ABSTRACT
CALIGULA WAS ONCE again in the vicinity of Rome by the end of May 40, although he seems to have stayed outside the city limits and delayed his official entry into Rome proper until the end of August, when he celebrated his ovation.1 It was probably not very long after his return from the north that the Jewish embassy from Alexandria, led by Philo, first met him, in his mother’s gardens by the Vatican Hill (also outside the city limits).2 Whatever setbacks the emperor may have encountered in the previous months, he seems to have been in an affable mood on this occasion. He smiled at the delegation, giving them an encouraging wave of the hand and the promise that he would deal with them when he had the time. We should not take this as a hollow excuse. Considerable public business would have accumulated while he was in the north, and apart from the Alexandrians there were several foreign rulers and deputations awaiting him.3 At some point after this he seems to have moved south to Campania, travelling from one villa to another. If he hoped to escape from the tedium of meeting foreign deputations, he was to be disappointed. It was almost certainly in this summer that Herod Antipas, tetrarch of part of his late father’s (Herod the Great’s) dominion, and his wife Herodias (sister of Herod Agrippa) made their journey to see the emperor in Campania, lured by the prospect of Antipas being granted the title of king. In the meantime, however, Caligula had received damaging evidence from Agrippa, who still nursed a grudge against his brother in law, and Antipas found himself accused of treachery, originally with Sejanus, and more recently with the Parthian King Artabanus. He was sentenced to exile, probably in Gaul (p. 183).4 Philo’s deputation from Alexandria also tried to meet Caligula while in Campania, and it was there that they heard the devastating news that he had ordered his own statue to be placed within the Temple at Jerusalem (p. 188).
