The Wars of the Jews; Or, The History of the Destruction of JerusalemJosephus, Flavius
Religion
The Wars of the Jews; Or, The History of the Destruction of Jerusalem
Josephus, Flavius
Jews -- History
4. Sabinus did also afford these his assistance to the same purpose by
letters he sent, wherein he accused Archelaus before Caesar, and highly
commended Antipas. Salome also, and those with her, put the crimes which
they accused Archelaus of in order, and put them into Caesar's hands;
and after they had done that, Archelaus wrote down the reasons of his
claim, and, by Ptolemy, sent in his father's ring, and his father's
accounts. And when Caesar had maturely weighed by himself what both had
to allege for themselves, as also had considered of the great burden of
the kingdom, and largeness of the revenues, and withal the number of the
children Herod had left behind him, and had moreover read the letters he
had received from Varus and Sabinus on this occasion, he assembled the
principal persons among the Romans together, [in which assembly Caius,
the son of Agrippa, and his daughter Julias, but by himself adopted
for his own son, sat in the first seat,] and gave the pleaders leave to
speak.
5. Then stood up Salome's son, Antipater, [who of all Archelaus's
antagonists was the shrewdest pleader,] and accused him in the following
speech: That Archelaus did in words contend for the kingdom, but that
in deeds he had long exercised royal authority, and so did but insult
Caesar in desiring to be now heard on that account, since he had not
staid for his determination about the succession, and since he had
suborned certain persons, after Herod's death, to move for putting the
diadem upon his head; since he had set himself down in the throne, and
given answers as a king, and altered the disposition of the army, and
granted to some higher dignities; that he had also complied in all
things with the people in the requests they had made to him as to their
king, and had also dismissed those that had been put into bonds by his
father for most important reasons. Now, after all this, he desires the
shadow of that royal authority, whose substance he had already seized to
himself, and so hath made Caesar lord, not of things, but of words. He
also reproached him further, that his mourning for his father was only
pretended, while he put on a sad countenance in the day time, but drank
to great excess in the night; from which behavior, he said, the late
disturbance among the multitude came, while they had an indignation
thereat. And indeed the purport of his whole discourse was to aggravate
Archelaus's crime in slaying such a multitude about the temple, which
multitude came to the festival, but were barbarously slain in the midst
of their own sacrifices; and he said there was such a vast number of
dead bodies heaped together in the temple, as even a foreign war, that
should come upon them [suddenly], before it was denounced, could not
have heaped together. And he added, that it was the foresight his father
had of that his barbarity which made him never give him any hopes of the
kingdom, but when his mind was more infirm than his body, and he was not
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