The Memoirs of Herod Agrippa II

Chapter ONE - Polixenes Again

Chapter ONE Polixenes

Here comes that damned physician Polixenes again. The palace chamberlain opens the door and stands, as always, facing sideways, straight as a rod. He begins his inevitable litany of titles: 'Marcus Julius Agrippa, Great King, Friend of the Caesars, Friend of Rome, Tetrarch of Paneas, Ulatha, Gaulanitis, Batanea, Trachonitis, Auranitis, also of Abilene and Noarus, Toparch of Tiberius . . ' This list is supposed to make me feel important, to temper the bad news that lies in reserve. But its effect is quite the opposite. The scattered lands which I control under the stern thumb of Rome only serve to remind me of the independent power of my great-grandfather Herod and my father, Agrippa, both of them kings who could handle emperors. I put a stop to it with a stern wave of the hand. And anyway my visitor hardly needs reminding. Standing in the doorway in front of two assistants carrying bags and other equipment, he smiles that obsequious smile of his, the smile of doctors and messengers who bring bad news. Both want to ingratiate themselves by saying something you hope to hear but which the circumstances deny them. So they compromise by mingling a lot of high-flown 'buts' and 'ifs' and a generous spoonful of flattery with that one fact that you don't want to hear. Just as soon as they begin to smile knowingly at the list of your titles you know that they are going to make you miserable. It never fails. And so Polixenes, pale shaven face and bow, steps forward and begins the consummate act he feels he should put on for his bags of gold and his reputation as doctor to a king.

He becomes now - this is the second stage of the procedure - the scientist, the detached observer of a piece of materia medica that just happens to be my body. He is, however, a good physician who was taught his medicine well in the Greek manner and knows the Egyptian skills of needle and scalpel. So I keep him at my side. He asks me ever so politely yet firmly to lie down on the couch and goes through all the motions as if some essential 'I' had left the room and given him the loan of my abject body. He nods, frowns, smiles and hums to himself all the while just as he would if he were alone in his laboratory. To me my body is ill and refuses to do what I ask of it but to Polixenes it is a complex structure which he can analyse and question, control and nurture. And then the diagnosis; the bad news as usual. As he half intends, I hardly understand what he tells me but I am an obedient patient and promise to follow all of his instructions. His hovering assistants gather up his copious bags and he leaves with a promise to return again on the morrow.

The long and the short of it is that things are not going too well with my body. I long ago grew old and after that very old. I am now to be granted what so few have seen, a century. It is a miracle of nature that I can still stand with two sticks of wood on my two sticks of legs, a miracle for which I have to thank Polixenes. He evinces confidence in a programme of remedies some of them worse than old age itself; herbal infusions, an ever stricter diet, baths. Well, I am not, I hope, going to depart tomorrow. I shall, for a little while yet, wake to the glory of the Judaean sun and the limpid, almost colourless, air of these wonderful hills, stroll through the groves of olive and jasmine and ponder on what history has gathered to itself in me.

I can no longer brush time aside with a casual sweep of my arm. With old men like me it impregnates the world. I have managed to keep old age at bay for at least as long as most. Having power you can too easily mistake its limits and forget that you are one amongst many, forget that power is the reward of wisdom and that wisdom's garland is fear of the Lord. I have, after all, had my share of his prodigality but I must now accept that I have arrived at the stage of life where living through each day is only half a victory. Of course, death has always been just around the corner; death by poison, death by assassination, death in battle as well as a hundred other possibilities. As soon as we are born we are old enough to die. Such awareness, when in the thick of events we ever bother to think about it, is tempered with the knowledge of life's span and the expectation of fulfilling it, but in sick old age the latter kind of knowledge rules the former. Now that Polixenes has gone bowing out backwards and the door has been closed behind him leaving only his smile and clasped hands along with a faintly sick chemical odour I know that I am close to that certain judgement and that life is, in reality, short.

