and religion. They have all been circumcised.
King Herod has now-therefore close dealings with the following kings: -
The King of Chalcis,
The King of Iturea,
The King of Adiabene,
The King of Osroene;
The King of Lesser Armenia,
The King of Pontus and Cilicia,
The King of Commagene, and
The prospective, King of Parthia.
The Crown of Parthia commands, of course, an alliance of a great many other kings of the Middle East - as far as Bactria and the Indian border. King Herod also enjoys the support of Jews throughout the world, not forgetting the Jews of Alexandria, and of the Edomites and Nabateans, and is now angling for the support of the King of Arabia. The Phoenicians, too, are slowly being won over by his blandishments: only Tyre and Sidon continue cold. He has broken off diplomatic relations with these cities and forbidden his subjects to trade with them under penalty of death. Tyre and Sidon will be forced to come to terms. Their economic prosperity depends on trade with the interior; and, except for the corn which they import from Egypt, and fish, which is often scarce in bad weather, King Herod controls their entire food supply.
It would be difficult to exaggerate the dangers of the situation and we can all be most thankful that your British victory has been so complete, though I could have wished that the regiments now stationed in Britain were available for hurried transference to the East, where I am pretty sure that they will before long be needed.
If you are willing to consider, with your usual graciousness and perspicacity, the advice that I have to offer you in these difficult circumstances, it is this I suggest that you immediately restore to his throne. Mithridates, the ex-King of Armenia, who is at present living at Rome. It was, if I may say so without offence, a lamentable mistake on the part of your uncle, the Emperor Tiberius Caesar, to allow the late King of Parthia to, unite the Armenian crown with his own, and not immediately to avenge with force of arms that most insulting letter the King wrote to him. If, therefore, you send Mithridates to me at Antioch at once, I undertake to put him back on the throne of Armenia while Bardanes and Gotarzes are disputing the throne of Parthia. The present Governor of Armenia can be bribed not to oppose us too strongly and Mithridates is a by no means incapable prince and a great admirer of Roman institutions. His brother, too, is King of Georgia and commands quite a strong army of Caucasian mountaineers. I can get in touch with him and arrange for an invasion of Armenia from the north while we march up from the south-west. If we succeed in restoring Mithridates we can have nothing to fear from the Kings of Pontus and Lesser Armenia, whose kingdoms will be cut off from Parthia by Armenia; nor from the King of Commagene (whose son has now been betrothed to King Herod's daughter Drusilla), because his kingdom lies directly between Armenia and my own command. We shall in fact, hold the north, and when Bardanes has fought his civil war, and ousted King Gotarzes (as I think he is bound to do) his next expedition will have to be against Mithridates in Armenia. The recovery of Armenia will be no easy matter if we give Mithridates adequate support, and Bardanes's southern and eastern allies will not easily be persuaded to help him in so distant and hazardous an expedition. And, until he recovers Armenia, Bardanes will be in no position to further any of the imperialistic schemes that I confidently believe King Herod Agrippa to be planning. This is the first definite accusation I have made against the loyalty of your supposed friend and ally, and I know the great danger I am running of incurring your displeasure by making it. But I put the safety of Rome before my own safety and I should consider myself a traitor if I suppressed any of the political information that comes to me, merely because it makes unsavoury reading in an official dispatch. Having said so much, I shall further make so bold as to suggest that King Herod's son, Herod Agrippa the Younger, be invited back to Rome to attend your triumph. He can then, if necessary, be detained indefinitely on some pretext, and may prove a useful hostage for his father's good behaviour.
I had two courses before me. The first was to summon Herod to Lyons at once to answer Marsus's charges, in which, in spite of my bias in Herod's favour, I could not help believing. If guilty, he would refuse to come and that would mean an immediate war, for which I was unprepared. The second course was to play for time
and give no indication of my mistrust; but the danger of that was that Herod might benefit from the delay more than, I would. If I decided on this course I would certainly take Marsus's advice about Armenia; but was Marsus right in reckoning on a friendly Armenia as sufficient protection against the enormously powerful Eastern confederation that Herod seemed to have built up?
