[Previous: lines 153-182]
Pilate wants to shuffle-off responsibility for sentencing Jesus.
Forte autem rex, et soboles hoc tempore regum------------
Herodes studio sacrorum advenerat urbem.
Munere Romulidum, pars huic amissa paterni [185]
reddita erat regni, Galilaeaeque oppida habebat.
Quem postquam accepit rector Romanus adesse ,
solveret ingrato quo se se munere tandem,
transmisit Galilaeum illi vinctum Galilaeo,
atque ipsum iussit, vitamque, et crimina, si qua, [190]
quaerere, pro meritisque viro decernere poenas.
Tum vero audito Christi rex nomine laetus
duci intro iubet, ingenti correptus amore
compellare virum, ac propius vera ora tueri.
Quem dehinc aggreditur vario sermone: sed ille [195]
nil contra, atque oculos nusquam avertebat Olympo.
Ergo illum nil supra hominem miratus, et ultro
irridens, iterum iubet ad praetoria duci,
et rursum haud laeto Romano redditur insons.
It happened then that a king of royal stock,------------
Herod, had come to the holy city.
The Romans had gifted him a portion of [185]
his father’s kingdom—the towns of Galilee.
Hearing of his return the Roman ruler
thought to rid himself of a thankless task and
sent the bound Galilean to Galilee’s king,
telling him to inquire into his crimes, if any, [190]
and determine what punishment was just.
Hearing Christ’s name, the king was delighted:
ordering him brought to him, eager to talk
with him first-hand and see him face to face.
He tried to start parley, but the other [195]
made no answer, his eyes fixed on Olympus.
There seemed nothing more-than-human to marvel at:
so he laughed at him, and sent him back again,
though innocent, to the Roman’s displeasure.
This is one of the (few, I think) occasions where Vida’s classicising habit of referring to the Christian heaven as ‘Olympus’ comes a cropper. In line 196, there, it looks as though the nonresponsive Jesus is peering over the north-western horizon all the way to Greece. Gardner’s ‘But Christ made no answer, his gaze fixed on heaven’ is probably better (although it names Christ when the actual Latin doesn’t). Still: I committed at the beginning of this process to render Olympus as Olympus, and it seems weaselly to back down now (it is backed like a weasel, and so on, and so forth.)
Otherwise: Vida rather skimps on this episode. Here's his source, Herod interrogating Christ, as recounted in Luke.
When Pilate heard of Galilee, he asked if the Man were a Galilean. And as soon as he knew that He belonged to Herod’s jurisdiction, he sent Him to Herod, who was also in Jerusalem at that time. Now when Herod saw Jesus, he was exceedingly glad; for he had desired for a long time to see Him, because he had heard many things about Him, and he hoped to see some miracle done by Him. Then he questioned Him with many words, but He answered him nothing. And the chief priests and scribes stood and vehemently accused Him. Then Herod, with his men of war, treated Him with contempt and mocked Him, arrayed Him in a gorgeous robe, and sent Him back to Pilate. That very day Pilate and Herod became friends with each other, for previously they had been at enmity with each other. [Luke 23:8-12]Several key details there Vida could have made more of, I feel.
Herod’s eagerness to see Christ face-to-face ( duci intro iubet, ingenti correptus amore/compellare virum, ac propius vera ora tueri [193-4]) picks out a phrase from Vergil, when Evander talks of how eager he is to meet Anchises face to face: mihi mens iuvenali ardebat amore compellare virum et dextrae coniungere dextram; ‘my heart burned with youthful ardour to speak to him and clasp him hand in hand’ [Aeneid 8:163-4].
Why does Vida downplay Herod? Perhaps because Herod’s role in his drama strikes him as too much of a distraction from the main epic-throughline of his retelling. He was a son of the now dead Herod the Great (of ‘massacring the innocents’ infamy), and his fuller name was Herod Antipater (Greek: Ἡρῴδης Ἀντίπατρος, Hērǭdēs Antipatros). Herod oversaw about a quarter (hence ‘Tetrarch’) of Roman Judea as a client-ruler—he was never called king, it seemed. ‘Antipater’ was a regular period name, although it looks like it’s there to distinguish him from his wicked father. His domain was two separate bits of territory, Galilee and Perea.
