The Magic Circle (53 page)

Pepin [the first Carolingian] lacked the magical powers inherent in royal blood. He therefore sought the Church’s blessing … to show that his kingship came not through blood, but from God. Pepin was thus the first monarch to rule by the grace of God. To underline the importance of this act, Pepin was anointed on two occasions, the second time, with his two sons [Charlemagne] and Carloman, [to combine] the new concept of monarchy by divine right with the Germanic concept of magic power carried by blood
.

—Martin Kitchen,
Cambridge Illustrated History of Germany

Tiberias, Galilee: Spring, A.D. 39

INTROIT

During that time [Herod Antipas] was almost entirely under the influence of a woman who caused him a whole series of misfortunes
.

—Emil Schürer,
The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ

In all the woes that curse our race

There is a lady in the case
.

—Gilbert & Sullivan

Herod Antipas, tetrarch of Galilee and Peraea, stood with widespread arms at the center of his royal chambers as he did each morning, while three of his personal slaves prepared him for his appearance at the receiving chambers to hear petitions. They attached the straps of the gold breastplate with its heavy chains of state, and draped the official red robes across his shoulders. His wardrobe complete, the slaves knelt and were dismissed by his freedman, Atticus, who accompanied the guards posted outside to follow the tetrarch along the promenade from his private wing of the vast palace at Tiberias.

This long walk in silence was the only occasion during the day when Herod Antipas ever had time to think—and right now he certainly had a lot of thinking to do. He’d already learned of the horror awaiting him in chambers: the freshly arrived imperial messenger dispatched by the emperor Caligula from his summer home at Baiae—an emperor, as Antipas could ill afford to forget, who regarded himself as a god.

Of all the woes that had befallen Antipas of late, he knew this might well prove the worst. And in this case, as in previous crises, the axis was centered upon his own family. Perhaps it ran in their blood, Antipas thought with a kind of dark humor. As many had observed, the brief history of the Herodian dynasty wasn’t lacking in problems of consanguinity. Whether intermarriage, blood feuds, bloodletting, or out-and-out bloodbaths, it seemed the Herods liked to keep things in the family.

This canker in the Herodian bloodline was derived directly from Antipas’s father, Herod the Great, a man steeped in his own sensuality and greed, who had slaked his thirst for riches and power in the blood of his own relations—a group that had included ten wives and dozens of offspring, many of whom he’d dispatched with an efficacy otherwise reserved for sacrificial beasts.

Herod Antipas himself had once stood very far down the line of succession. But due to the sudden shortage of heirs at his father’s death forty years ago, the kingdom had devolved upon himself, his brother Archelaus, and his half brother Philip of Jerusalem. Now, with both these brothers dead, Antipas found himself at sixty the last Herod still in possession of Jewish lands. But as of today, all that had changed—thanks in large part to the machinations of his ambitious wife Herodias.

Antipas knew he’d been cursed from the start by this love, this lust, this obsessive passion he felt for the woman who was actually his niece—and who, when they’d first met, had herself been married to another of his Herodian half brothers, Herod Philip of Rome. Galling as the theft of a brother’s lawful spouse might have been to his Jewish subjects here in Galilee, the wound was further exacerbated by Antipas’s repudiation of his first wife, a princess of royal blood.

To make matters worse, ten years ago, at the goading of Herodias and her daughter Salome, Antipas had actually executed a grass-roots spiritual leader from the Essene community who’d done nothing more than to publicly call the tetrarch’s wife a whore. Not satisfied with having a man beheaded to salvage her reputation, the power-hungry Herodias was now at it again—this time within their own long-embattled family.

More than forty years ago, when Herodias’s father was executed by Herod the Great, young Herodias and her brother Agrippa had been carried off by their mother to Rome, where they had grown up alongside the children of the imperial family. Agrippa was now spoiled out of all proportion. At nearly fifty, he was a dissolute spendthrift whose only achievement was having cultivated in himself the tastes of a king. And therein lay the crux of the problem. For thanks to his friendship with Caligula, today Agrippa, the man who would be king, indeed
was
a king.

