(It is of negligible loss to posterity that Sharlappius's account of Antipater's later years and Herod's early years is lost to us entirely. Sharlappius's Tales of Classical Perversion was discovered only due to a sack of Palmyra by early Muslims attempting to levy the destruction of the Temple of Baalshamin. Again, it is thought that this is a mere volume of a much larger work encompassing similar tales of classical Greece, Rome, Byzantium, Egypt, Carthage, and Persia. By cutting into one of the stone columns an unnamed Islamic personage discovered a pristinely preserved text within its marble. There are, however, various sections obscured by various cuts and stains of blood; implying that whomever initially carried the text out from the city was gravely wounded.
It is highly probable that these missing tales of the volume in question deal with lessons of statesmanship imparted by Antipater to his son, Herod the Great; with Herod's trial before the Sanhedrin for which he appeared with armed escort, of dealings between Herod and his Roman patron: Sextus Julius - uncle of Caesar, Herod's betrothal to Mariamne - granddaughter to yet another Hyrcanus Hasmonean who had usurped Antipater, and Herod's subsequent poisoning and usurpasion of said Hyrcanus after Hyrcanus poisoned his brother and mutilated his ears so that should he escape he could not be Herod's high priest.
As stated in the forward to this volume, due to subtle differences in the writing style, it is highly probable that Sharlappius is a portmanteau of ancient texts collated into a larger wisdom volume; perhaps a group of writers writing simultaneously in conjunction with one another. Some texts were of writers aspiring to the sublimity of classical epic, others to a biblical cadence, still others by classical dramatists of particularly mediocrity, all of them exaggerating the historical record for dramatic license and derivative of previous texts to point of plagiarism, none of particularly distinguished aesthetic quality nor historical value; but of some historiographic value as document of how particularly mediocre writers of their day approached historical subjects.
- Dr. Raginmund Westenbach - Free University Berlin, 1952)
4. It was in the general worldview of Julius Caesar that he saw open liberality as of great benefit to his autocratic aims. It is to be doubted that he had any specific opinion of Jews, but he welcomed Jews to his court as he did all peoples whom he saw of use, and treated those Jews of detriment with the ruthless vengeance to which he meted every person of impedimence. The consistency of his approach, the open embrace of allies and pitiless retaliation to enemies was to his great benefit against Pompey's unpredictable caprice; which, in turn, was of great benefit to Rome, as the virtue of Caesarean imperitration saved their Empire from fortune's ever repositioning chaos, even as it was to the detriment of the continually more sombered peoples subsumed within Rome's ever expanding borders.
5. As a young man, displaced from power, his father dead, defeated after yet another battle with Hasmoneans; Herod the Great, penurious and derelict, fleeing yet another capture, contemplating suicide in the desert; a desert vision spoke directly unto him:
'Herod. Herod the Great. I am the Lord your God. The God of Lot, the God of Ishmael, and the God of Esau. Go unto Egypt, speak with Cleopatra, receive her benefaction, and avenge all brothers of disfavor.'
In contemplative response to his vision, thus spake Herod:
"It is this fate of the world which I solemnly welcome to make final reckoning unto the Judean peoples to ignominious providence, consigning them in wrathful duplicity to beyond the lychgates of Sheol. Were Idumea to die one thousand million deaths, fate would be more merciful than one generation more's endurance of Israel. The God of Israel is the God of death, and death shall die from Palestine's vengeance. "
6. And Herod visited Cleopatra in Alexandria, and Cleopatra offered Herod generalship in a war against the Partheans, who supported the claim of a third Antigonus, whom with Parthea's assistance handed Herod opprobrious defeat:
Herod: "I need shit." Cleopatra: "You just got shit." "I need more shit than this." "You're not getting more." "Like fuck I'm not, you need me and you don't even motherfucking know how badly." "Give me one good reason I shouldn't have you drowned in a pool of slave urine." "Do you have any idea how bad the Parthean threat is?" "Bad enough to hand you your ass." "The Partheans wouldn't beat fuckall if they didn't have help from a peoples you've never heard of." "What peoples are those schnorrer?" "These people from the far east called the Chinese whose country alone is bigger than Rome's empire." "Fuck you." "They've got yellow skin and slits for eyes." "Don't be racist." "You make slaves of every brown person to your south and you care about being racist?" "We have ambassadors from every court in the classical world and you're feeding me bubbemeicehs about how there's a country larger than Rome subsidizing an emperor whose most famous deed is fucking himself in the ass with his boutique drinking horns?" "Look at these pictographs here." "What am I looking at?" "You're the ones with the pictographic script you tell me!" "Dennis! Look at this script." (Court scribe Dennis comes over.) Herod: "This is Chinese calligraphy." Tell me. Does this or does this not look like the pictograph for war?" Dennis: "I suppose there's a certain resemblance." Herod: "And does this not look like the word for Egypt?" "Not particularly." Herod: "It's so obvious!" Cleopatra: "You're an idiot." Herod: "And this looks like your pictograph for Jews." Cleopatra: "You're telling me a bunch of black lines slashing through other lines look like our picture language?" "Look at it!" "And you're telling me that there's a people so far across the world that their whole country alone is as big as Rome's empire didn't evolve to have pictographs with words that mean something completely different from what they mean to us?" "So you admit there's a resemblance!" Dennis: "There's a certain resemblance." Cleopatra: "Shut the fuck up Dennis!"
