Mariamne I

Origins and early life

Mariamne was born about 54 BCE, a Jewish princess of the Hasmonean house, the dynasty of the Maccabees who had freed Judea from the Seleucids and ruled it for a century; she was the granddaughter of both rival claimants of the last civil war, Hyrcanus II on her mother's side and Aristobulus II on her father's, and the daughter of Alexander and Alexandra.

Work and career

In 37 BCE she was married to Herod, the Idumean whom Rome had made king of Judea, a match that was a deliberate act of politics: Herod, whose own Jewishness the population regarded as recent and imposed, needed the legitimacy of the native royal line, and Mariamne gave the Hasmonean claim to his children. Josephus, our only substantial source, describes her as of extraordinary beauty and as proud, contemptuous of Herod's family, and unable to forgive what he did to hers.

This fiche states plainly what that was: Herod had her seventeen-year-old brother, the high priest Aristobulus III, drowned in a pool at Jericho in 35 BCE, and later executed her grandfather Hyrcanus. Twice, when leaving on dangerous journeys, Herod left secret orders that she be killed if he did not return, which she learned of both times. In 29 BCE, after a court intrigue driven by his sister Salome and his mother, he had Mariamne tried on charges of adultery and of plotting to poison him, and put to death; Josephus writes that he was afterwards seized by remorse so violent that he called her name through the palace and fell ill.

Their two sons, Alexander and Aristobulus, were executed by their father in 7 BCE. The last Hasmoneans died in Herod's household.