The Time of the Apostles Author:Adolf Hausrath Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: administration availed Vitellius. The valiant proconsul, whose achievements were greeted with unanimous admiration,1 was recalled so ungraciously by Caius that h... more »e imagined he was returning to his death. Arrived at Rome, he flung himself in oriental fashion at the feet of Caligula, in order to save his life; vowing to offer him innumerable sacrifices if his life were spared. The crafty soldier had not miscalculated. The young Caesar's vanity was touched by the servile adulation of the most renowned official of the late reign. He admitted the man whom he had recalled in such a hostile spirit to the inmost council of his oriental friends, where, indeed, he had to accommodate himself to a continuance of oriental flattery. Thus Antipas had in the closest intimacy with the emperor an adversary who had never forgotten his interference in the administration. The same intimacy was enjoyed by another enemy, his brother-in-law Herod Agrippa, who played the same part as informer to his patron Caligula that had made Antipas influential with Tiberius. The natural consequence was the fall of the "fox" tetrarch. 3. Herod Agrippa. After the death of Tiberius, it was the caprice of the new Caesar to shuffle the destinies of the nations. Judaea was flung piecemeal to an adventurer now past the meridian of his life—a man who now, after a career of sycophancy, crime, treachery, and gluttony alternating with prison fare, was to end by playing the honourable part of a king of Jerusalem. Herod Agrippa, this last great king of the Idumaean dynasty, was withal a remarkable figure of his time. His character, destitute of virtue or consistency, made him sufficiently pliant and malleable to be at once Caesar's confidant and the favourite of the Pharisees.His petty arts as go-between and negociator su...« less