At this time, the monarch of the Roman world was Caius Caesar, commonly known by his surname, Caligula. Among the first acts of a reign, whose outset was deservedly popular for its numerous manifestations of prudence and benevolence, forming a strange contrast with subsequent tyranny and folly, was the advancement of a tried and faithful friend, to the regal honors and power which his birth entitled him to claim, and from which the neglectful indifference at first, and afterwards the revengeful spite of the preceding Caesar, Tiberius, had long excluded him. This was Herod Agrippa, grandson of that great Herod, who, by the force of his own exalted genius, and by the favor of the imperial Augustus, rose from the place of a friendless foreign adventurer, to the kingly sway of all Palestine. This extensive power he exercised in a manner which was, on the whole, ultimately advantageous to his subjects; but his whole reign, and the later years of it more particularly, were marked by cruelties the most infamous, to which he was led by almost insane fits of the most causeless jealousy. On none of the subjects of his power, did this tyrannical fury fall with such frequent and dreadful visitations, as on his own family; and it was there, that, in his alternate fits of fury and remorse, he was made the avenger of his own victims. Among these numerous domestic cruelties, one of the earliest, and the most distressing, was the murder of the amiable Mariamne, the daughter of the last remnants of the Asmonaean line,―― “Herself the solitary scion left Of a time-honored race,”