been married in his father’s lifetime to his niece, Herodias, daughter of the eldest brother whom Herod the Great had cruelly put to death. This, too, was a most ill-assorted marriage, for her husband was more than double her age, and there was no pretence even of love and affection between them. She was of a passionate and imperious nature, and chafed at Philip’s ignoble descent, for his mother was a Boethusian, while her own was a Maccabean princess; but what galled her even more bitterly was her exclusion from all the magnificence and pomp of the regal courts. So it was, that when the tetrarch Antipas was visiting her husband at Rome, where he lived in a private capacity, she intrigued with him to repudiate his Arabian wife and establish herself in her place.

He yielded to her infamous design, and, in violation of every principle of law and morality, took her to his palace at Tiberias to succeed his rightful but dishonoured queen, who had fled to her own people, through fear of being poisoned by her wicked rival.

It was an ill-fated step for Antipas; for crime led on to crime, lust to murder, and both brought a terrible retribution, in war and depredation, exile and ruin.

The profligacy which was such a marked feature of the Roman Empire at this period had doubtless infected the Province of Syria, but the feelings of the people were shocked by such an act of unblushing immorality in high places. And John the Baptist was but their mouthpiece when he raised his voice against the adulterous union: “It is not lawful for thee to have thy brother’s wife.”

Herodias was not a woman to tolerate such reproof, and it was not long before she succeeded in silencing his voice: she dreaded the possibility of Herod’s being stung by remorse under the vehemence of his remonstrance, and putting her away.

Antipas also was in fear lest the people might be stirred by his eloquence to rise in rebellion, and so John was cast into prison. The distant fortress of Machaerus was chosen for his incarceration, mainly to remove him as far as possible from the machinations of the queen, for Herod well knew her revengeful spirit, and shrank from the additional odium of the murder of a man whom the people loved, and of whose fearless integrity he himself was not insensible. Indeed, such was the fascination of the Baptist’s character, that his words, with all the bitterness of their sting, with all the pangs of conscience they must have stirred, did nevertheless give him pleasure to hear, for we are told “He was much perplexed,” or, if the ordinary reading be correct, with a strange inconsistency in which his better nature triumphed for a time, “he did many things” under his influence, and “heard him gladly.” But at last the opportunity came for which the deep-designing adulteress was always watching. The king’s divorce of his Arabian wife led to the proclamation of war. The desperate father, whose warlike spirit had made the great Herod quail — “the old desert lion, whose claws had been more than once felt in Sebaste and Sepphoris” — took up arms to avenge his outraged child, and the forces of the Tetrarch were being massed on the frontier. Before they crossed, Herod, taking the occasion of his birthday, entertained the chief captains and civil authorities to a great banquet in the castle of Machaerus. Considering the object of the war, we can well imagine that the jealousy of the guilty queen would be excited to the highest pitch by the presence of the officers of the army. To ingratiate herself and make her cause more popular with those who had undertaken to defend it, she persuaded her daughter, the beautiful Salome, to submit to an act of no little condescension for their gratification. She placed herself in the degraded position of the professional dancing-girls, whose office it was by immodest arts to please the tastes of a licentious court.

The design succeeded almost beyond her expectations. The royal host, flushed with wine, and gratified alike by the condescension and the shameless exhibition which pandered to his impure passion, offered her, with true Oriental exaggeration, even the half of his kingdom as her reward. Salome was in league with her mother, and knew that there was a prize she coveted far more than the greatest of earthly possessions: it was the riddance from the stern uncompromising censor of her sinful life. The supreme moment had arrived, and, after the briefest consultation with the author of the plot, the damsel asked for the Baptist’s head to be brought to her without delay. The petition was granted; but, though the king felt some genuine sorrow that he had been betrayed into an unconditional promise, he had not the moral courage to see that no oath could be binding which involved the commission of a dreadful crime. One of his bodyguard was despatched to the prisoner’s cell, and the work of execution was soon completed. It reveals with an unmistakable clearness the revengeful nature of the real murderess, when tradition tells how, when the bleeding head was brought into the banquet-hall, she tore out the prophet’s tongue in vindictive rage, just as the Roman lady had pierced that of the dead Orator, under whose denunciations she had smarted so bitterly. And so the tragedy ended; but its consequences lived on to haunt and vex the lives of those who perpetrated it j and they soon showed themselves.

The fame of Jesus was now at its height, and the interest of Antipas was awakened. All kinds of reports were spread abroad concerning His Person and Character. Many said that it was Elijah, whose reappearance every pious Jew was anxiously awaiting: and the raising of the widow’s son at Nain shortly before this must have recalled the miracle at Sarepta and quickened the imagination.

Others thought it was one of the old prophets, most probably Jeremiah, come back to restore to them the Ark and the Urim and Thummim, which he had hidden ages before on the mountain where Moses died; and it has been suggested, not without reason, that the sadness of the Face that was never seen to laugh, helped to revive the memory of “the prophet of lamentation and tears and woe.”

But there was yet a third belief that prevailed, for “it was said of some, that John was risen from the dead,” and it is almost needless to say that it was this that laid hold of Herod’s mind. No matter that he was by profession a Sadducee, with no faith in the Resurrection, his creed was forgotten in the superstitious dread which the memory of his crime fostered. The shade of the murdered prophet haunted him wherever he went; it followed him even beyond the seas; and the fear it engendered became “a byword and a proverb in Roman society,” and furnished material for the biting satire of a heathen poet j and was held up in the schools of the Stoics to illustrate the miseries of a guilty conscience.

A prolonged agony like this was a fitting penalty for such a heinous crime, but it did not exhaust the measure of Divine vengeance. Salome was accidentally beheaded, and has supplied to moralists a signal example of exact correspondence between crime and its retribution.

Herodias, the evil genius of the king’s life, shared his punishment, as she had shared his sin; for when he was banished from his kingdom, she followed his fallen fortunes to Gaul, and there, dethroned and dishonoured, the guilty pair wandered about till an ignoble death closed a career of almost unequalled guilt.

1 Dean Plumptre has suggested that in the lines,

“But when the feast of Herod’s birthday comes,

Thou mov’st thy lips, yet speak’st not in fear, Thou keep’st the Sabbath of the circumcised, And then there rise dark spectres of the dead,” there is a direct allusion to this incident. Persius would have been a boy at the time of the Baptist’s murder; for he died in the prime of life, A.D. 62. ‘The circumstance may well have fixed itself in his mind.

Note: Herod the Great had several wives, viz., Mariamne, a granddaughter of Hyrcanus, by whom he had Aristobulus, the father of Agrippa: Mariamne, a daughter of Simon, by whom he had Herod Philip, the husband of Herodias: Malthace, a Samaritan woman, the mother of Antipas and Archelaus: and Cleopatra, the mother of Philip, the tetrarch of Trachonitis, etc. He had several other wives besides, but they are unconnected with Sacred History.

Note: Tjiropei, for ZtoUi, is found in the Sinaitic and Vatican MSS.

Note: Fulvia, the wife of Mark Antony, in revenge for the Philippics, in which Cicero had attacked her husband, maltreated the Orator’s body, and pierced his tongue through and through with a bodkin.

Note: She is said to have fallen through the ice, the sharp edge of which nearly severed her head from the body.

Note: He was banished by Caligula to Lugdunum, from which place he went to Vienne.