7. To quell potential fears amid the Alexandrine court of Chinese invasion, Cleopatra put Herod upon a ship bound for Rome to visit Marc Anthony and beseech him a Roman legion.
And a tempest did toss the ship upon the waters and the ship was like to be broken.
"Fuuuuuuuck. Why are you sleeping?" "What's going on!" "We're in a tempest. Pray to your god." "What god?" "Don't you have a god?" "I have two gods." "Pray to them both." "One of them probably wants me to be in this storm." "Then jump off the fucking ship." "I'm not jumping the fucking ship!" "If you're responsible for this storm then jump off the ship." "I'm not fucking responsible." "Then fucking pray." "What will praying do?" "You don't want to pray? Then join the crew! Take a fucking hammer and some nails to mend the broken hull." "I'm not helping, I used to be a king." "Fuck you, and I'm Cyrus the Great. Take this shit and fucking work." "I'm fine with working! I'm just royalty and don't know how to use this. What do you call it? A hammer and nail?" "Just take it. You club the nails into the wood with the hammer."
8. And Herod did take the hammer and nail, but no sooner did he put them into his cassock's pocket than the storm's wave did toss into the sea its passengers, and all did perish in the sea but Herod, who was swallowed by an whale. And Herod dwelt inside the whale for three days, and still he had the hammer and nail, and upon the third day Herod said: 'Behold, I have lived upon the fish swallowed by the great whale, but I am like to die in the belly of such a leviathan.' And Herod did hammer a nail into the whale's stomach, whereupon the whale did vomit, and did extrude Herod and his fish. And Herod did find himself near to the coastline of Sicily and the city of Lampedusa, and an Sicilian fishermen did see Herod from his boat and called to him: "Behold, thou art the likeness of a man sent from the sea by Neptune. Let me not entertain angels unaware." And the fisherman did take Herod into his boat and did ferry him to the peninsula of Italia, where Herod did sojourn to Rome by foot.
9. Once again penurious and derelict, Herod came to Rome and a rich Roman Jew immediately knew him, one Flavius Jacobus. "King Herod! As the Living God breathes! You were at my eldest son's bar mitzvah at Khirbat-Kharazza!" (Herod stares at him...) "Don't you remember me? We smoked Hashish behind the Wadi as my concubines...." "Oh! You were the one who beat the shit out of the Rabbinical student looking for a handout for his Yeshiva." "Yes!" "I knew I can count on Rome!"
And Herod did go the house of Flavius Jacobus, who clothed him in tunics with golden raiment and fed him sausage and mussels, and Herod took Jacobus's daughter Doris Flavia as his wife.
