v. 27. And immediately the king sent an executioner, and commanded his head to be brought: and he went and beheaded him in the prison, v. 28. And brought his head in a charger, and gave it to the damsel: and the damsel gave it to her mother. v. 29. And when his disciples heard _of it_, they came and took up his corpse, and laid it in a tomb. The account given by St Matthew (xiv. 6) is equally terse, but the fuller description of the scene as reconstructed by Dean Farrar in his "Life of Christ" is worth quoting. "But Herodias had craftily provided the king with an unexpected and exciting pleasure, the spectacle of which would be sure to enrapture such guests as his. Dancers and dancing-women were at that time in great request. The passion for witnessing these too often degrading representations had naturally made its way into the Sadducean and semi-pagan court of these usurping Edomites, and Herod the Great had built in his palace, a theatre for the Thymelici. A luxurious feast of the period was not regarded as complete unless it closed with some gross pantomimic representation; and doubtless Herod had adopted the evil fashion of his day. But he had not anticipated for his guests the rare luxury of seeing a princess--his own great-niece, a granddaughter of Herod the Great and of Mariamne, a descendant, therefore, of Simon the High Priest and the line of Maccabæan princes--a princess who afterwards became the wife of a tetrarch and the mother of a king--honouring them by degrading herself into a scenic dancer. Yet when the banquet was over, when the guests were full of meat and flushed with wine, Salomé herself, the daughter of Herodias, then in the prime of her young and lustrous beauty, executed, as it would now be expressed, a _pas seul_ 'in the midst of' those dissolute and half-intoxicated revellers. 'She came in and danced, and pleased Herod, and them that sat at meat with him.' And he, like another Xerxes, in the delirium of his drunken approval, swore to this degraded girl, in the presence of his guests, that he would give her anything for which she asked, even to the half of his kingdom.