Berenice: Queen in Roman Judea - An Interview with Bruce Chilton

A lover of an emperor-to-be stood between Roman imperialism and a fraught situation in Jerusalem - was Berenice a footnote in the Jewish Wars or one of the most astute political actors of her day?

Born in 28 CE, Berenice, or Βερενικη, was the great-granddaughter of Herod the Great and daughter of Agrippa I, a dynasty forged in the uneasy space between Jerusalem and Rome. Client monarchy was always a delicate balancing act: legitimacy conferred by the Roman Senate on the one hand, by the Temple on the other. ‘What’s most important about her,’ Bruce Chilton, a professor at Bard College, explains, ‘is that she was very much the daughter of the Herodian dynasty.’ From her earliest childhood, marriage was to prove a strategy. Contracted to be wed at ten to the son of the powerful alabarch of Alexandria – a figure embedded in the eastern Mediterranean’s fiscal machinery – she became a pawn in a larger project: the restoration of Herodian power.

Her father’s political resurrection was astonishing. Once bankrupt and fleeing debt collectors in Rome, Agrippa manoeuvred his way into imperial favour under Caligula and Claudius. Berenice’s marriages formed part of that ascent. After her first husband’s death, she was married to her uncle, Herod of Chalcis, securing dynastic continuity, and, later still, she briefly wed Polemon of Cilicia, insisting he convert to Judaism before the union. The pattern is unmistakable: diplomacy conducted through the body of a queen.