10. Herod and Jacobus sued for a meeting with the Imperial Senate to present the evidence of a Chinese invasion.
Jacobus: "We need a lot more parchment than this." Herod: "I don't have any more." "Like fuck you don't. I know a guy." "What does a goy do for us?" "No, a guy." "He's Jewish?" "I dunno, he's a guy." "You don't know if he's a goy?" "He's a guy, I'm not paying him to daven maariv." "Well we all know goys, even in Judea." "No, I know a guy." "What guy?" "A guy who does parchments." "What parchments?" "All parchments." "No, what do you mean he does parchments?" "He knows how to handle them." "What do we need to handle parchments for? I can write, you can write..." "This guy, he knows how to fake parchments from any part of the world." "Even this part of the world? I've never seen manuscript like this before and I don't even know if this part of the world exists." "When he's done with it he'll make that part of the world real to everybody who sees the parchment." "And he's a goy?" "YES! YES HE'S A GOY!" "Ok then." "WHAT DOES THAT MATTER?" "I just thought you said goy not guy." "If you want to do business in Rome, you gotta know a guy for everything." "But the guy doesn't have to be a goy?" "NO HE DOESN'T HAVE TO BE A GOY!" "Would you rather he be a goy?" "I would rather he knows what he's doing." "Do Jews around Rome have the reputation for knowing what they're doing?" "Nobody has a better reputation than us." "So why are you getting a goy?" "BECAUSE THIS GUY'S GOOD!" "But if Jews can do it better..." "Nobody does it better than this guy!" "What's he doing?" "I've been trying to tell you for five minutes! He's going to copy your script and make forty-nine more pages of it." "How's this goy going to do it?" "Fuck if I know, if I knew we wouldn't need a guy." "So the goyim know how to do this script and we don't?" "THIS goy knows how to do the script!" "So what would happen if a Jew figured out how to do a script like this, would you take your business to him?" "No Jew does, and it's best we don't, because if we get caught, we'll be crucified." "I wish I was a goy right now..." "Aren't you?" "What's the Antipater family gotta do to convince you all we're Jews?" "Conversations like this."
And Jacobus took Herod to his gentile, and the gentile fabricated forty-nine separate parchments of Chinese-like calligraphied script, and together with their evidence, they approached the consular bench of Antony.
11. And complemented on either side by Octavian and Lepidus, thus spake Marc Anthony
"Alright Philistine, you say there's a threat, and you come to us with cloth that's clearly manufactured by some goy Jacobus knows. I have a Jew in Tyre whose document fakes are so much better than this, but I can't have myself looking weak by ignoring a threat in front of all these honorable senators that you obviously made up, or else they'll exaggerate the threat themselves and stab me the way they stabbed the last guy. So you see that I have no choice but to pretend I believe you and you have no choice but to pretend I believe you when really, I don't believe shit. So you're not going to get any Roman legions; Rome's soldiers will never soil themselves with Judea ever again. Instead, you're going to get a band of Gauls; don't worry, these ghouls are even bloodier than the Romans.
Now these mercenaries need to be financed, and they need to be financed extremely well or else they will turn on their benefactors, and that would be a shame; because in this case, the benefactors will not be Rome, the benefactors will be Jews: or to be precise, this Jew, Flavius Jacobus, and your partners in Antioch. You wanted a partnership with Herod so that you could make money and declare financial independence from subsidizing Rome at a rate we dictate. Don't try to deny it. Julius figured out how you Jews work, and knew how to keep you under us. See the little bambino next to me? His name's Octavian. He and I intend to continue that, don't we pischer? (Octavian is silent) See? He wants to keep you our friend too....
Flavius Jacobus, you made your arrangement with Herod without me, now you pay for him, not me. You're gonna lose money on this, not make it. You and your family will be Rome's puella defututa for the rest of time. And Herod, congratulations, you're King of Judea again. Were you ever before? I can't even remember. What is it you Jews say? Mayzel Tov? (Herod is silent) Well, Mayzel Tov Herod, you want to die on that mess? Go ahead Philistine, it's all yours."
In the coming years, Herod would be referred to derogatorily as The Philistine. Anyone who repeated it would be dropped in boiling water.
13. A year and a half later, Herod's Gauls were still fighting the Hasmoneans and losing. Herod came to visit Anthony's new base camp in the Turkish region of Samosata. And thus said Herod:
"Divine former consul, vanquisher of Brutus and Cassius, benefactor of Judea and best friend to the Jewish people, it is a terrible burden to report these findings with such heavy heart, but a long war without Roman involvement is, so clearly, in point of fact, Octavian's pitiably duplicitous interests, and of no benefaction to Anthony or Rome, because Anthony's strength lies so clearly in the East with us. Octavian does use these irresolute Gauls to undermine Anthony's position."
And thus answered Anthony:
"Herod, Anthony's loyalest vassal, his counsel in time of need; friend to Rome, soldier constant and staunch, you need not convince us of what our mind already concludes, and merely hearing corroboration from this shrewd and sensible mouth is tiding so felicitous it undermines all doubt and gives indication from Mercury himself that Fortuna shall ride Neptune's wave above Octavian and all disloyals who consort with him.
You shall have two Roman legions, thousands of Syrian conscripts, mercenaries and slaves from all around the empire. All under General Sosius, a commander of greatest experience and achievement."
