Berenice

Origins and early life

Berenice — Julia Berenice, a Roman citizen by birth — was born in the year 28, the daughter of King Agrippa I and the great-granddaughter of Herod the Great and of the Hasmonean princess Mariamne, a Jewish princess of the last royal house of Judea.

Work and career

Married young to her uncle Herod of Chalcis, she was a queen at sixteen and a widow at twenty, later briefly queen of Cilicia, and for most of her life the companion and co-ruler of her brother Agrippa II. Her hour of history came in 66: as the Roman procurator Florus massacred Jews in Jerusalem, Josephus records that she went barefoot before his tribunal, in the guise of a penitent, to plead for her people — at real risk to her life — and with her brother tried to argue the city out of the war that would destroy it.

After the catastrophe she became the open lover of Titus, the conqueror of Jerusalem, and lived with him in Rome as a wife in all but name; when he became emperor in 79, political outcry at a 'foreign queen' forced him to send her away — 'against his will, against hers,' in Suetonius's phrase — a story Racine turned into one of the great tragedies of the French stage. She died after 81, the year of Titus's death; her fate is unrecorded.