The idea in Luke’s Gospels (not attested in Josephus, or elsewhere) is that Pilate, eager to rid himself of the responsibility for judging Jesus, invoked a kind of legal technicality: though Jesus’s alleged crimes had been committed in Jerusalem, he was himself a Galilean, and so could be packed off up to Galilee for Herod to deal with. Looking at the map you can see that this would be an improbably long way to transport a prisoner—on foot, with a guard—so Luke adds that, by chance, Herod happened to be in Jerusalem at that time. But Jerusalem was in the tetrarchy of Herod’s older brother Archelaus, and if the Roman had wanted to pass the prisoner over to Jewish justice it would have made more sense to send him to that authority. Still, the Gospels are adamant that it was Herod Antipater who was the hostile Jewish king.
There's another problem, which is that Jesus has (the Gospels tell us) already been condemned by the Jews when tried before the Sanhedrin. This has its own issues (if it really was passover, for Sanhedrin law forbad the trying of a capital charge on the eve of a Sabbath or festival), but the doubling-up also looks dodgy just on narrative grounds, since it doubles-up: Herod mocks Jesus, dresses him ironically in a royal robe and sends him off, which is exactly what the Roman soldiers later do. Joseph Tyson tries to extract some historicity from the mess of tangled sources behind Luke's later account:
The inclusion of the hearing under Herod does serve an historical purpose. Jesus is from Galilee; Herod is his ruler. According to Mark, Herod had been seeking Jesus for some time. It is only natural to expect that Antipas would have some part to play in the execution of Jesus. The Markan tradition has led up to this, and the independent L tradition complements the Markan. With good reason it has been suggested that the hearing before Herod in Luke xxiii 612 is merely a doublet of the trial before Pilate. Although there seems to be good reason for accepting the Herod-incident as basically historical, the fact of duplicity is important. Herod and his soldiers mock Jesus and dress him in the garb of a king, says Luke. This is precisely what happened to Jesus after his condemnation by Pilate, according to Mark and Matthew. This detail is missing after Pilate's condemnation in Luke. It has been transferred to follow the Herod-incident. Is there not a purpose in this transfer? If it is a symbol of condemation, then it means that the L source implies that Herod Antipas did condemn Jesus. Moreover, Antipas sent Jesus back to Pilate. What would be the reason for this if Herod had found Jesus not guilty? If not guilty, Jesus is a free man. At least, this is the way the case is presented in Luke. Pilate examines Jesus in a preliminary fashion and finds no fault in him. So he sends him to Herod. It would seem that if Herod agreed, Jesus would be free. But not so, Jesus is sent back to Pilate.Herod’s reputation is so tied to the Gospels that I, for one, was surprised to discover I had no idea what happened to him after the crucifixion. Josephus gives us the low-down: he got himself entangled in a squabble over territory at the border of Perea and Nabatea. This led to a war, which Herod lost. The Emperor Tiberius, worried about this weakening of the eastern edge of his empire, was moved to send in a Roman counter-offensive. But this campaign was abandoned on Tiberius's death in 37 AD. Finally, in AD 39 Antipas was accused by his nephew Agrippa I of conspiracy against the new Roman emperor Caligula, who sent him into exile in Spain, where he died at an unknown date. So there you are.
This leads to the hypothesis that the two sources used by Luke carried two different viewpoints. The Markan viewpoint is that Jesus is presented to Pilate after a night meeting of the Sanhedrin, that Pilate can find no fault in Jesus but submits to the demands of the crowd. The viewpoint of Luke's other source is that Jesus was presented to Pilate after a brief morning meeting of the Sanhedrin, that Pilate sent him to Herod who found him guilty. Luke has combined these two, and the combination gives us a most confused point of view. [Joseph B. Tyson, ‘The Lukan Version of the Trial of Jesus’ Novum Testamentum, 3:4 (1959), 256-7]
At the head of this post: ‘Hérode’, by French painter James Tissot; presently in the Brooklyn Museum.
[Next: lines 200-244]
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