14. Sosius immediately marched Herod's legions to Jericho, torched five settlements and killed all their inhabitants. He then marched upon Jerusalem which he put under siege. The legions build ramparts, During this year, Herod divorced Doris Flavia and sent her back to her father in Rome, for having seen the third Antigonus's sister, Mariamne, he conceived for her a dark passion at sight. He sent three Roman soldiers to abduct her by night and bring her to his base camp, un-mishandled.
15. Waiting in the base camp was both Herod and Marc Anthony:
Anthony: "Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to witness the lawful joining of Judea's King Herod in matrimony to the princess Mariamne!" Mariamne: "WHAT?" Anthony puts hand over Mariamne's mouth: "If anyone does object, speak now or forever hold their piece." (laughter from all the guests of Herod's tent) "Do you, King Herod, take Mariamne as your lawful wedded wife?" "I do." "In the absence of her father, whom you killed, in the absence of her brother, who will not live another month, I speak for her as the bride's guardian (Mariamne screams from underneath Anthony's mouth, everyone in Herod's tent laughs further) "Mariamne takes you as her lawful wedded husband, to obey and serve you all the days of her life, however long or short." (Mariamne screams again) "In Rome it was always customary for Jewish grooms to break a glass. I would imagine this custom is observed in Judea as well, so may we have a glass in a napkin please?" (What's a napkin? someone asks) (Herod breaks the glass) "MAZEL TOV!" Anthony: "And now I must return to Turkey immediately, but let us all leave Herod's tent so that Herod's wife may enjoy the fruits of her wedding night!" (Everyone cheers, but Mariamne screams a third time.)
16. In spite of Anthony's prediction, it has been well over a month, and Rome's rampart construction has not progressed even an inch. Night after night, the Jerusalemites, many starving, snuck out from the city walls to make attack upon Roman camp. Picking at manifold points in the camp, differing night by night, Jerusalemites killed God knoweth how many slaves and well over a hundred Roman troops, meanwhile bribing many others, stealing food and weaponry, building walls still within the city still higher than the city gates. Yet every attack resulted in Romans venturing to the surrounding townships to bring back ten Jews of all ages to crucify in view of Jerusalem's walls. All Jerusalem heard the innocent groans upon the wood.
17. Upon the siege's fortieth day, two members of the Sanhedrin, Shemaiah and Avtalyon, advocated to let the Romans into the gates and for Antigonus to surrender. They did not convince Jerusalem to favor appeasement, but they did tell their clansmen to not involve themselves in tonight's raid, because, they told their kinsmen and children, Rome would kill all the raiders tonight, and none would survive.
Every day, Rome's slaves ventured into the Judean hills surrounding Jerusalem, and every day thousands of slaves carved boulders from the mountains and carried them to Roman camp. And every night, a dozen Judean guerillas carried those boulders into the city gates without Rome noticing.
Yet without officers from the Houses of Shemaiah and Avtalyon, there were not enough experienced soldiers to coordinate the boulders' operation. The next morning, these boulders were hoisted upon catapult and breached the northern wall. Roman soldiers and all their slaves and mercenaries invaded Jerusalem from the north. They killed everyone in the streets, among them all those who showed documents of being Herod loyalists. They immediately go to the temple, looted the treasures, slaughtered all the priests and animals, and raped the women. All of Jerusalem looked as though it may be slaughtered.
And thus spake Herod:
"God help me I do so love those screams.... The screams of people who know you can stop their suffering by raising an eyebrow, and choose not to because it's your pleasure.... isn't it a shame most people don't ever know what power truly is.... I wish I could give it to them.... resurrect each one from the grave and let them stand in my place to watch others suffer so I could say to them: do you see, my friend, what it means to triumph over life and death.... they would only conclude that yes.... if I can feel so powerful, it's worth your death and the death of all that you love.... because it would show them what I know - what my father knew, what Caesar knew, what Yahweh knows: that life is all a myth, suffering is myth, meaning is myth.... whatever people who survive this will tell stories of their dead to their children, parts true, parts false, but just stories.... and these stories breathe meaning from generation's life to generation, and let them know that they too suffer to a purpose just as did ancestors.... yet unknown to them is that their purpose is someone else's pleasure.... the stories are as worthless as life itself.... just more excrement the Romans pump from the cities along with their rivers of blood.... life is not stories, it's trash to throw out, bills to pay, pots to empty, things to insert in the front, things to dump out the back. Life is a thing, not a meaning.
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