In saying that I say something strange. Is it that we come slowly to recognise the mortality of human life, or is it that life really does get shorter as we grow older? In the heat of life, everything we do, we do for tomorrow. Man leans forward into his hopes, his expectations and his fears. If this is so, then life becomes shorter as each tomorrow wings its way past us into history and memory which are a matter of record and increasingly beyond our control. And when you are, as I am, so far past the promise of my three score years and ten and in need of the talents of men like Polixenes, then the name of action dies in our limbs and the future at last begins to lose its flavour. And yet it is still true that death flees from the man who seeks it and seeks out the man who would flee it. So here I am.

Old age is not only the loss of the future and the loss of vitality but something more. It is a kind of carrying on after life, the discovery that one's time is past. Not that it has past but that it is past; a static, unchangeable entity that somehow exists on its own, an independent thing outside oneself. Instead of hopes and dreams and expectations, it becomes a vibrant thing alive with possibilities, mere memories, a kind of scrap-book of the mind. The future, the time between now and the expiration of the body, what remains of life, turns from action to contemplation. The tragedy of old age lies in that contradiction; the contemplation of action. The tears which are shed over its passing in the quiet of the night offer little by way of consolation.

Is that why I am writing a memoir, as a way of overcoming or coming to terms with old age, as the only possible remaining act? In writing, in this scratching of stylus over parchment, this filling up of lines on the page and the rolling on of the scroll, contemplation becomes action. Once again my authority can control the past, organise it, remake it, put emperors and kings, battles and embuscades, murders and stratagems and loves neatly in their rightful order. At least the author is still alive in spite of the deadly threat which lies behind the visits of Polixenes and his potions and baths. Yet this memory, this recollection, which I so readily boast of, is an act of the mind and by no miracle will it become absolute truth under by hand. In the very instant that I place it under the Lord's protection I recall the broken back of Jerusalem's great hill, the fire and sacrilege of that dead day and know that he intends precisely that I do so.

The life I now return to is like a vast palace fallen into disrepair, full of rooms that I used to know well but now, not used for many a year, has doors that hardly open and, if they could, lead only into dust and twilight. I inhabit the scattered rooms of that great house, the house of the Hasmoneans, of Antipater, of the great Herod and of my father, a house fallen into decay under my stewardship. The halls and chambers of the independent house of Juda are no longer open and I preside over remnants. I have none of the will or strength of my great predecessors; their ability to take upon themselves the sudden risk and place their destiny in the hands of God. While I sit here shuffling papers for a Roman overlord, the Great Queen Bodacer of the Britains fights for freedom and her right to rule and falls in the rout of battle. I shall fall shuffling tablets on my desk. Hovering over the words I write is the knowledge that they stand in the place of the actions they fail to describe or merely hint at; a mark on paper which generates a different kind of future.

I hold and have always held to the one and only golden rule of the Herodians which is to follow Rome, but where they did so with a skill and flair that drew them and Juda up to the heights, I did so meekly, far too meekly. I was a thinker rather than a doer; an administrator. I attended to the facts of the case and, with my nose close to a thousand details, failed to see the hand of fate stretched out towards me and thus ignored it. I have now to admit that, even in the prime of life, I lived in a kind of recollection by living off the past. As son and great-grandson of great men, I inherited my life in more than one sense because I lived off their blood and owed my state to them and the memory of their names. I am thus the ideal chronicler because I am and always was the past, it inhabits my person and flows through my veins. I am the trusted Herod, the safe Herod and, perhaps what is worse, the good Herod. I live my life now in this large dilapidated house of ghosts in dusty rooms which echo with the sounds of action. Too poor to keep this house laden with spirits in good repair, I am too old also. I keep my state for I am still tetrarch yet I live here in the few rooms while the rest of the palace and the rest of the world echo about me. The ghosts and the echoes. Yet in my dotage I still have my scriber.

I do hope you enjoyed this first chapter. More below. Votes and comments always most welcome.