Herod in History Herod in History Nicolaus of Damascus and the Augustan Context KIMBERLEY CZAJKOWSKI AND BENEDIKT ECKHARDT 1 1 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Kimberley Czajkowski and Benedikt Eckhardt 2021 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in 2021 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2021936614 ISBN 978–0–19–284521–4 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192845214.001.0001 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A. Acknowledgements We have incurred various debts of gratitude in the course of writing this short book, not least from seminar audiences who have been subjected to different chapters at various stages of work in progress. We would especially like to thank Martin Goodman for the invitation to present a version of the book as a whole at the Oxford Seminar on Jewish History and Literature in the Graeco- Roman Period in February 2020, and likewise the audience for taking us to task on certain key points. Chapter 3, ‘Herod the Saviour’ was greatly helped by an invitation from Aneurin Ellis- Evans to present at the Oxford Ancient History Seminar’s themed series Kingship and Statecraft in the Greek East in 2019; a very early version indeed of Chapter 5 was also inflicted upon Edinburgh colleagues in 2016. The core of Chapter 4 was presented at a conference on The Crazy Genius of Herod the Great held in Dublin in 2015, and Chapter 7 has the longest history, as it revisits ideas first presented at a conference in Paris in 2012, and published (in a much shorter form) in the proceedings (Eckhardt, 2014). Thanks are due to all these audiences. While this was very much a collaborative effort, the material did not lend itself to joint authorship throughout, not least because of the different prehistories of individual chapters. Hence, Chapters 2, 4, and 7 are written by Eckhardt, whereas Czajkowski has authored Chapters 3, 5, and 6. OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 11/07/21, SPi Contents 1. Herod and his Historians 1 2. Herod on the Rise 25 3. Herod the Saviour 51 4. Herod the Liberator 73 5. Herod the Husband 95 6. Herod and his Sons 115 7. Herod and the People’s Front of Judaea 139 Epilogue: Herod and the Worms 165 References 175 Index of Sources 187 General Index 194 OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 11/07/21, SPi 1 Herod and his Historians Gaius Iulius Herodes, better known as Herod the Great, ranks as one of the most famous Roman client kings. His reign, traditionally dated from 37 bce to his death in 4 bce,1 brought Judaea and its ruler onto the international stage at a time when the nature of the imperial power was itself being transformed. Herod’s close connection with key Roman poli ti cians—Antony and Octavian not least—meant that the history of this small kingdom in the East became inextricably linked with the power- struggle at the heart of imperial government, and Herod’s skill in successfully negotiating this turbulence should not be underestimated. His kingship has, however, provoked considerable controversy in his- torical evaluations: this ostensible success on the international stage went hand in hand with familial carnage, and with a certain amount of antipathy from his own people in Judaea. Intense interest in writing the history of this paradoxical king has been stimulated by the fact that, unlike for other dependent rulers of the period, we have not one but two extensive accounts of Herod’s reign by one and the same classical author: Josephus. Flavius Josephus, a Judaean living at Rome under the Flavians after the Great War, wrote prodigiously during his time in the capital. Of greatest note for our purposes are the Jewish War, detailing the build-u p to and history of the Jewish revolt against Rome that resulted in the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 ce, and the Antiquities of the Jews, a twenty book account of the history of the Jewish people. In both 1 Aspects of this chronology have always been in dispute, and the thorough reinvestigation of all the relevant evidence by Mahieu 2012 leads to a rather different result, 36 bce to 1 ce. This causes several problems with ancient calculations of the lengths of both the reign of Herod (thirty- four years) and Archelaus (nine or ten years); this and other problems are pointed out by Sievers 2014 and Grabbe 2020, 29–31. In light of these arguments, we have retained the trad ition al chronology. For this book, the precise dating of events is usually of little concern. Herod in History: Nicolaus of Damascus and the Augustan Context. Kimberley Czajkowski and Benedikt Eckhardt, Oxford University Press. © Kimberley Czajkowski and Benedikt Eckhardt 2021. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192845214.003.0001