Читать книгу Women of History: Selected from the Writings of Standard Authors - Various - Страница 15

Table of Contents

[B.C. 28.]

MERIVALE.

ISTORY hardly presents a more tragic situation than that of the devoted Mariamne, the miserable object of a furious attachment on the part of the monster [Herod the Great] who had slain before her eyes her uncle, her brother, and her grandfather. Herod doted upon her beauty, in which she bore away the palm from every princess of her time; the blood which flowed in her veins secured to him the throne which he had raised upon the ruins of her father's house; but her personal and political claims upon the royal regard made her doubly obnoxious to the sister [Salome] of the usurper, who felt alike humiliated by either. Mariamne was imperious: she despised the meaner parentage both of Herod and Salome, and was disgusted with the endearments of her husband, stained with the blood of her murdered kinsmen. She rebuked him impetuously for his barbarities, repelled his caresses, and denied him his rights over her person, while she maintained inviolate against all others the dignity of her conjugal virtue.

Herod was apprehensive of her influence with the people, to the detriment of his own upstart family, and her resentment was inflamed by discovering that he had given orders on leaving Judea, that she should be put to death in the event of his being sacrificed by Octavius. There was little need of artifice to effect the destruction of one who laid herself open so fearlessly to the wrath of a tyrant, however he might be besotted by his love. The foes of Mariamne pretended that she had plotted to poison her husband. She was seized, examined, and sentence of death formally passed upon her. The sentence may have been intended only to intimidate her; but its execution was urged by the jealous passions of Salome, and Herod's fears were worked upon till he consented to let the blow fall. Her misery was crowned by the craven reproaches of her mother Alexandra, who sought to escape partaking her fate by basely cringing to the murderer. But she, the last daughter of a noble race, endured with constancy to the end, and the favour of her admiring countrymen has not failed to accord to her a distinguished place in the long line of Jewish heroines.

They recorded with grim delight the tyrant's unavailing remorse, his fruitless yearnings for the victim he had sacrificed, the plaintive exclamations he made to echo through his palace, and the passionate upbraidings with which he assailed her judges. He strove, it was said, by magical incantations to recall her spirit from the shades, and, as if to drive from his mind the intolerable recollection of her loss, commanded his attendants always to speak of her as one alive. Whether or not the pestilence which ensued might justly be regarded as a divine judgment, the sharp disease and deep settled melancholy which afflicted the murderer formed a signal and merited retribution for his crime.