culture, sensitive on both counts. (It says a good deal that when he decided to remedy the situation years later he hired the finest tutor in the business, one who—in addition to his own literary and musical accomplishments—had the best credential possible: he had been tutor to Cleopatra’s children.) It could not have helped that Herod would have appeared graceless in Cleopatra’s silken presence.
Where passions run high, the reverse of the great foreign policy axiom can also prove true: the friend of one’s friend is one’s enemy. Perhaps Herod felt about Cleopatra the way you inevitably do about someone whose palace puts yours to shame. She may have been too flush with her Antioch success to conciliate; she may well have hinted that she coveted Herod’s land. Debts are difficult to acknowledge, and each owed the other. Cleopatra had underwritten Herod’s flight to Rome. His father had rushed to Caesar’s aid in Alexandria. In any event the famously entertaining Herod had a violent reaction to his visitor. He doubtless arranged a series of royal banquets for Cleopatra. And arguing that he would be providing a community service, he recommended to his council of state that they arrange as well for her murder. It could easily be done, while she was in Jerusalem and at their mercy. He would eliminate a covetous, conniving neighbor, but everyone stood to benefit, Antony most of all. Heatedly Herod explained himself: “In this way, he said, he would rid of many evils all those to whom she had already been vicious or was likely to be in future. At the same time, he argued, this would be a boon to Antony, for not even to him would she show loyalty if some occasion or need should compel him to ask for it.”
Herod buttressed his case in the usual way; as ever, the diabolical woman was the sexual one. In addition to all else, he explained to his advisers, the Egyptian hussy had “laid a treacherous snare for him”! Declaring herself overcome with love, she had attempted to force herself upon him, “for she was by nature used to enjoying this kind of pleasure without disguise.” Herod had as much reason as anyone to observe that Cleopatra was a tough negotiator. And if you are being taken advantage of by a woman, it is convenient to turn that woman into a sexual predator, capable of unspeakable depravity, “a slave to her lusts.” (It was not such a great leap. “Cupidity” and “concupiscence” have the same Latin root.) Having managed to evade her unblushing proposals, Herod took his offended sensibilities to his council. The woman’s lewdness was an outrage.
Herod’s advisers begged him to reconsider. He was being rash. The risks were too great, as Cleopatra herself—closely guarded, well surrounded, and surely more astute about the political ramifications—surely knew. His council offered Herod a little lesson in the perverse dynamics of affection, one that might have come in handy later. In the first place, Antony would fail to appreciate Cleopatra’s murder even were its advantages pointed out to him. Second, “his love would flame up the more fiercely if he thought that she had been taken from him by violence and treachery.” He would emerge a man obsessed. Herod would be roundly condemned. He was, Herod’s advisers emphasized, out of his league with this woman, the most influential of the day. Could he not bring himself to take the high road?
Cleopatra was of course far too smart to seduce—or attempt to seduce—a small-time sovereign. She had nothing to gain by trapping Herod in such a way. It was unlikely that she would seduce a subordinate of her patron, especially improbable that she would fling herself into Herod’s arms at a time when she was—by now quite visibly; it was nearly summer—pregnant with Antony’s child. A Roman legion was stationed in Jerusalem to secure Herod’s throne. Those men were unlikely to remain silent. Artful though he was, Herod had, as later events would reveal, a limited understanding of the human heart. With difficulty, his council dissuaded him from any assassination attempts. He would have no defense, the plot “being against such a woman as was of the highest dignity of any of her sex at that time in the world.” Herod could afford neither to offend Cleopatra nor allow her any reason whatever to hate him. Surely he could bring himself to shrug off the dishonor her brazen advances had caused him? *
Assuming these deliberations reached Cleopatra’s ears, it is difficult not to hear her cackling with delight. She had and knew she had Antony’s loyalty. She had better reason to consider disposing of Herod, who alone stood between her and full possession of the eastern coastline. As she well knew, his land had at several junctures belonged to the Ptolemies. In the end Herod’s council calmed him. Respectfully and politely, he escorted his visitor through the blazing heat of the Sinai to the Egyptian border. If Cleopatra knew of the discussions—and it is difficult to believe that she did not—theirs must have been a charged, tedious trip over molten sand. Surely it was so for the resentful Judaean king. At Pelusium he sent Cleopatra off, heavily pregnant and laden with gifts, a very different return than the furtive one she had made from that outpost in 48.
