Free King Jesus (Penguin Modern Classics) by Robert Graves Page A

expense of his brothers’ lives ; but they judged him by their own standards of conduct to be a hypocrite and decided that his plea for clemency had been made solely to clear himself of the suspicion of having been concerned in their deaths.
    They all sailed back to Judaea, where Herod called the leading Jews together at his Palace and informed them of what had happened. To the embarrassment of Antipater, who was present, he then said : “The Emperor has graciously permitted me to appoint my successor. I should dearly have loved to name Alexander and Aristobulus, my sons by the ill-fated Mariamne, as co-heirs in my dominions, for they are of the royal Maccabee blood, descendants of the glorious heroes who won for Israel the freedom which by the Lord’s grace I have been able to preserve for you and your children through years of the greatest danger. Alas, they have not yet proved worthy to rule in Israel, and were my soul to be required of me to-night, with my former Will still remaining in force, I should die miserably, expecting that all my work would be undone within a few months. These princes do not yet understand the necessity of obeying the Law faithfully, and what is reprehensible in a private person is fifty times more so in a king to whom a vast multitude looks for guidance. I have decided to appoint my generous and pious son Antipater to succeed me, with the succession, however, to revert to Alexander and Aristobulus, jointly, after his death, though he may have sons surviving, if in your opinion they are then worthy to rule. If any of you, however, has cause to complain of this decision, I hope that he will speak up boldly at once before I record and seal it in a new Will.”
    No one dared to complain. Unquestionably Antipater was by far the most suitable man of the three to inherit the throne, and was moreover Herod’s eldest son.
    Antipater rose and briefly thanked his father for the good opinion he had of him, which he would try never to forfeit ; but hoped, he said, that no new king would be crowned at Jerusalem for very many years to come. He ended : “And should it happen, Father, that my brothers please you better by their behaviour before long—and I am convinced that they are nobler men at heart than their rash tongues acknowledge them to be—I would not take it ill if you then decided them to be, after all, worthy of the throne of their maternal ancestors. On the contrary, I would be happy in their happiness, for we are all sons of one father and are bound together by natural obligations of love. I have only one modest request to make of you, for which nobody here can dare toblame me since I am commanded by our God to honour my mother as well as my father. It is this, that you will restore my mother Doris to your favour, seeing that you put her away for no fault of hers when you married Mariamne. She has remained faithful to you these many years, separated from your protection and care, without a word of complaint.”
    Herod cheerfully granted this request, restoring Doris to her former rights by an edict which he signed on the spot.
    Alexander and Aristobulus presently found an unexpected ally in their Aunt Salome, who had fallen in love with an Arabian petty king named Sylleus but had been forbidden by Herod to marry him unless he consented to be circumcised. Sylleus explained that if he were circumcised his people would stone him to death, and therefore begged to be excused the rite, but Herod could not give his sister to an uncircumcised infidel without weakening his position with the Jews ; he preferred to risk the enmity of both Salome and Sylleus. Salome was mad with rage. The intricacies of the subsequent Palace plots and counter-plots, in which most of Herod’s wives became involved, are hardly worth unravelling, but at last she succeeded in stirring up trouble for Herod at Rome with the help of her lover Sylleus and of the influential Ionian Greeks whom Herod had offended in the matter