This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
View text chunked by:
[629]
Upon Herod's saying this, he was interrupted by the confusion he
was in; but ordered Nicolaus, one of his friends, to produce the evidence
against Antipater. But in the mean time Antipater lifted up his head, (for
he lay on the ground before his father's feet,) and cried out aloud, "Thou,
O father, hast made my apology for me; for how can I be a parricide, whom
thou thyself confessest to have always had for thy guardian? Thou callest
my filial affection prodigious lies and hypocrisy! how then could it be
that I, who was so subtle in other matters, should here be so mad as not
to understand that it was not easy that he who committed so horrid a crime
should be concealed from men, but impossible that he should be concealed
from the Judge of heaven, who sees all things, and is present every where?
or did not I know what end my brethren came to, on whom God inflicted so
great a punishment for their evil designs against thee? And indeed what
was there that could possibly provoke me against thee? Could the hope of
being king do it? I was a king already. Could I suspect hatred from thee?
No. Was not I beloved by thee? And what other fear could I have? Nay, by
preserving thee safe, I was a terror to others. Did I want money? No; for
who was able to expend so much as myself? Indeed, father, had I been the
most execrable of all mankind, and had I had the soul of the most cruel
wild beast, must I not have been overcome with the benefits thou hadst
bestowed upon me? whom, as thou thyself sayest, thou broughtest [into the
palace]; whom thou didst prefer before so many of thy sons; whom thou madest
a king in thine own lifetime, and, by the vast magnitude of the other advantages
thou bestowedst on me, thou madest me an object of envy. O miserable man!
that thou shouldst undergo this bitter absence, and thereby afford a great
opportunity for envy to arise against thee, and a long space for such as
were laying designs against thee! Yet was I absent, father, on thy affairs,
that Sylleus might not treat thee with contempt in thine old age. Rome
is a witness to my filial affection, and so is Caesar, the ruler of the
habitable earth, who oftentimes called me Philopater. 1
Take here the letters he hath sent thee, they are more to be believed than
the calumnies raised here; these letters are my only apology; these I use
as the demonstration of that natural affection I have to thee. Remember
that it was against my own choice that I sailed [to Rome], as knowing the
latent hatred that was in the kingdom against me. It was thou, O father,
however unwillingly, who hast been my ruin, by forcing me to allow time
for calumnies against me, and envy at me. However, I am come hither, and
am ready to hear the evidence there is against me. If I be a parricide,
I have passed by land and by sea, without suffering any misfortune on either
of them: but this method of trial is no advantage to me; for it seems,
O father, that I am already condemned, both before God and before thee;
and as I am already condemned, I beg that thou wilt not believe the others
that have been tortured, but let fire be brought to torment me; let the
racks march through my bowels; have no regard to any lamentations that
this polluted body can make; for if I be a parricide, I ought not to die
without torture." Thus did Antipater cry out with lamentation and
weeping, and moved all the rest, and Varus in particular, to commiserate
his case. Herod was the only person whose passion was too strong to permit
him to weep, as knowing that the testimonies against him were true.
1 A lover of his father.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.