This message from his wife strengthened Pilate’s reluctance, inclined as he already was to neutrality, if not to clemency, through his animosity to Caiaphas, and perhaps through the words of the Accused. Claudia Procula had not said, “Save Him”—but: “Have thou nothing to do with that just man.” This was Pilate’s idea, also; as if he had a confused divination of the importance of this mysterious beggar who called Himself King. At the very first he had ordered the Jews to judge Him, themselves, but they had not been willing to do this. Then another way to evade the responsibility occurred to him. He went back to Jesus and asked whether He were a Galilean. This evasion seemed to promise success. Jesus did not belong to his jurisdiction, but to that of Herod Antipas. By good luck Herod was there at Jerusalem at that very time, come as was his wont for the Passover. The Procurator had found a legitimate subterfuge to satisfy his wife—and to free himself from this troublesome perplexity. With one stroke he would ingratiate himself with the Jews, leaving to one of their own race the decisive judgment, and at the same time he would do a bad turn to the patriarch whom he hated with all his heart because he suspected him with good reason of spying on him and tale-bearing to Tiberius. So, losing no time, he ordered the soldiers to take Jesus before Herod. THE WHITE CLOAK The third judge before whom Jesus was led was a son of that bloody-minded hog, Herod the Great, by one of his five wives. He was the true son of his father because he wronged his brothers as his father had wronged his sons. When his brother Archelaus, his own half-brother, was accused by his subjects, he managed to have him exiled. He robbed his other brother Herod of his wife. When he was seventeen years old he began to reign as Tetrarch over Galilee and over Berea, and to ingratiate himself with Tiberius, offered himself as a secret tale-bearer of the sayings and doings of his brothers and of the Roman officials in Judea. On a voyage to Rome he fell in love with Herodias, who was both his niece and his sister-in-law, since she was the daughter of his brother Aristobulus, and wife of his brother Herod, and not shrinking from the double incest, he persuaded her to follow him, together with Salome, the daughter of the adulteress. His first wife, daughter of Aretas, king of the Nabatei, went back to her father, who declared war on Antipas and defeated him. This happened while John the Baptist was beginning to be talked about among the people. The prophet let slip some words of condemnation against these two incestuous adulterers, and this was enough for Herodias to persuade her new husband to have him taken and shut up in the fortress of Machærus. Every one knows how the foul Tetrarch, inflamed by cruel Salome’s lascivious arts, and perhaps meditating a new incest, was forced to offer her the bearded head of the Prophet of Fire on a golden platter.