Neglected Historical Fact of the Day: Herod Agrippa, Caligula, and Claudius.
So last time we talked about the infamous Herod the Great, and his….special reign over Judea, After his death, the Kingdom of Judeah fell into a state of disarray for awhile, Herod Antipater took power and rueld for awhile, and brought the kingdom closer to the Augustin. Or specifically, part of the kingdoms, Augustus split the kingdom for awhile, dividing Judea into 6 sub provinces, but under Tiberous Herod Antipater was able to reunite the kingdoms as one with permission of the Roman Emperor Tiberius. Judea was ruled effectively and a great deal of the damage of Herod the Great was reduced. Oh by the way, during his reign, a minor Jewish preacher who claimed he was the son of god named Joshua ben Joseph was crucified for treason and a minor cult of no importance sprang up around his death. But really didn’t matter in the long term.
Things started to go to shit when Tiberius died and the Third emperor Caligula took power….Right so Caligula, we need to spend a time talking about this psycho. In terms of damage to the Empire he wasn’t the worse emperor, but in terms of the most horrible emperor as a person it is harder to get worse than Caligula. I put Caligula as the worse, followed by Commodes, then Nero. Even if most of the writing about him were exaggerated, and even if we write off most of his stuff involving incest, rape, and torture were exaggerated, the fact remains that he was handed an Empire in fantastical shape and within 4 years he had almost run it into the ground, to the point where they had to kill him to get it back on track.
Among his many terrible, terrible, terrible policies included his tendency to randomly and pointlessly attack the client kings of Rome. Client kings btw, were kings who ruled provinces on behalf of rome and sent taxes etc to the ROmans, so basically puppet kings. Caligula killed many of them for basically no reason, and even declared war upon one of them because…..who fucking knows. His second worse policy was in regard to Judea though, where he exiled Herod Antipas for….no reason and that was just the start. See, Caligula had this crazy (literally crazy) notion that he was actually a god, the greatest and most powerful of all the Gods, and that he was just hanging out with these mortals for awhile. Thus he forced all of Rome to sacrifice to him as if he was himself a god, and hail him as divine. This was bad enough in Rome, but in fiercely monotheistic and anti idolatry Judea…..yeah they were not happy with this. No way this punk is going to share space with Yahwee, nope, just not happening. Caligula felt the diplomatic solution was to attempt to build again golden statue to himself in the HOly of HOlies, because fuck you guys. This almost led to a war, because no, the Jews were NOT happy with this circumstance. However, into this story steps Herod Agrippa, the last and greatest of the Herods. Raised with the Roman Elite, as a personal friend of many major Roman figures (including Claudius) Herod Agrippa (named after Octavian’s second in command Marcus Agrippa) was able to use his personal relationship with Caligula to talk him out of doing the stupid thing.
Caligula was assassinated and replaced by Claudius, who gave all of Judea to Herod Agrippa as an independent kingdom, rather than a Roman provence. The Jews were free…for now.
