THE HISTORIAN'S HEROD
Steinfels, Peter
HISTORIAN'S HEROD PETER STEINFELS King Herod, dear reader, has been misunderstood. The Massaere of the Innocents is folklore. "The real problem raked by the career of Herod" is how a small country...
...they require selection, emphasis, interpretation, orchestration...
...Besides executing for treason his second wife Mariamme, whom he loved jealously, and her mother, brother, and grandfather...
...For such regimes spies are only the antennae of terror...
...Is it not the apologia repeated on behalf of almost every modern dictatorship...
...According to Jo-sephus, chronicler of Herod's age, "No meeting of citizens was allowed, nor were walking together or being together allowed, and their movements were observed...
...Purges were a regular necessity...
...Even measuring in units of this-worldly impact, one would have thought of that figure who was the object of Herod's alleged search-and-destroy mission...
...Herod," Michael Grant agrees, "was truly eager to integrate Judaism and Jewry with the surrounding world...
...At each moment when civil war or the fall of a patron was about to drop Herod into oblivion, he scored again...
...Over half the members of the Jewish Council were disposed of...
...If the Massacre of the Innocents is legend, it is not for want of willingness on Herod's part Was Herod's cruelty a tolerable price, by ancient and perhaps modern standards too, for his politics of survival...
...But historical facts do not emerge and align themselves of their own accord...
...Apart from small groups of ruined noblemen and Messianic extremists," writes Michael Grant, "the Jews had never had it so good...
...and was executed in an insignificant episode during the reign as tetrarch of Herod's son Antipas, after preaching a doctrine which will always be baffling to those we name "the Great...
...Certainly it took a strong and shrewd personality to obtain and retain power in the Judea of Herod's day...
...But he was a "Messianic extremist," I suppose...
...obviously I could not...
...When complaints against Herod broke out after his death, his friend Nicolaus of Damascus was quick to point out that there had been little sign of them while he was alive...
...besides killing the wife of one of his brothers, two husbands of his sister, and numerous other members of his household, Herod had two of his own sons strangled, and finally on his deathbed ordered the slaying of his firstborn...
...Our ears perk up...
...Herod was a Hel-lenizer, not merely out of tactical compromise with the conqueror's ideology, but out of personal enthusiasm...
...the lights of his reign kept flashing for a third of a century...
...Like a ricocheting pinball, Herod bounced through the intrigues of the Middle East and the Roman empire, a pro-Roman contender of Arab descent for a Jewish kingship...
...Insofar as he could, Herod achieved this aim brilliantly...
...Beneath and within every bed lurked a family conspiracy-marrying ten times didn't help...
...The leaders of student demonstrations were burnt alive...
...Is there a familiar ring to that summary...
...Was his failure really a failure for Judaism and Jewry, which despite dispersion and holocaust lives on, while the Roman empire and its satellite kingdoms, prosperous or not, have evaporated into the memories of our culture...
...The real problem raked by the career of Herod" is how a small country manages to retain some independence under the shadow of a super-power...
...He zigzagged from Caesar to Cassius to Antony to Augustus, from Galilee to Rome to Jerusalem, moved not by chance but by cunning, ruthlessness, audacity, perseverance, and when circumstances demanded, obsequiousness...
...It is the sober judgment of a respected historian, Michael Grant, in the volume Herod the Great...
...Only the modern secular mind, the mind of realpotitik and cost-benefit analysis, can so totally underestimate the realities of integrity, of sacrifice, death, and rebirth...
...Grant adds that on the open roads as well as in the cities, "there were hosts of men spying upon any and every social encounter...
...Only that mind could write, as Grant does, that Herod "achieved as much greatness as was possible for any man of his time who was not a Roman...
...While he lived, he did very great things for Romans, Greeks and Jews alike...
...And the strongest impression made on me by Grant's portrait of Herod was that, like Auden's rendition in For the Time Being, it reveals store about our own sorry standards of greatness, our own rationalizations for domination and violence, than about true, even this-worldly, achievement...
...But what sort 'of survival had Herod in mind for Judea...
...That complaints against Herod went unvoiced during his lifetime does not appear surprising...
...Formally he was a Jew, but as Martin Noth points out in The History of Israel, he was "fundamentally a Hellenistic pagan ruler...
...This is not the ironic comment of a writer attempting to reduce real- politik to absurdity by summoning it to justify one of the culture's exemplars of villainy...
...During this time Herod expanded the borders of Judea, built new cities, restored and enlarged the Temple, and dotted Jerusalem and the country with royal buildings...
...Others might quarrel . with his scholarship...
...Grant, in effect, says yes...
...Messianic beliefs had to be mercilessly stamped out...
...The ordinary peasants, merchants and citizenry were prospering, and knew it, and Herod's mighty public works had given full employment and had eliminated social agitation...
...Virtually everything I know about the historical Herod comes from Grant's book...
Vol. 103 • January 1976 • No. 2