Letters came from Herod. In the first he answered my questions about the prophesied king. In the second he congratulated me most warmly on my victories and, curiously enough, asked permission to send his son to Rome to witness my triumph; he hoped that I would not mind the lad enjoying a few months' holiday in Rome before returning to Palestine in the summer to assist him at the great feast in honour of my birthday, which he hoped to celebrate , at Caesarea. The letter about the prophesied king ran as follows:
Yes, my dear Marmoset, as a child I used to hear plenty of mystical talk about this Anointed One, or Messiah as they call him in our language, and it still goes on in theological circles at Jerusalem; but I never paid much, attention to it, until now, when your request for, a report on the prophecy has led me to investigate the matter seriously. At your suggestion I consulted our worthy friend Philo, who was in Jerusalem paying some vow or other which he had sworn to, our God - he is always either vowing or paying vows. Philo, you know, has made a daring and I should say a most absurd identification of the Deity ideally, conceived by Plato and his philosophical crew - Unchanging and Unyielding and Eternal and Uncompounded Intellectual Perfection, exalted above all predicates - with our passionate tribal God at Jerusalem. I suppose that he found the Platonic Deity too cold and abstract, and wanted to infuse some life into him, at the same time glorifying his own God by extending his rule over the universe. At all events, I asked Philo what the sacred Scriptures had to say about this enigmatic Person. Philo grew very serious at once and assured me that the whole hope of our race is centred on the coming of the Messiah. He gave me the following particulars:
This Messiah is a king who shall come to redeem Israel from its sins, and as the human representative of our Jewish God. He is not necessarily a great conqueror, though he must release the Jews from any foreign yoke which interferes with their freedom of worship. This prophecy was first made, according to Philo, shortly after the Jews had been led out of Egypt by their law-giver Moses in the days of Rameses II. In a book which we call the Book of Numbers, ascribed to Moses, he is spoken of as a `Star and Sceptre out of Jacob'. In later sacred writings, dating from about the time that Rome was founded, he is spoken of as a man who shall gather the lost sheep of Israel from many quarters and restore them to their native fold in Palestine - for already by that time the Jews had become scattered in colonies all over the Near and Middle East. Some had left Palestine voluntarily as traders and settlers, some had been carried away as captives. Philo says that Jewish theologians have never been able to decide whether this Messiah is a real or a symbolic figure. At the time of the heroic Maccabees (my mother's priestly ancestors) he was regarded as only a symbol. At other times he has not only been regarded as a real person, but has even been popularly identified with non-Jewish deliverers of the race, such as Cyrus the Persian, and even Pompey, who put an end to the Hasmonean oppression.' Philo declares that both these views are wrong: the Messiah is yet to come and he must be a Jew, in direct line from our King David whose son Solomon built the Temple at Jerusalem, and must be born in a village called Bethlehem, and must gather Israel together and cleanse it from its sins by a most thorough-going ritual of confession, repentance, and placation of the offended Deity. Jerusalem is to be sanctified down to `the very cooking-pots and the bells on the horses' necks'. Philo even knows the date of the Messiah's birth, namely, 5,500 years from that of the earliest ancestor of the Jewish race: but opinions differ as to when he lived, so that is not much help.
The scriptures are not entirely consistent in their various foreshadowings of this Messiah. He is sometimes represented as an angry powerful warrior dressed in royal purple and bathed in the blood of his country's foes, and sometimes as a meek, sorrowful outcast, a sort of poor prophet preaching repentance and brother love. Philo says, however, ever, that the most trustworthy and clearest statement made about him occurs in a book called The Psalter of Solomon. It is in the form of a prayer:
`Behold, 0 Lord, and raise up their king, the Son of David, at the time thou hast appointed, to reign over Israel Thy servant; and gird him with strength to crush unjust rulers; to cleanse Jerusalem from the heathen that tread it under foot, to cast out sinners from Thy inheritance; to break the pride of sinners and all their strength as potter's vessels with a rod of iron to destroy the lawless-nations with the words of his mouth; to gather a holy nation and lead them in righteousness. The heathen nations shall serve under his yoke; he shall glorify the Lord