The moment Tiberius was dead, Caligula—that vile little former dancing-boy who’d succeeded him—had released Agrippa from jail and lavished gifts and lands and titles upon him with the same abandon he would soon exhibit in spending all of Tiberius’s legacy of twenty-seven million gold sesterces in less than one year. Among these gifts, Caligula gave Agrippa lands that in Herodias’s opinion should certainly have gone to her husband Antipas, including the sacred land where the tomb of Abel, son of Adam and Eve, was located—the spot where the first blood had been shed by mankind.

The Hebrew peoples had always wrestled with the paradox of blood, for had not their God forbidden the shedding of
all
blood with the commandment “Thou shalt not kill”? Antipas might be only the converted Jewish son of a Samaritan mother, but commandment or no, this injunction had proven to be both his personal test and his private curse. And he was about to be tested or cursed once again.

Herod Antipas well knew the poison of power lust still working in the veins of his ambitious relations, not least of all his wife. Humiliated that her brother was made a king when her husband was yet a mere tetrarch, Herodias nagged until Antipas sent a deputation from Galilee to Rome with gifts for the greedy boy emperor, an attempt to bribe him for equal treatment. But this approach had worked against them. Caligula’s messenger, just arrived from Baiae, was bearing a list of further contributions expected from the tetrarch. On this list was something that made Antipas’s heart contract, for it was an object that, apart from its surface value, held deep meaning for him and him alone.

It went back to that time when they’d gone to the palace built by Herod the Great at Machareus, east of the Dead Sea, to celebrate Antipas’s birthday. Herodias’s lovely daughter Salome was with them. Still a young girl, Salome had danced in honor of the event. But of course, as Herodias surely knew when choosing Machareus as a birthday site, it was also the very fortress where her hated enemy had long been held in prison. So after her charming dance, Salome had asked the favor.

The hideous scene still haunted Antipas’s nightmares. Even now, after so many years, he felt sick to think of it. In her fury, unassuaged by this gruesome death, Herodias had sought further triumph. She’d ordered the severed head of her victim brought into the great hall where they were dining—my God, it was arrayed like a boar’s head on a platter! But despite his horror and revulsion, there’d been something deeper, something hidden within that scene that Antipas had never spoken of in all these years, though he’d thought of it many times. It was the platter itself.

Antipas recognized that platter from his youth. It was a relic unearthed from beneath the Temple Mount during the costly eight-year expansion and reconstruction of the second temple by architects of his father, Herod the Great. It was thought to be part of the original treasure of King Solomon, perhaps hastily buried during the destruction of the original temple. But his father Herod had always joked—Antipas got a chill whenever he thought of it—that it was really the shield Perseus had used against the snake-headed Medusa, to turn her to stone.

It was this dreadful object that was now forever coupled in his mind with the severed head of his wife’s victim—that gauntly ecstatic face, the open eyes, the hair still drenched with blood.

He wondered how Caligula had learned of the golden platter. And why in God’s name had this boy who now considered himself a god decided to demand it as part of his tribute?

Rome: Noon, January 24, A.D. 41

SPIRIT AND MATTER

It is no paradox but a great truth borne out by all history that human culture advances only through the clash of opposites
.

—J. J. Bachofen

It is difference of opinion that makes horse races
.

—Mark Twain

Herod Agrippa struggled uphill, his breath labored, his heart pounding against his ribs, his brow drenched in sweat—and with only a single soldier of the Praetorian Guard to share his burden. He was terrified they might be recognized. After all, it had been done in broad daylight. And he was even more afraid someone might guess exactly what the burden was they carried beneath this blanket.

Who could imagine, thought Agrippa, that someone so lithe and graceful, a dancer, a youth who’d actually been acclaimed a spirit or a god, would be as heavy as a sackful of stones? But those thirty knife wounds through the face, stomach, and genitalia of the late Gaius Caesar—who only twenty minutes earlier had been alive and well in the colonnade—should have convinced anyone the emperor Caligula had been anything but a god.

