Herod replied in terms of the most boundless gratitude for Caligula's gift. Caligula showed me the letter. `But what a man! Herod had written. `Seventy thousand suits of armour, and all for his own personal pleasure! Two a day for nearly a hundred years! But it seems almost a pity to condemn a man like that to rot away at Lyons.' You ought to send him out to invade Germany singlehanded. Your father always said that the only way to deal with the Germans was to exterminate them, and here you have the perfect exterminator at your service - such a glutton for combat that he lays in a stock of seventy thousand suits of armour, all made to measure.' We had a good laugh over that. Herod ended by saying that he must come back at once to Rome to thank Caligula by word of mouth: pen and paper were not sufficient to express what he felt. He would make his brother Aristobulus temporary regent in Galilee and Gilead, with Silas to keep a careful eye on him, and his youngest brother, Herod Pollio, temporary regent of Bashan.
He came back to Rome with Cypros, and paid his creditors every penny of his debts: and went about saying that he never intended to borrow again. For the first year of Caligula's reign he had no difficulties worth mentioning. Even when Caligula quarrelled with my mother over his murder of Gemellus - from which, you may be sure, Herod had not actively dissuaded him so that, as I described in my previous story, she was forced to commit .suicide, Herod was so sure of Caligula's continued trust in his loyalty that almost alone of her friends he wore mourning for her sake and attended her funeral. He felt her death pretty keenly, I believe - but the way he put it to Caligula was: ' I should be a thankless wretch if I failed to pay my respects to the ghost of my benefactress. That you showed your displeasure at her grandmotherly interference in a matter which did not concern her must have affected the Lady Antonia with the profoundest grief and shame. If I felt that, I earned your displeasure by any similar behaviour - but of course the case is absurd - I should certainly do as she has done. My mourning is a tribute to her courage in leaving a modern world which has superannuated women of her antique sort.'
Caligula took this well enough and said: 'No, Herod, you have done rightly. The injury she did was to me, not to you.' But when his brain turned altogether as a result of his illness and he declared his divinity and began cutting off the heads of statues of Gods and substituting his own, Herod began to grow anxious. As ruler of many thousands of Jews he foresaw trouble. The first certain signs of this trouble came from Alexandria, where his enemies, the Greeks, pressed the Governor of Egypt to insist on the erection of the Emperor's statues in Jewish synagogues as well as in Greek temples, and on the use, by Jews as well as by Greeks, of Caligula's divine name in the taking of legal oaths. The Governor of Egypt had been an enemy of Agrippina's and also a partisan of Tiberius Gemellus's, and decided that, the best way, to prove his loyalty to Caligula was to enforce the Imperial edict which had, as a matter of fact, been intended only for the Greeks of the city., When the Jews refused to swear by Caligula's godhead or admit his statues within the synagogues the Governor published a decree declaring all Jews in the city aliens and intruders. The Alexandrians were jubilant and began a pogrom against the Jews, driving the richer ones from other parts of the city, where they lived in style side by side with Greeks and Romans, into the crowded narrow streets of `The Delta'. Over 400 merchants' houses were sacked, and the owners murdered or maimed. Countless insults were heaped on the survivors. The loss in lives and the damage to property were so heavy that the Greeks decided to justify their action by sending an embassy to Caligula at Rome, explaining that the refusal of the Jews to worship his majesty had so outraged the younger and less'disciplined Greek citizens that they had taken vengeance into their own hands. The Jews sent a counter-embassy, led by the Alabarch's brother, one Philo, a distinguished Jew with a reputation as the best philosopher in Egypt. When Philo reached Rome he naturally called upon Herod, to whom he was now related by marriage; for Herod, after paying back the Alabarch those 8,000 gold pieces, together with interest at ten per cent for two years - greatly to the Alabarch's embarrassment, for as a Jew he could not lawfully accept interest on a loan from a fellow-Jew had further shown his gratitude by betrothing Berenice, his eldest surviving daughter, to the Alabarch's eldest son. Philo asked Herod to intervene on his behalf with Caligula, but Herod said that he preferred to have nothing to do with the embassy: if events took a serious turn he would do what he could to mitigate the Emperor's displeasure, which he expected to be severe - and that was all that he could say at present.
