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AS soon as Pheroras was dead, and his funeral was over, two of Pheroras's
freed-men, who were much esteemed by him, came to Herod, and entreated
him not to leave the murder of his brother without avenging it, but to
examine into such an unreasonable and unhappy death. When he was moved
with these words, for they seemed to him to be true, they said that Pheroras
supped with his wife the day before he fell sick, and that a certain potion
was brought him in such a sort of food as he was not used to eat; but that
when he had eaten, he died of it: that this potion was brought out of Arabia
by a woman, under pretense indeed as a love-potion, for that was its name,
but in reality to kill Pheroras; for that the Arabian women are skillful
in making such poisons: and the woman to whom they ascribe this was confessedly
a most intimate friend of one of Sylleus's mistresses; and that both the
mother and the sister of Pheroras's wife had been at the places where she
lived, and had persuaded her to sell them this potion, and had come back
and brought it with them the day before that his supper. Hereupon the king
was provoked, and put the women slaves to the torture, and some that were
free with them; and as the fact did not yet appear, because none of them
would confess it, at length one of them, under the utmost agonies, said
no more but this, that she prayed that God would send the like agonies
upon Antipater's mother, who had been the occasion of these miseries to
all of them. This prayer induced Herod to increase the women's tortures,
till thereby all was discovered; their merry meetings, their secret assemblies,
and the disclosing of what he had said to his son alone unto Pheroras's
1 women.
(Now what Herod had charged Antipater to conceal, was the gift of a hundred
talents to him not to have any conversation with Pheroras.) And what hatred
he bore to his father; and that he complained to his mother how very long
his father lived; and that he was himself almost an old man, insomuch that
if the kingdom should come to him, it would not afford him any great pleasure;
and that there were a great many of his brothers, or brothers' children,
bringing up, that might have hopes of the kingdom as well as himself, all
which made his own hopes of it uncertain; for that even now, if he should
himself not live, Herod had ordained that the government should be conferred,
not on his son, but rather on a brother. He also had accused the king of
great barbarity, and of the slaughter of his sons; and that it was out
of the fear he was under, lest he should do the like to him, that made
him contrive this his journey to Rome, and Pheroras contrive to go to his
own tetrarchy.
2