Herod Antipas, Tetrarch of Galilee and Peraea

By Frederick Fyvie Bruce

Chapter 7

The accession of Gaius marked the beginning of the end for Antipas. This was due mainly to the hostility of his nephew Agrippa, and partly to the unwisdom of his wife Herodias. Vitellius also found occasion now to satisfy his grudge against Antipas.

Agrippa was Herodias’s brother; they were children of the ill-fated Aristobulus. Shortly, after his father’s death, the boy Agrippa was sent to be educated at Rome. His mother Berenice was a bosom friend of Antonia, widow of the elder Drusus; Agrippa himself became very friendly with her son Claudius (the future emperor), with the younger Drusus (son of Tiberius) and with other members of the imperial family. He became so heavily involved in debt, however, that he incurred the disapproval of Tiberius, and when his protector Drusus died in A.D. 23 he had to retire to Idumaea. But when his sister Herodias came to live with their uncle Antipas as his second wife, she used her influence on Agrippa’s behalf and procured for him a home, a pension and an official position (avlarano,moj) at Tiberias. Soon, however, he quarrelled with his uncle, and betook himself to Antioch, to Flaccus, legate of Syria. He quarrelled with Flaccus in turn, and went back to Rome, having paid off his old debts by incurring new ones elsewhere. He now tried to sow suspicion in Tiberius’s mind against Antipas, but the old princeps knew his faithful servant too well to listen to such calumnies.⁷³ Agrippa was appointed guardian of Tiberius’s grandson, Tiberius Gemellus (son of the younger Drusus), and formed a close friendship with Tiberius’s grand-nephew Gaius, who was to succeed him as emperor. An imprudent remark which he made about the succession came to Tiberius’s hearing, and he spent the last six months of Tiberius’s reign in prison.

With the death of Tiberius he experienced a swift reversal of fortune: Gaius released him from prison, recompensed him with a golden chain equal in weight to the iron chain with which he had been fettered, and gave him the territory over which his uncle Philip had ruled as tetrarch until his death in A.D. 34. On Philip’s death his tetrarchy had been added to the province of Syria, but now it was bestowed on Agrippa, together with the more northerly territory which had formerly been the tetrarchy of Lysanias.⁷⁴ With these territories Gaius conferred on Agrippa the title of king.

His sister Herodias now urged her husband Antipas to ask Gaius to raise his title from tetrarch to king. For over forty years Antipas had ruled Galilee and Peraea in Rome’s interests, incurring the ill-will of his neighbours by acting as the emperor’s faithful agent and informer in that part of the world. It would be but a small requital for such long and thankless service rendered to Rome if Antipas were now, at he end of his days, to receive the royal style. If the new emperor had so readily bestowed this style on his spendthrift boon-companion Agrippa, surely he would recognize Antipas’s more solid claim to equal honour.

So Herodias argued; but Antipas, who was not called ‘that fox’ for nothing, told her that it was wisest to leave well alone. But she persisted, and at last he was persuaded against his better judgment to set out for Rome to present his request. It proved to be his undoing

Instead of receiving what he asked for, he lost what he already had. For Agrippa sent a letter to poison Gaius’s mind against him Antipas, said this letter, had been confederate with Sejanus before Sejanus fell from power in A.D. 31, and he was now plotting with Artabanus of Parthia against Rome. Moreover, in his arsenal at Tiberias Antipas had armour sufficient for seventy thousand men.

When Antipas appeared before Gaius at Baiae, Gaius was reading Agrippa’s letter. He looked up and asked Antipas if this was true about the armour in the arsenal. Antipas could not deny it. He was sentenced on the spot to exile at Lyons in Gaul; his property and territory were confiscated and handed over to Agrippa (A.D. 39).

But as for Herodias, the emperor told her that he proposed to treat her as the sister of his friend Agrippa and not as the wife of his enemy Antipas; she could retain her property and continue to live in the style to which she was accustomed. But the Herodian ladies had the qualities of their defects. Herodias tossed her head and said, ‘No, thank you; I’ll go into exile with my husband.’⁷⁵

This she did; and in exile Antipas and Herodias together disappear from history.

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⁷³ BJ ii 178.

⁷⁴ Ant. xviii 237, xx 138; cf. Luke iii 1.

⁷⁵ Ant. xviii 240 ff.

 

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