Caligula listened affably to the Greek embassy, but dismissed the Jews with angry threats, as Herod had foreseen, telling them that he did not wish to hear any more talk about Augustus's promises to them of religious toleration: Augustus, he shouted, had been dead a long time now and his edicts were out of date and absurd. 'I am your God, and you shall have no other Gods but me.'
Philo turned to the other ambassadors and said in Aramaic: 'I am glad that we came; for these words are a deliberate challenge to the Living God and now we can be sure that this fool will perish miserably.' Luckily none of the courtiers understood Aramaic.
Caligula sent a letter to the Governor of Egypt informing him that the Greeks had done their duty in forcibly protesting against the Jews' disloyalty, and that if the Jews persisted in their present disobedience he would himself come with an army and exterminate them. Meanwhile, he ordered the Alabarch and all other officials of the Jewish colony to be imprisoned. He explained that but for the Alabarch's kinship with his friend Herod Agrippa he would have put him and his brother Philo to death. The only satisfaction that Herod was at presentable to give the Jews in Alexandria was to have the Governor of Egypt removed. He persuaded Caligula to arrest him on the grounds of his former enmity to Agrippina (who, was, of course, Caligula's mother) and banish him to one of the smaller Greek islands.
Then Herod told Caligula, who now found himself short of funds: `I must see what I can do in Palestine to raise some money for your Privy Purse. My brother Aristobulus informs me that my fire-eating old uncle Antipas was even richer than we supposed. Now that you are off on your British and German conquests - and, by the way,. if you happen to-pass through Lyons, please remember me very kindly to Antipas and Herodias Rome will seem very dismal to us left-behinds. It will be a good opportunity for me to absent myself and visit my kingdom again; but as soon as I hear that you are on the way back I shall hurry home too, and I hope that you will be satisfied with my efforts on your behalf.' The fact was that most disquieting news had just arrived for Herod from Palestine. He sailed east on the day after Caligula had fixed for his absurd military expedition; though as a matter of fact it was nearly a year before Caligula set out.
Caligula had given orders for his statue to be placed in the Holy of Holies in, the Temple at Jerusalem, a secret inner chamber where the God off the Jews is supposed to dwell in his cedar- chest and which is only visited once a year by the High Priest. His further orders were that the statue should be taken out from the Holy of Holies on days of public festival and worshipped in the outer court by the assembled congregation, Jews and non-Jews alike. He either did not know or did not care about the intense religious awe in which the Jews hold their God. When the proclamation was read at Jerusalem by the new Governor of Judaea sent to succeed Pontius Pilate (who by the way had committed suicide on his arrival at Rome) there were such extraordinary scenes of riot that the Governor was forced to take refuge in his camp outside the city, where, he sustained something very like a siege. The news reached Caligula at Lyons.; He was utterly enraged and sent a letter to the new Governor of Syria who had succeeded my friend Vitellius, ordering him to raise a strong force of Syrian auxiliaries and with these and the two Roman regiments under his command to march into Judaea and enforce the edict at the point of the sword. This Governor's name was Publius Petronius, a Roman soldier of the old school. He lost no time in obeying Caligula's orders, so far as his preparations for the expedition were concerned, and marched down to Acre. Here he wrote a letter to the High Priest and chief notables of the Jews informing them of his instructions and of his readiness to carry them out. Herod meanwhile had taken a hand in the game, though he kept as much in the background as possible. He secretly advised the High Priest as to the best course to follow. At his suggestion the Governor of Judaea and his garrison were sent under safe conduct to Petronius at Acre. They were followed by a delegation of some 10,000 leading Jews, who came to appeal against the intended defilement of the Temple. They had come with no warlike intentions, they declared, but nevertheless would rather die than permit this terrible injury to be done to their ancestral land, which would immediately be struck by a curse and never recover. They said that they owed political allegiance to Rome and that there could be no complaints against them for disloyalty or failure to pay their taxes; but that their principal allegiance was to the God of their Fathers, who had always preserved them in the past (so long as they obeyed his laws) and had strictly forbidden the worship of any other Gods in his domain.