The flesh was still warm as they lugged his corpse up the Esquiline Hill to the shelter of the Lamian Gardens, but the blood-soaked toga, already stiffening in the cold January air, adhered to the blanket. Agrippa realized that under the circumstances of the emperor’s violent death a state funeral was hardly possible, but he prayed at least they might accomplish a swift and covert burial before the maddened mobs found the body and indulged in the favorite Roman sport: desecration of the dead.

This brutal assassination had taken place before Agrippa’s very eyes. He’d just left the auditorium with Claudius and Caligula where they’d been watching the Palatine Games. Caligula paused to watch some boys rehearsing the Trojan war dance, to be performed for those returning after lunch. It was then that the attack came.

A large group of men—a group that, to Agrippa’s amazement, included the emperor’s own personally chosen German and Thracian bodyguards—fell en masse upon Caligula with spears and javelins, yelling blasphemies and, while he yet continued to live and breathe, hacking him to bits. Claudius, who fled and hid behind a curtain in the Hermaeum, was discovered there and whisked outside the city gates, for his own protection, by the Praetorian Guard.

In the pandemonium that ensued, a splinter group hurried off to dispatch Caligula’s wife and son, while those of the Roman senate who were among the conspirators scurried to convene an emergency session, calling for a vote to bring back the Republic. It had all happened so fast—in a matter of moments—that Agrippa’s head was still spinning as he puffed uphill, finally reaching the leafy obscurity of the gardens so they could lay down their burden. He sat on a rock and mopped his brow as the guard began to dig.

It was in fact mere chance that found Agrippa in Rome on this fateful day.

Two years ago Herod Antipas and his wife, Agrippa’s sister Herodias, had been banished by Caligula to Lugdunum in southern Gaul for demanding too many favors. Now his uncle Antipas was dead and Herodias with him, and Agrippa found himself in control of a domain that, though far from united, approached the size of that his grandfather Herod the Great had once possessed. And with it, he’d inherited most of the headaches. Not least among these was trying to manage the many conflicts between his Roman patrons and his subjects, the zealously religious Jews.

The most recent stir, the one that brought Agrippa here to Rome only this week, was the emperor Caligula’s recent decision to “teach the Jews a lesson” for all the disturbances they’d caused their Roman overlords. Caligula planned to do this by setting up a colossal stone statue of himself as Gaius the God—within the very grounds of the Jerusalem temple!

The statue was rumored to be already en route by ship to the port of Joppa. Agrippa would have full-blown riots on his hands the moment such an effigy disembarked on Jewish soil, and so he hastened here to Rome at once to see whether he might change the course of events already set in motion.

After all, had Agrippa not grown up alongside Caligula’s uncle Claudius, within the very bosom of the imperial family? And he’d also remained close enough to Caligula all these years to have reaped the reward of gold chains and jewels, not to mention a kingdom of his own. He therefore had cause to hope that, together with Claudius, he might convince the young emperor to see reason in the matter. But upon his arrival at Rome, Agrippa had been hardly prepared for the man he was to meet in the person of the emperor.

The very first night he was fast asleep in the palace when, well past midnight, he was aroused by the palace guard. They’d forced him to dress and then marched him double-step to the palace auditorium. There he found a group of prominent senators and statesmen, as well as the emperor’s uncle Claudius, who’d likewise been brought from the safety of their homes in the dead of night.

They were trembling in fear as soldiers lit the wicks of oil lamps on the stage up front. Claudius was about to speak when, with great fanfare of flutes and cymbals, the emperor leapt onstage dressed as Venus in a short silk toga and a wig of long blond hair. He sang a lovely song of his own composition, performed a dance, and vanished!

“It’s been like this ever since his sister Drusilla’s death,” Claudius told Agrippa when they’d quitted the chamber. “He sleeps barely three hours a night, roaming the palace and howling at the sky, inviting the moon goddess into his bed to take his sister’s place in his arms. Drusilla died, you’ll recall, on the tenth of June not three years ago. He was inconsolable, sleeping next to her corpse for days on end; he wouldn’t be removed from her side. Then he raced off alone by chariot through the Campania, took ship to Syracuse, and vanished for a month. He didn’t shave or cut his hair; upon his return he looked and behaved like a wild man. Things only went downhill from there.”