Early in the fall, one blessed with a copious flood, she gave birth to her fourth child. In the ancient world perhaps more than in any other there was a good deal in a name; she called her new son Ptolemy Philadelphus, baldly evoking the glory days of the third century, the last time her family had reigned over as great an empire as did Cleopatra, the Goddess, the Younger, Father-Loving and Fatherland-Loving, in 36.
TO HEROD’S CHAGRIN, he was not so easily rid of this grasping, business-minded woman. During her stay at the Judaean court Cleopatra had made a few friends, to whom she was about to prove devilishly helpful. Shortly after the return to Egypt, she received word from Alexandra, Herod’s mother-in-law. The Hasmonean princess had found in the Egyptian queen a sympathetic spirit, reason enough for Herod to have resented his royal visitor. He would condemn Cleopatra for having coolly eliminated most of her family—it was a rich accusation, coming from someone who had murdered his way to the throne and would continue his bloody spree for decades—but he had equal reason to envy her for having done so. For the most part, class and religious differences accounted for Herod and Alexandra’s mutual antipathy. Not only was Herod Jewish on the wrong side, but the Idumeans were new converts to Judaism. The Jews had little use for them. Herod’s wife and her family were by contrast noble-born descendants of generations of Jewish high priests, an office said to have originated with Moses’s brother. In 37 Herod ventured outside that family to appoint a new high priest. He did so although there was an obvious and immensely appealing candidate at hand: Mariamme’s sixteen-year-old brother, the tall, disarmingly attractive Aristobulus. Herod preferred an undistinguished official in the lucrative, commanding office; its trappings alone conferred a kind of otherworldly power. Fitted with a gold-embroidered diadem, the high priest ministered to his people in a floor-length, tasseled blue robe, set with precious stones and hung with tinkling golden bells. Two brooches fixed a purple, scarlet, and blue cape, also studded with gems, upon his shoulders. Even on a lesser individual, the accessories were enough “to make one feel that one had come into the presence of a man who belonged to a different world.”
In bypassing his young brother-in-law Herod set off a maelstrom in his household. To Alexandra—daughter of a priest and widow of a prince—the appointment was an “unendurable insult.” With the help of a traveling musician she smuggled word of the indignity to Cleopatra, on whom she felt she could count for female solidarity, especially royal female solidarity. She knew Cleopatra had little patience with Herod and that she had Antony’s ear. Could she not intercede with him, implored Alexandra, to obtain the high priesthood for her son? If Cleopatra did so, Antony appears to have had greater matters on his mind than the domestic affairs in Herod’s household. He made no effort to intervene, although at some later date in 36 the double-jointed Dellius turned up in Jerusalem on unrelated business. Dellius had been the one to lure Cleopatra to Tarsus; the match of the conspiring mother-in-law and the contortionist adviser was almost too perfect. Alexandra’s children were uncommonly handsome, to Dellius’s eye more “the offspring of some god rather than of human beings.” As ever, pulchritude sent his lively mind whirring. He persuaded Alexandra to have portraits painted of Mariamme and Aristobulus and to submit them straightaway to Antony. Were the Roman triumvir to set eyes upon them, promised Dellius, “She would not be denied anything she might ask.”
Alexandra did as Dellius asked, which suggests either naivete on her part or something more toxic. She could be trusted to detect a plot from one hundred paces away and to supply one, should none be brewing. If Josephus can be taken at his word, Dellius intended to recruit sexual partners of both genders for Antony. In receipt of the portraits Antony hesitated, at least so far as Mariamme was concerned. He knew Cleopatra would be furious. Josephus leaves unclear whether Cleopatra was likely to object on moral grounds or out of jealousy. She would in any event be slow to forgive. Evidently Antony did not hesitate to send for Mariamme’s brother. Here Herod changed his mind. For his part, he deemed it unwise to send the most powerful Roman of his time a striking sixteen-year-old boy, “to use him for erotic purposes.” Instead Herod assembled his council and his family, to complain of Alexandra’s incessant complots. She colluded with Cleopatra to usurp his throne. She schemed to replace him with her son. He would do the right thing and appoint her son to the priesthood. Dellius’s proposition may obliquely have prompted the concession; Aristobulus’s appointment would keep him in Judaea, out of Antony’s clutches and far from Cleopatra’s schemes. Alexandra responded with a flood of tears. She begged her son-in-law for forgiveness. She regretted her “usual outspokenness,” her heavy-handedness, doubtless an unhappy
