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"Go find the vessel waiting here for one Appius of Rome," he commanded. "It is she that lies near us," said the other. "And you know her pilot?" "Ay, 'tis Tepas the Idumaean. He knows the broad sea as one may know his own vineyard." "Bring him to me." When Tepas came, Antipater took him aside and spread before him a chart of the vast, purple sea which beat upon the shores of Hellas.
Messala broke in upon him with a biting laugh. "Oh, I understand you now. Ishmael, you say, is a usurper, yet to believe an Idumaean sooner than Ishmael is to sting like an adder. By the drunken son of Semele, what it is to be a Jew! All men and things, even heaven and earth, change; but a Jew never. To him there is no backward, no forward; he is what his ancestor was in the beginning.
He had no faith in any man, and no man not even the emperor by whose sufferance he held the crown had any faith in him. The king feared the people and the people feared the king. Herod began his career with good purposes. An erect, powerful, and handsome youth of Arabic and Idumaean blood, brave with lance and charger, he raided the bandit chieftain Hezekias and slew him, with all his followers.
The sceptre had departed from Judah, and the lawgiver from between his feet. The high priesthood was a mere forfeit in the deals of Idumaean tetrarchs and Roman governors. The publicans were notorious for their exactions, their covetousness, their cheating and oppression of the people. Soldiers filled the country with violence, extortion, and discontent.
And out of doubt, to see too, they would fain do as Herod in old time did in Jewry, that he might with more surety keep still his dominion: who being an Idumaean born, and a stranger to the stock and kindred of the Jews, and yet coveting much to be taken for a Jew, to the end he might establish to him and his posterity the kingdom of that country, which he had gotten of Augustus Caesar, he commanded all the genealogies and pedigrees to be burnt, and made out of the way, so that there should remain no record whereby he might be known to them that came after that he was an alien in blood: whereas even from Abraham's time these monuments had been safely kept amongst the Jews, and laid up in their treasury; because in them it might easily and most assuredly be found of what lineage everyone did descend.
Many of the Syrians that escaped came and told Lysias all that had happened, and he on hearing it was confounded and discouraged. But in the year following he collected an army of sixty thousand chosen footmen and five thousand horsemen to renew the attack, and marched to the Idumaean border.
The news had been more credible, I grant you, coming from an Egyptian, who is of a race that has forgotten what truth is, or even from an Idumaean, whose people never knew what truth was; but, to make quite certain, I saw a centurion from the Tower this morning, and he told me preparations were going on for the reception; that the armorers were furbishing the helmets and shields, and regilding the eagles and globes; and that apartments long unused were being cleansed and aired as if for an addition to the garrison the body-guard, probably, of the great man."
Esar-haddon boasts that he marched into the middle of the territory, that he slew eight of its sovereigns, and carried into Assyria their gods, their treasures, and their subjects; and that, though Laile escaped him, he too lost his gods, which were seized and conveyed to Nineveh. Then Laile, like the Idumaean monarch above mentioned, felt it necessary to humble himself.
With the death of Simon, the last remaining son of Mattathias, this lecture properly should end; yet a rapid glance at the Jewish nation, under the rule of the Asmonean princes and the Idumaean Herod, may not be uninteresting. John Hyrcanus, the first of the Asmonean kings, was an able sovereign, and reigned twenty-nine years.
Supported by Augustus, whom he had managed to conciliate after the death of Antony, Herod reigned with undisputed authority over even an increase of territory. He doubtless reigned with great ability, tyrant and murderer as he was, and detested by the Jews as an Idumaean. He reigned in a state of magnificence unknown to the Asmonean princes.
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