Page:Lives of the apostles of Jesus Christ (1836).djvu/204

 infamous, to which he was led by almost insane fits of the most causeless jealousy. On none of the subjects of his power, did this tyrannical fury fall with such frequent and dreadful visitations, as on his own family; and it was there, that, in his alternate fits of fury and remorse, he was made the avenger of his own victims. Among these numerous domestic cruelties, one of the earliest, and the most distressing, was the murder of the amiable Mariamne, the daughter of the last remnants of the Asmonaean line,—

"Herself the solitary scion left Of a time-honored race,"

which Herod's remorseless policy had exterminated. Her he made his wife, and after a few years sacrificed her to some wild freak of jealousy, only to reap long years of agonizing remorse for the hasty act, when a cooler search had shown, too late, her stainless innocence. But a passionate despot never yet learned wisdom by being made to feel the recoil of his own folly; and in the course of later years this cruelty was equalled, and almost outdone, by a similar act, committed by him on those whom her memory should have saved, if anything could. The innocent and unfortunate Mariamne left him two sons, then mere children, whom the miserable, repentant tyrant, cherished and reared with an affectionate care, which might almost have seemed a partial atonement for the injuries of their murdered mother. After some years passed in obtaining a foreign education at the imperial court of Rome, these two sons, Alexander and Aristobulus, returned at their father's summons, to his court, where their noble qualities, their eloquence and manly accomplishments, as well as the interest excited by their mother's fate, drew on them the favorable and admiring regard of the whole people. But all that made them admirable and amiable to others, was as powerless as the memory of their mother, to save them from the fury of the suspicious tyrant. Those whose interests could be benefited by such a course, soon found means to make them objects of jealousy and terror to him, and ere long involved them in a groundless accusation of conspiring against his dominion and life. The uneasiness excited in Herod by their great popularity and their commanding talents, led him to believe this charge; and the miserable old tyrant, driven from fear to jealousy, and from jealousy to fury, at last crowned his own wretchedness and their wrongs, by strangling them both, after an imprisonment of so great a